You know those crime stories where police investigate a suspicious death and discover that somebody very close to the deceased, usually a spouse, had taken out an insurance policy prior to the death. This usually leads to a police investigation and murder charges. The insurance claim is the focus of suspicion and a key piece of evidence in the case against the partner of the deceased.
Now Larry Silverstein took out an insurance policy one month before the World Trade Centre was hit by two planes and collapsed. To be exact, three buildings collapsed, of which only two were hit by planes. Building 7 or WTC 7 collapsed just as if it had been demolished in a controlled explosion. Silverstein was seen by a number of witnesses to have called his insurer on the morning of 9/11 to ask if he could authorise the demolition of the building because allegedly it was in danger of collapsing due to fire. This was widely reported. The building fell soon afterward. Why would he have asked such a question unless the building was already rigged to be demolished? It takes at least 8 days to lay charges for a demolition. And if it was rigged to be demolishedd, which the phone call would strongly suggest, why do mainstream media channels like Fox, which have reported Mr Silverstein's phone call, not ask him about this? Was WTC 7 rigged with explosives for demolition, Mr Silverstein? And if so, why?
It's nearly a decade since this all happened. All the most compelling questions around these events are unearthed by following the money. And we are talking about a great deal of money. Silverstein collected $4.5 billion insurance money on a lease of only $145 million (for which he was repaid - so effectively he made $4.5 billion on an investment of nothing)! Silverstein did not actually own the building. Imagine that! Since then Lucky Larry has made several subsequent insurance claims for damages caused by 9/11. The World Trade Centre is a honey pot that just keeps giving. Surely that alone is cause for investigation, since the claim was for an event that killed 3000 people.
Wednesday 23 June 2010
Adam's Calender: The oldest stone settlements in Africa
75,000 years ago early humans built a stone calendar that predates all other man-made structures found to date. This ‘African Stonehenge’ has for the first time created a link to the countless other stone ruins in southern Africa and suggests that these ruins are much older than we thought. The complex that links Waterval Boven, Machadodorp, Carolina and Dullstroom, covers an area larger then modern-day Johannesburg.
Six years of research by a group of independent scientists and explorers has delivered what may be the crucial missing elements in our understanding of the lives and development of early modern humans. Their discovery has been released in a book they call Adam’s Calendar. But the research has also shown that these stone settlements represent the most mysterious and misunderstood structures found to date. It points to a civilisation that lived and dug for gold in this part of the world for thousands of years. And if this is in fact the cradle of humankind, we may be looking at the activities of the oldest civilisation on Earth.
This remarkable stone structure of Adam’s Calendar was originally a large circular structure resembling but predating Stonehenge by many thousands of years. Its original shape is still clearly visible from satellite images. Adam’s Calendar is built along the same 31 degree longitudinal line as Great Zimbabwe and the Great Pyramid of Giza. Three of the monoliths are aligned with the rise of Orion’s belt when it rose horizontally on the horizon some 75,000 years ago. A recent observation is that the fallen monolith on the outer circle that marks the vernal equinox sunrise is shaped like the Horus hawk head from Egypt and the resembles the Zimbabwe ruins birds. This is the oldest statue of the Horus hawk by a long shot and should attract great interest in the years to come. Adam’s Calendar takes us further back in time closer to the emergence of Homo sapiens, than any other structure ever found to date, and it will force historians and archaeologist to reconsider ancient human activity and consciousness.
The first signs of human intelligence and consciousness only appeared around 75 000 years ago, when the Khoisan people of southern Africa started leaving behind an array of spectacular cave paintings all over this part of the continent. Finely crafted beads and bracelet fragments found in a cave at Blombos in the Western Cape, South Africa, show that these early humans had already developed a feel for the arts and crafts.
Read more
Fox News report on 'pulling' Building 7
Is this recent claim from Fox News's Scott Shapiro about WTC owner Larry Silverstein's call to insurers on 9/11 credible? - it does not add up:
"Governor Jesse Ventura and many 9/11 “Truthers” allege that government explosives caused the afternoon collapse of Building 7. This is false. I know this because I remember watching all 47 stories of Building 7 suddenly and silently crumble before my eyes.
Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
A controlled demolition would have minimized the damage caused by the building’s imminent collapse and potentially save lives. Many law enforcement personnel, firefighters and other journalists were aware of this possible option. There was no secret. There was no conspiracy."
Now readers, please remember that 'Lucky' Larry Silverstein only acquired WTC six months previously from the New York Port Authority. Before then it had been a publicly owned building. He had taken out an insurance policy in July 2001 for the World Trade Centre, which included a clause that would reimburse the leaseholders for the whole value of the WTC site in the event of a terrorist attack. Silverstein and Company only paid $124 million for the lease but the insurance payout was for the whole value of the site. Coincidentally, it was destroyed on September 11 and he collected a cool $4.5 billion. WTC7 was worth $500 million alone! He was even repaid the initial $124 million.
But if he was speaking to his insurer on 911 about demolition, it means the building must already have been rigged for demolition. Demolitions take at least a week or two to prepare.
Shapiro's refutation of Jesse Ventura actually raises as many questions as his claim to know that there was no conspiracy answers.
Source:
"Governor Jesse Ventura and many 9/11 “Truthers” allege that government explosives caused the afternoon collapse of Building 7. This is false. I know this because I remember watching all 47 stories of Building 7 suddenly and silently crumble before my eyes.
Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
A controlled demolition would have minimized the damage caused by the building’s imminent collapse and potentially save lives. Many law enforcement personnel, firefighters and other journalists were aware of this possible option. There was no secret. There was no conspiracy."
Now readers, please remember that 'Lucky' Larry Silverstein only acquired WTC six months previously from the New York Port Authority. Before then it had been a publicly owned building. He had taken out an insurance policy in July 2001 for the World Trade Centre, which included a clause that would reimburse the leaseholders for the whole value of the WTC site in the event of a terrorist attack. Silverstein and Company only paid $124 million for the lease but the insurance payout was for the whole value of the site. Coincidentally, it was destroyed on September 11 and he collected a cool $4.5 billion. WTC7 was worth $500 million alone! He was even repaid the initial $124 million.
But if he was speaking to his insurer on 911 about demolition, it means the building must already have been rigged for demolition. Demolitions take at least a week or two to prepare.
Shapiro's refutation of Jesse Ventura actually raises as many questions as his claim to know that there was no conspiracy answers.
Source:
What about the Robin Hood tax?
Osborne could have raised £20 billion from a Robin Hood tax. The Conservative Party responded positively to the calls for a tax on financial transactions before the election and said it was looking into it. Ozzie's Bank levy will only raise £2 billion, which is peanuts compared to the £150 billion British taxpayers put into the collapsing banks. Instead we have welfare cuts and a VAT hike that will hit the poor and the consumer sector.
Monday 21 June 2010
How to watch the World Cup - go Slovenia!
The World Cup is a fantastic way to see nations of the world at play in a competitive and friendly environment - like international relations without guns and bullying. If the refs sometimes get it wrong, the players still have to abide by their decisions.
I have decided that it is best not to watch the competition simply as a patriotic supporter of the national side. That way disappointment and anguish lie. Much better to enjoy watching it as a celebration of talent from around the world and to enjoy seeing underdogs upset the hierarchy of winners and losers. There has been plenty of that in this world cup, with most of western Europe dramatically underperforming. You can then give your passion to outsiders like Slovenia and Paraguay - without all the hand wringing and head banging that goes with supporting a national side that is doomed to always disappoint. Go Slovenia! Go Paraguay!
I have decided that it is best not to watch the competition simply as a patriotic supporter of the national side. That way disappointment and anguish lie. Much better to enjoy watching it as a celebration of talent from around the world and to enjoy seeing underdogs upset the hierarchy of winners and losers. There has been plenty of that in this world cup, with most of western Europe dramatically underperforming. You can then give your passion to outsiders like Slovenia and Paraguay - without all the hand wringing and head banging that goes with supporting a national side that is doomed to always disappoint. Go Slovenia! Go Paraguay!
Friday 18 June 2010
China comes to the rescue of Greece
This is a bold move by the Chinese, and is part of the tectonic shift of power away from the West to China and other new BRIC countries. Some see it as sinister - but it is really a win-win for China and Greece and a wake-up call that 'we' are no longer the only players in town anymore and that things are changing fast. I believe we should welcome China's 'peaceful rise' rather than assume aggressive intent. The West's own history of militarism and imperialism is too easily projected on the new powers in the world, who themselves have long memories of being subject to colonialism, in particular China, India and Brazil.
The recent attempt by Brazil and Turkey to break the impasse over Iran's nuclear development was another sign that its no longer a unilateral game of the West dictating terms to developing countries. On that occasion, the move was rejected by the main powers, including Russia and China. But if the West won't deal with Iran, China and Russia probably still will.
People tend to have an emotional reaction to China and focus on its human rights abuses, which there are of course many, but fail to note its achievements and the fact that unlike the USA, it is not a plutocracy run by and for millionaires pretending to be a democracy. Treating China like a uniquely evil dictatorship is wrong - all large developing countries have serious human rights issues, including India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. All have margnalised minorities too. Tibet has a very long history of being a satellite state of China, long before the 1949 revolution.
In China even rich people can go down for corruption and some of them even end up being executed. Harsh, but perhaps some exemplary punishment of the ripoff merchants would be good in the West too. Unfortunately, the foxes are inside the coop and have taken us for a ride already, and are now back to business as usual. In China, the national interest means something - eliminating poverty, building industry, even greening the economy, whereas in the US and UK, the national interest is what suits the banks and the military industrial complex and never mind the rest.
Here are some comments on a very Cold War style scaremongering article in The Guardian from security correspondent Simon Tisdall, who just spouts spook speak from the West's security agencies.
Quote:
I love the way Chinese business investment is always 'aggressive and expansionist'! As opposed to the uniformly benign American or UK business presence around the world?
"The Chinese are hard-headed realists..." says Breffni O'Rourke - as opposed to the utopian idealists of the West, who never fail to leave behind them a trail of happy, healthy, wealthy people of all creeds and colours wherever their business goes?
'Greece is probably safe for now. But it wouldn't do to be complacent.' Beware the Yellow Peril! Kaiser Bill, come back, all is forgiven, you were right all along!
I'm no fan of the Chinese regime - most of my family on my mother's side fled China during the Revolution of 1949 - but I find this kind of innuendo-laden, biased scaremongering preposterous in the extreme. The sheer hypocrisy of such a piece is breathtaking.
Second Quote:
Both the comments and the article show just how much non-Chinese do NOT know about China.
- The government today may be called communist, but it has far more in common with the traditional Chinese governments over the last 5000 years than it does with the communist image in westerner's minds. thinking the government is "communist" only helps the Chinese distract and confuse westerners.
- The government is centralized under a semi-elected group that controls many aspects of the economy and society. They are semi-elected because only a subset of the population gets a vote, although that subset is actually quite large.
- China has no intention or desire to project military power as they learned long ago (4000 years ago) that that is a waste of time and wealth. Read the Art of War (it is free on the internet at http://www.sonshi.com/index.html). China knows that entangling alliances work far, far better than military aggression (and are a lot cheaper and more profitable).
- As long as China has existed, it has been entrepreneurial. This was suppressed for a while under the British and the early Communist rulers, but it has come fully back.
- Because China has more centralized rule, it is able to better address situations that could go into the mud real quick in the west. So yes, China has some excesses in their economy, but they are well aware of them and are making changes to tamp the excesses down. Unlike the US and UK where bankers can easily pay off people to remove restrictions on their raping and pillaging, this can not happen in China where for the most part the central control tries to do what is best for society overall (doing the best for society instead of the best for the individual is deeply ingrained in their culture). Some fine examples of the value of central control are: (1) investing in rebuilding their passenger and freight rail systems so they are more energy efficient and run on non-oil energy so when Global Peak Oil happens, the trains will still be able to run, (2) Investing in the development and implementation of non-oil energy so when global Peak Oil happens, China will still have the energy it needs to function as a modern country, (3) Implementing massive roll out of high-speed broadband so the intellectual capitol of China can continue to be freely tapped.
- For all practical purposes, Taiwan is now completely integrated with China in a manner similar to Hong Kong. While both sides keep up the fiction of separation, the reality is there is next to none and a vast majority of Taiwanese have no problem with the current defacto arrangement and have no desire to go back to the bad old days when the two were separate.
- As for Tibet, a good analogy would be the old south trying to break away from the Union during the US civil war. Tibet has been controlled by China for hundreds of years and like the US does not look favorably on part of the country trying to break away, especially when the US financed the revolution. Just as the Union did in the US civil war, China is putting down a rebellion of a minority of Tibetans. To help integrate Tibet more closely with China and share China's economic success, China has invested huge sums in making transportation available to Tibet. If the people in the US didn't like the south trying to break away how can we say anything about Tibet?
The bottom line is China is NOT the west. It does NOT think like the west. China plays its own game with its own rules. China does NOT want to rule the world. but trade with it (as profitably as possible). China has enough issues ruling the people of China, it has no desire to rule anymore. Note that China's military spending is minuscule compared to the west and the spending is mostly defensive.
The bottom line is unless a westerner has studied China's 5000 years of history, culture and philosophy AND has lived and worked in China for several years, they are totally unqualified to even discuss China (most westerner are in this category which is why western governments make so many mistakes).
And yes, I have studies Chinese history, culture and philosophy and have lived and worked in China. I am now back in the US but still work closely with Chinese companies.
Most of what is written about China in the west is flat out wrong and full of misinformation. Tisdall is just as wrong as the rest.
The recent attempt by Brazil and Turkey to break the impasse over Iran's nuclear development was another sign that its no longer a unilateral game of the West dictating terms to developing countries. On that occasion, the move was rejected by the main powers, including Russia and China. But if the West won't deal with Iran, China and Russia probably still will.
People tend to have an emotional reaction to China and focus on its human rights abuses, which there are of course many, but fail to note its achievements and the fact that unlike the USA, it is not a plutocracy run by and for millionaires pretending to be a democracy. Treating China like a uniquely evil dictatorship is wrong - all large developing countries have serious human rights issues, including India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh etc. All have margnalised minorities too. Tibet has a very long history of being a satellite state of China, long before the 1949 revolution.
In China even rich people can go down for corruption and some of them even end up being executed. Harsh, but perhaps some exemplary punishment of the ripoff merchants would be good in the West too. Unfortunately, the foxes are inside the coop and have taken us for a ride already, and are now back to business as usual. In China, the national interest means something - eliminating poverty, building industry, even greening the economy, whereas in the US and UK, the national interest is what suits the banks and the military industrial complex and never mind the rest.
Here are some comments on a very Cold War style scaremongering article in The Guardian from security correspondent Simon Tisdall, who just spouts spook speak from the West's security agencies.
Quote:
I love the way Chinese business investment is always 'aggressive and expansionist'! As opposed to the uniformly benign American or UK business presence around the world?
"The Chinese are hard-headed realists..." says Breffni O'Rourke - as opposed to the utopian idealists of the West, who never fail to leave behind them a trail of happy, healthy, wealthy people of all creeds and colours wherever their business goes?
'Greece is probably safe for now. But it wouldn't do to be complacent.' Beware the Yellow Peril! Kaiser Bill, come back, all is forgiven, you were right all along!
I'm no fan of the Chinese regime - most of my family on my mother's side fled China during the Revolution of 1949 - but I find this kind of innuendo-laden, biased scaremongering preposterous in the extreme. The sheer hypocrisy of such a piece is breathtaking.
Second Quote:
Both the comments and the article show just how much non-Chinese do NOT know about China.
- The government today may be called communist, but it has far more in common with the traditional Chinese governments over the last 5000 years than it does with the communist image in westerner's minds. thinking the government is "communist" only helps the Chinese distract and confuse westerners.
- The government is centralized under a semi-elected group that controls many aspects of the economy and society. They are semi-elected because only a subset of the population gets a vote, although that subset is actually quite large.
- China has no intention or desire to project military power as they learned long ago (4000 years ago) that that is a waste of time and wealth. Read the Art of War (it is free on the internet at http://www.sonshi.com/index.html). China knows that entangling alliances work far, far better than military aggression (and are a lot cheaper and more profitable).
- As long as China has existed, it has been entrepreneurial. This was suppressed for a while under the British and the early Communist rulers, but it has come fully back.
- Because China has more centralized rule, it is able to better address situations that could go into the mud real quick in the west. So yes, China has some excesses in their economy, but they are well aware of them and are making changes to tamp the excesses down. Unlike the US and UK where bankers can easily pay off people to remove restrictions on their raping and pillaging, this can not happen in China where for the most part the central control tries to do what is best for society overall (doing the best for society instead of the best for the individual is deeply ingrained in their culture). Some fine examples of the value of central control are: (1) investing in rebuilding their passenger and freight rail systems so they are more energy efficient and run on non-oil energy so when Global Peak Oil happens, the trains will still be able to run, (2) Investing in the development and implementation of non-oil energy so when global Peak Oil happens, China will still have the energy it needs to function as a modern country, (3) Implementing massive roll out of high-speed broadband so the intellectual capitol of China can continue to be freely tapped.
- For all practical purposes, Taiwan is now completely integrated with China in a manner similar to Hong Kong. While both sides keep up the fiction of separation, the reality is there is next to none and a vast majority of Taiwanese have no problem with the current defacto arrangement and have no desire to go back to the bad old days when the two were separate.
- As for Tibet, a good analogy would be the old south trying to break away from the Union during the US civil war. Tibet has been controlled by China for hundreds of years and like the US does not look favorably on part of the country trying to break away, especially when the US financed the revolution. Just as the Union did in the US civil war, China is putting down a rebellion of a minority of Tibetans. To help integrate Tibet more closely with China and share China's economic success, China has invested huge sums in making transportation available to Tibet. If the people in the US didn't like the south trying to break away how can we say anything about Tibet?
The bottom line is China is NOT the west. It does NOT think like the west. China plays its own game with its own rules. China does NOT want to rule the world. but trade with it (as profitably as possible). China has enough issues ruling the people of China, it has no desire to rule anymore. Note that China's military spending is minuscule compared to the west and the spending is mostly defensive.
The bottom line is unless a westerner has studied China's 5000 years of history, culture and philosophy AND has lived and worked in China for several years, they are totally unqualified to even discuss China (most westerner are in this category which is why western governments make so many mistakes).
And yes, I have studies Chinese history, culture and philosophy and have lived and worked in China. I am now back in the US but still work closely with Chinese companies.
Most of what is written about China in the west is flat out wrong and full of misinformation. Tisdall is just as wrong as the rest.
Thursday 17 June 2010
Correction to previous post on Bush Bin Laden links
I have corrected a previous post in response to an email from representatives of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Al-Amoudi.
In the post it was claimed that there were connections between the Sheikh and The Capitol Trust Bank, which was untrue. I was happy to correct this and remove the inaccuracy from the article, which was reproduced from American Free Press.
The corrected post is now the one published.
Sheikh Al-Amoudi's representatives believe the article to be "tendentious and derives ultimately from politically motivated sources" and to be as a whole "dubious". They are of course entitled to their opinion.
In the post it was claimed that there were connections between the Sheikh and The Capitol Trust Bank, which was untrue. I was happy to correct this and remove the inaccuracy from the article, which was reproduced from American Free Press.
The corrected post is now the one published.
Sheikh Al-Amoudi's representatives believe the article to be "tendentious and derives ultimately from politically motivated sources" and to be as a whole "dubious". They are of course entitled to their opinion.
Wednesday 16 June 2010
And now for some deficit humour: Mark Steel
How long will this government keep their trick going, of announcing every few days: "Oh my goodness, the books are even worse than we thought. It turns out Alistair Darling left a whole year's VAT on a bus. But he didn't put it on the accounts thingy so never mind, we'll just have to make even more cuts I suppose"? The day before the budget George Osborne will make a statement that: "This morning I had a call from Blockbusters, and they informed me that Jack Straw neglected to pay the late return fee on Call of Duty, a game he took out for use on his Xbox. As a result the Treasury owes £4m more than was previously believed to be the case, which makes it a necessity that we sell off the Post Office."
They could keep it going for years, telling us before the 2013 Budget that they've just discovered Margaret Beckett was a junkie and secretly sold off the M4 as far as Bristol to pay for her habit, so now they'll have to scrap the fire service. Or they were told there was some money in a Co-op account, but when they went to draw it out to pay the army, the lady behind the counter said John Prescott had already taken it and spent it all on crisps.
Every commentator on almost every programme informs us every day that the deficit is so awful we have to make unprecedented cuts, so it wouldn't be surprising if the World Cup panellists said: "England's back four can't be expected to keep their shape while there's a record £1.7 trillion debt on their minds, Gary. If we don't take immediate measures to get that down they're bound to get caught out of position."
For example, a poll in this week's Sunday Times asked whether you agree or disagree that the government could save money by "eliminating unnecessary non-jobs in the public sector". As if anyone would say: "No – we must keep those unnecessary non-jobs. They're vital to us all." You might as well have the headline: "Public supports austerity measures. An overwhelming majority answered 'yes' to the question, 'Do you agree people who do nothing, I mean nothing, except smoke dope and torture mice out of boredom, should be funded by you personally by having to sell your child to a cockle-picking gang'?"
But the government is obviously concerned that when the actual cuts are announced, that consensus might crack. So at the moment they're still being vague about what they're planning, and carry on telling us they're going to scrap "waste". But if there was a genuine pile of waste that could save billions if it was scrapped, they could be more specific, couldn't they? And say: "We've found a whole office in the Department of Transport dedicated to memorising the scripts of Last of the Summer Wine. They're all on fifty grand a week as well. It was set up by Harold Wilson apparently, when he was going a bit funny, so that's a start."
They seem to realise that, when they announce which areas will be cut, it doesn't sound so convincing that we're all in it together. For example they've cancelled plans to extend free school dinners for children from poorer backgrounds, which affects everyone equally, I suppose, as without studying the figures, who can say whether Cameron and Osborne's family would qualify for that payment? One group that might just escape that category are the richest 1,000 people in Britain whose wealth, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has increased by 30 per cent in the last year. That amounts to £77bn, or half the entire annual deficit.
So they could contribute perhaps. But more likely is the government's plan to get people to accept massive cuts in public services as unavoidable, then happily watch people squabble over if it should be someone else battered rather than them. Eventually it will turn out the books are so bad they have to make each service appear on a television show and plead to be saved by public vote, with a tense announcement at the end by Graham Norton that "only one of you will be here next week and that is... disability benefit. Sorry, social services, you've got to go now, but you've been a great contestant. Byeeee".
Source: The Independent
They could keep it going for years, telling us before the 2013 Budget that they've just discovered Margaret Beckett was a junkie and secretly sold off the M4 as far as Bristol to pay for her habit, so now they'll have to scrap the fire service. Or they were told there was some money in a Co-op account, but when they went to draw it out to pay the army, the lady behind the counter said John Prescott had already taken it and spent it all on crisps.
Every commentator on almost every programme informs us every day that the deficit is so awful we have to make unprecedented cuts, so it wouldn't be surprising if the World Cup panellists said: "England's back four can't be expected to keep their shape while there's a record £1.7 trillion debt on their minds, Gary. If we don't take immediate measures to get that down they're bound to get caught out of position."
For example, a poll in this week's Sunday Times asked whether you agree or disagree that the government could save money by "eliminating unnecessary non-jobs in the public sector". As if anyone would say: "No – we must keep those unnecessary non-jobs. They're vital to us all." You might as well have the headline: "Public supports austerity measures. An overwhelming majority answered 'yes' to the question, 'Do you agree people who do nothing, I mean nothing, except smoke dope and torture mice out of boredom, should be funded by you personally by having to sell your child to a cockle-picking gang'?"
But the government is obviously concerned that when the actual cuts are announced, that consensus might crack. So at the moment they're still being vague about what they're planning, and carry on telling us they're going to scrap "waste". But if there was a genuine pile of waste that could save billions if it was scrapped, they could be more specific, couldn't they? And say: "We've found a whole office in the Department of Transport dedicated to memorising the scripts of Last of the Summer Wine. They're all on fifty grand a week as well. It was set up by Harold Wilson apparently, when he was going a bit funny, so that's a start."
They seem to realise that, when they announce which areas will be cut, it doesn't sound so convincing that we're all in it together. For example they've cancelled plans to extend free school dinners for children from poorer backgrounds, which affects everyone equally, I suppose, as without studying the figures, who can say whether Cameron and Osborne's family would qualify for that payment? One group that might just escape that category are the richest 1,000 people in Britain whose wealth, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, has increased by 30 per cent in the last year. That amounts to £77bn, or half the entire annual deficit.
So they could contribute perhaps. But more likely is the government's plan to get people to accept massive cuts in public services as unavoidable, then happily watch people squabble over if it should be someone else battered rather than them. Eventually it will turn out the books are so bad they have to make each service appear on a television show and plead to be saved by public vote, with a tense announcement at the end by Graham Norton that "only one of you will be here next week and that is... disability benefit. Sorry, social services, you've got to go now, but you've been a great contestant. Byeeee".
Source: The Independent
Deficit? Solution could be a land value tax
Filling the gaping hole in the Government’s finances is, in George Osborne’s words, the “great national challenge of our generation”. Unwise spending cuts and tax rises could sap economic growth; unfair ones provoke political unrest; inaction a market panic.
Faced with a national crisis, who better to turn to for advice than Winston Churchill? A century ago, the great man — who, like the present coalition, was both Liberal and Conservative — advocated introducing a land tax as part of a bold package of fiscal reforms. In his emergency Budget on June 22, the Chancellor should set up a commission to consider how best to implement that recommendation.
Taxing land values would be a fair way to help to plug the budget gap while stabilising — and even boosting — the economy. Land is routinely valued each year as property changes hands. With all the land in Britain worth perhaps £5 trillion, a 0.5 per cent levy could raise £25 billion a year — as much as a five-point rise in income tax.
Neither tenants nor leaseholders would pay a penny; only freeholders and landlords would, with the owner of a large estate paying a higher rate than someone who owns a small suburban semi. The proceeds could be used to cut the deficit and national insurance, creating jobs, boosting take-home pay and stimulating growth. Over time, the aim would be to shift the tax burden off hard-working families and on to idle landlords — as in Hong Kong, where revenues from land taxes keep income tax low, there is no VAT or capital gains tax, and enterprise flourishes.
When the Government taxes successful effort, people strive less — some work less, others don’t bother setting up a business, a few relocate overseas — and since hiring is more expensive, fewer jobs are created. But taxing land wouldn’t crimp economic activity, as Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations. It wouldn’t reduce the supply of land, which can’t be spirited away to a tax haven. And it wouldn’t push up rents, which depend on what tenants are prepared to pay rather than landlords’ expenses.
A land tax would actually encourage development. Since it would be payable irrespective of how land is used, it would stimulate the regeneration of derelict sites — such as Battersea power station, where David Cameron launched his election campaign and which has lain idle since 1982. Infrastructure investment that raises surrounding land values, such as Crossrail or a high-speed rail network, would pay for itself and thus escape short-sighted budget cuts. And unlike property taxes, people who do up their homes would not be penalised.
Taxing land values could also limit property bubbles — and the inevitable busts — without discouraging mobility (unlike stamp duty) or business investment (unlike interest rate rises). Relaxing planning restrictions, as Policy Exchange, the Prime Minister’s favourite think-tank, has suggested, would help too. The notion that we can all get rich by swapping more or less the same stock of houses at ever more inflated prices is a dangerous delusion. Property speculation diverts funds from productive investment in promising companies — and when the bubble bursts, the economy plunges into recession, home-owners are stranded with huge debts and banks laid low by bad loans seek bailouts from taxpayers. Isn’t it time we learnt from our mistakes?
Above all, a land tax would be fair. Land in Britain is parcelled out more unequally than in Brazil: 0.3 per cent of the population owns 69 per cent of the land. The country’s biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns 277,000 acres, not because of his talent or industry, but because his ancestors seized vast swaths of Scotland.
These “land monopolists” — as Churchill dubbed them — get richer not through their own efforts, but that of others. The Duke of Westminster owns 300 acres of what was once fields and is now London’s priciest real estate — Mayfair and Belgravia. And because so many people have established thriving businesses in the capital, that inheritance is now worth billions of pounds. Surely it would be better to tax that windfall gain, rather than the employees and entrepreneurs who generate it?
For sure, farmers and big landowners would kick up a mighty fuss. But since the typical family of four shells out £750 a year to farmers in higher taxes and food prices because of the Common Agricultural Policy, which also inflates land prices, it’s only fair to claw some of that back. And while landowners would point to the impact on a poor granny in a big house — a bogus argument that Churchill called the “poor widow bogey” — she wouldn’t be forced out of her home; her tax bill could be deferred, or she could even be exempted.
Source: Philippe Legrain, The Times
Faced with a national crisis, who better to turn to for advice than Winston Churchill? A century ago, the great man — who, like the present coalition, was both Liberal and Conservative — advocated introducing a land tax as part of a bold package of fiscal reforms. In his emergency Budget on June 22, the Chancellor should set up a commission to consider how best to implement that recommendation.
Taxing land values would be a fair way to help to plug the budget gap while stabilising — and even boosting — the economy. Land is routinely valued each year as property changes hands. With all the land in Britain worth perhaps £5 trillion, a 0.5 per cent levy could raise £25 billion a year — as much as a five-point rise in income tax.
Neither tenants nor leaseholders would pay a penny; only freeholders and landlords would, with the owner of a large estate paying a higher rate than someone who owns a small suburban semi. The proceeds could be used to cut the deficit and national insurance, creating jobs, boosting take-home pay and stimulating growth. Over time, the aim would be to shift the tax burden off hard-working families and on to idle landlords — as in Hong Kong, where revenues from land taxes keep income tax low, there is no VAT or capital gains tax, and enterprise flourishes.
When the Government taxes successful effort, people strive less — some work less, others don’t bother setting up a business, a few relocate overseas — and since hiring is more expensive, fewer jobs are created. But taxing land wouldn’t crimp economic activity, as Adam Smith explained in The Wealth of Nations. It wouldn’t reduce the supply of land, which can’t be spirited away to a tax haven. And it wouldn’t push up rents, which depend on what tenants are prepared to pay rather than landlords’ expenses.
A land tax would actually encourage development. Since it would be payable irrespective of how land is used, it would stimulate the regeneration of derelict sites — such as Battersea power station, where David Cameron launched his election campaign and which has lain idle since 1982. Infrastructure investment that raises surrounding land values, such as Crossrail or a high-speed rail network, would pay for itself and thus escape short-sighted budget cuts. And unlike property taxes, people who do up their homes would not be penalised.
Taxing land values could also limit property bubbles — and the inevitable busts — without discouraging mobility (unlike stamp duty) or business investment (unlike interest rate rises). Relaxing planning restrictions, as Policy Exchange, the Prime Minister’s favourite think-tank, has suggested, would help too. The notion that we can all get rich by swapping more or less the same stock of houses at ever more inflated prices is a dangerous delusion. Property speculation diverts funds from productive investment in promising companies — and when the bubble bursts, the economy plunges into recession, home-owners are stranded with huge debts and banks laid low by bad loans seek bailouts from taxpayers. Isn’t it time we learnt from our mistakes?
Above all, a land tax would be fair. Land in Britain is parcelled out more unequally than in Brazil: 0.3 per cent of the population owns 69 per cent of the land. The country’s biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns 277,000 acres, not because of his talent or industry, but because his ancestors seized vast swaths of Scotland.
These “land monopolists” — as Churchill dubbed them — get richer not through their own efforts, but that of others. The Duke of Westminster owns 300 acres of what was once fields and is now London’s priciest real estate — Mayfair and Belgravia. And because so many people have established thriving businesses in the capital, that inheritance is now worth billions of pounds. Surely it would be better to tax that windfall gain, rather than the employees and entrepreneurs who generate it?
For sure, farmers and big landowners would kick up a mighty fuss. But since the typical family of four shells out £750 a year to farmers in higher taxes and food prices because of the Common Agricultural Policy, which also inflates land prices, it’s only fair to claw some of that back. And while landowners would point to the impact on a poor granny in a big house — a bogus argument that Churchill called the “poor widow bogey” — she wouldn’t be forced out of her home; her tax bill could be deferred, or she could even be exempted.
Source: Philippe Legrain, The Times
Tuesday 15 June 2010
Gulf oil chasm - 'a cavern the size of Mount Everest'
This is the most frightening thing I have read in a long time:
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” 1
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield, has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster, Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocasrbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planet’s most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April.
“In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well,” Kutcherov adds. “What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.”
He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.5
What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Read more
The Obama Administration and senior BP officials are frantically working not to stop the world’s worst oil disaster, but to hide the true extent of the actual ecological catastrophe. Senior researchers tell us that the BP drilling hit one of the oil migration channels and that the leakage could continue for years unless decisive steps are undertaken, something that seems far from the present strategy.
In a recent discussion, Vladimir Kutcherov, Professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and the Russian State University of Oil and Gas, predicted that the present oil spill flooding the Gulf Coast shores of the United States “could go on for years and years … many years.” 1
According to Kutcherov, a leading specialist in the theory of abiogenic deep origin of petroleum, “What BP drilled into was what we call a ‘migration channel,’ a deep fault on which hydrocarbons generated in the depth of our planet migrate to the crust and are accumulated in rocks, something like Ghawar in Saudi Arabia.” Ghawar, the world’s most prolific oilfield, has been producing millions of barrels daily for almost 70 years with no end in sight. According to the abiotic science, Ghawar like all elephant and giant oil and gas deposits all over the world, is located on a migration channel similar to that in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico.
As I wrote at the time of the January 2010 Haiti earthquake disaster, Haiti had been identified as having potentially huge hydrocasrbon reserves, as has neighboring Cuba. Kutcherov estimates that the entire Gulf of Mexico is one of the planet’s most abundant accessible locations to extract oil and gas, at least before the Deepwater Horizon event this April.
“In my view the heads of BP reacted with panic at the scale of the oil spewing out of the well,” Kutcherov adds. “What is inexplicable at this point is why they are trying one thing, failing, then trying a second, failing, then a third. Given the scale of the disaster they should try every conceivable option, even if it is ten, all at once in hope one works. Otherwise, this oil source could spew oil for years given the volumes coming to the surface already.”
He stresses, “It is difficult to estimate how big this leakage is. There is no objective information available.” But taking into consideration information about the last BP ‘giant’ discovery in the Gulf of Mexico, the Tiber field, some six miles deep, Kutcherov agrees with Ira Leifer a researcher in the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara who says the oil may be gushing out at a rate of more than 100,000 barrels a day.5
What the enormity of the oil spill does is to also further discredit clearly the oil companies’ myth of “peak oil” which claims that the world is at or near the “peak” of economical oil extraction. That myth, which has been propagated in recent years by circles close to former oilman and Bush Vice President, Dick Cheney, has been effectively used by the giant oil majors to justify far higher oil prices than would be politically possible otherwise, by claiming a non-existent petroleum scarcity crisis.
Read more
Kyrgyzstan - drug money behind violence
Kyrgyzstan is a country lacking any notable resource, living mostly on transfers from relatives who work in Russia (1 out of 5.5 million Kyrgyzs are doing unskilled jobs in the former metropolis). However since the crisis of 2008, remittances from Kyrgyz working in Russia have slowed to a trickle.
For some time the US rental payment for the base in Manas provided almost half of the national budget of the country. Ascar Akaev, the first president of Kyrgyzstan, once said: "Our mission is to survive until Russia gets richer".
Kyrgyzstan became the most notable hub for distribution of the Afghan drugs to Eurasian ‘markets’, a business that had multiplied in times under the NATO guardianship in Afghanistan since 2001. The town of Osh, the 'southern capital of Kyrgyzstan’ where the recent violence has been concentrated, has long ago become a major cross-point for the Great Heroin Way through non-controllable mountainous Tajik-Kyrgyz border and route to the north-west. Most likely the illicit profits proceeding from narco-trafficking were the main sources of spectacular enrichment of former President Bakiev’s clan during his presidency in 2005-2010. There were numerous signs that the very arrival of Kurmanbek Bakiev to power in March 2005 as a result of 'Tulip revolution’ was financed and supported by prosperous international narco-mafia. It is also notable that while in office Bakiev liquidated the Kyrgyz Anti-Drug Agency.
Rioters in Bishkek have been photographed armed with advanced US weaponry, which suggests somebody has been paying top dollar for equipment that is supposed to be for US forces in Afghanistan.
[Not sure if this is true]. It was only logical for the US establishment to use the services of narco-barons to overthrow Bakiev, who demanded from the US more and more pay-offs for his loyalty while engaging with Chinese and Russians on multimillion investments in Kyrgyz economy.
Source: Oriental Review
Monday 14 June 2010
BBC answers my complaint
Here is my reply from the BBC Complaints' Philip Young in relation to Today report on the massacre of nine activists on the Gaza flotila the day after the event. It does show that it is worth complaining, although by not saying when the reports he mentions were broadcast, he is not answering my specific complaint. If you do complain, use the BBC Trust guidelines.
Dear Mr Gill Reference 114615 Thank you for your e-mail. I understand you’re unhappy because you believe we didn’t feature a balanced report on BBC Radio 4 regarding the Freedom Flotilla aid convey after it was boarded by Israeli troops. The BBC strongly rejects allegations of bias for or against either Israel or the Palestinians. Impartiality is a cornerstone of our reporting and our editors and reporters are committed to achieving the highest of standards for our coverage of the Middle East. On this story we have been careful to report a range of perspectives. We have broadcast a number of interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli contributors and our correspondents have, for example, reported from Gaza and West Jerusalem as well as Istanbul. BBC News has given considerable coverage to the point of view of the activists on board the flotilla and that of Palestinians. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan was interviewed from one of the ships in the flotilla as well as relatives of people on board the ships. The founder of the Free Gaza movement, Dr Eyad Sarraj and Claudio Cordone from Amnesty International have also featured in our output. We carried an interview with Hasan Noworah, a British citizen (originally from Ramallah) and chairman of the Justice for Palestine Centre in Glasgow. He was on one of the ships in the convoy and after he returned to the UK he told us of the moment his ship was confronted by Israeli officials in international waters. Interviews with Palestinians have included the Palestinian human rights lawyer, Diana Buttu, the adviser to the Palestinian President ,Sabri Saidam; presidential aide Nabil Sha'ath; the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior member of Hamas, Aziz Duwaik; and Palestinian Legislative Council members Hanan Ashwarai and Mustafa Barghouti. Also to highlight the importance of the flotilla, the very departure of the aid vessels bound for Gaza was a global news story and we first covered it in the early hours of the morning on 27 May jointly on the BBC News Channel and World TV coverage. The script that morning read as follows: "The organisers of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say the boats have set sail from Cyprus. Between them, the boats are carrying about ten thousand tons of aid. Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for the past three years, and Israel says it's ready to intercept the convoy and deport the activists. Jon Donnison reports from Gaza City." An hour later we interviewed our correspondent Jon Donnison live from Gaza about the flotilla. We can’t agree with your concerns of bias on this report, however I'd like to assure you that I've registered your complaint on our Audience Log. This is daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The Audience Logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content. Once again, thank you for contacting us. Kind Regards Philip Young
Dear Mr Gill Reference 114615 Thank you for your e-mail. I understand you’re unhappy because you believe we didn’t feature a balanced report on BBC Radio 4 regarding the Freedom Flotilla aid convey after it was boarded by Israeli troops. The BBC strongly rejects allegations of bias for or against either Israel or the Palestinians. Impartiality is a cornerstone of our reporting and our editors and reporters are committed to achieving the highest of standards for our coverage of the Middle East. On this story we have been careful to report a range of perspectives. We have broadcast a number of interviews with both Palestinian and Israeli contributors and our correspondents have, for example, reported from Gaza and West Jerusalem as well as Istanbul. BBC News has given considerable coverage to the point of view of the activists on board the flotilla and that of Palestinians. For example, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan was interviewed from one of the ships in the flotilla as well as relatives of people on board the ships. The founder of the Free Gaza movement, Dr Eyad Sarraj and Claudio Cordone from Amnesty International have also featured in our output. We carried an interview with Hasan Noworah, a British citizen (originally from Ramallah) and chairman of the Justice for Palestine Centre in Glasgow. He was on one of the ships in the convoy and after he returned to the UK he told us of the moment his ship was confronted by Israeli officials in international waters. Interviews with Palestinians have included the Palestinian human rights lawyer, Diana Buttu, the adviser to the Palestinian President ,Sabri Saidam; presidential aide Nabil Sha'ath; the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council and senior member of Hamas, Aziz Duwaik; and Palestinian Legislative Council members Hanan Ashwarai and Mustafa Barghouti. Also to highlight the importance of the flotilla, the very departure of the aid vessels bound for Gaza was a global news story and we first covered it in the early hours of the morning on 27 May jointly on the BBC News Channel and World TV coverage. The script that morning read as follows: "The organisers of a flotilla of ships trying to deliver aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say the boats have set sail from Cyprus. Between them, the boats are carrying about ten thousand tons of aid. Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade for the past three years, and Israel says it's ready to intercept the convoy and deport the activists. Jon Donnison reports from Gaza City." An hour later we interviewed our correspondent Jon Donnison live from Gaza about the flotilla. We can’t agree with your concerns of bias on this report, however I'd like to assure you that I've registered your complaint on our Audience Log. This is daily report of audience feedback which is circulated to BBC staff, including members of the BBC Executive board, channel controllers and other senior managers. The Audience Logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions on future BBC programmes and content. Once again, thank you for contacting us. Kind Regards Philip Young
Friday 11 June 2010
Dutch election results - right wins
As ever with news reports about foreign elections, they tend to focus on the mainstream parties' results and the far right. The far right has been big news at least since the NF in France began its rise in the early 90s. By contrast, upswings on the far left tend to be ignored. In France in 2002 the far left candidates won 20% of the vote between them. In Germany Die Link ("The Left") was on almost 10% until recently - they were actually big news for a while. By contrast the rise of the Dutch Socialists has never really become a 'sexy' story, perhaps because Holland's new rightwing anti-immigrant politicians were better at grabbing headlines. The assassination of Pim Fortyn was obviously a very big story in 2002. Now we have the Freedom Party and another charismatic rightwing leader, Geert Wilders, who was banned from Britain a couple of years ago because of his extreme views. Now the Freedom Party has the third largest number of seats, 24, while the third party in the last parliament, the Socialists, lost ten seats, falling back to 15. Although the Christian democrats lost 20 seats, overall the right won 50% of the vote, with the rightwing Liberals now on 31 seats. Labour did pretty well for opposing further commitment to the war in Afghanistan and breaking up the Labour-Christian Democrat coalition. However they probably will not be happy with this result, and may have to form a coalition with the Liberals. The Greens gained 3 seats, meaning overall the leftwing parties got 28 seats, down from 35 in 2006. Labour got 31, down 3. The social liberals, Democrats66, gained 7 seats giving them 10 seats, a massive upswing in support.
Results
Partij Afk. Aantal % +/- Zetels
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie VVD 1902891 20,45% +5,78% 31 +9
Partij van de Arbeid PvdA 1823542 19,60% -1,60% 30 -3
Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV 1438706 15,46% +9,57% 24 +15
Christen-Democratisch Appèl CDA 1273839 13,69% -12,82% 21 -20
Socialistische Partij SP 918150 9,87% -6,71% 15 -10
Democraten 66 D66 641529 6,89% +4,93% 10 +7
GroenLinks GrLinks 617352 6,63% +2,03% 10 +3
ChristenUnie CU 303529 3,26% -0,71% 5 -1
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij SGP 163034 1,75% +0,19% 2 0
Partij voor de Dieren PvdD 120490 1,29% -0,53% 2 0
Totaal geldige stemmen 9305647 150
Results
Partij Afk. Aantal % +/- Zetels
Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie VVD 1902891 20,45% +5,78% 31 +9
Partij van de Arbeid PvdA 1823542 19,60% -1,60% 30 -3
Partij voor de Vrijheid PVV 1438706 15,46% +9,57% 24 +15
Christen-Democratisch Appèl CDA 1273839 13,69% -12,82% 21 -20
Socialistische Partij SP 918150 9,87% -6,71% 15 -10
Democraten 66 D66 641529 6,89% +4,93% 10 +7
GroenLinks GrLinks 617352 6,63% +2,03% 10 +3
ChristenUnie CU 303529 3,26% -0,71% 5 -1
Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij SGP 163034 1,75% +0,19% 2 0
Partij voor de Dieren PvdD 120490 1,29% -0,53% 2 0
Totaal geldige stemmen 9305647 150
Thursday 10 June 2010
Iran, WMDs and the Green movement
This comment on a Guardian article about the Iranian Green movement makes a lot of sense. You would have thought that the Iraq war had taught the neocons and their media friends something about imposing sanctions for non-existent WMDs or alleged support for democracy in the Middle East. Apparently not. One can be opposed to the brutal repression by Iran's regime without supporting the policy of sanctions over Iran's nuclear development. Iran does not have a bomb, unlike Israel, the USA and the UK, who all fail to comply with the NPT treaty.
"The stolen election"
Even Robert Fisk finally admitted that Ahmadinejad won:
"But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.
"This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded."
When will you people learn that these lies will get you nowhere? Where are the media shills who peddled the WMD lies about Iraq now? Disgraced and discredited, forced to bench their media careers and sell their services on the right-wing talk circuit. Is that where Timothy Garton Ash wants to end up?
Iran has no nukes - it was tempted, but decided it wasn't worth it. Iran's leader has popular support. Mousavi - nobody knows who he is outside of Tehran. The Yanks' real beef with Iran has nothing to do with either nukes or democracy. The neocons were warned before they went ahead and demolished Iraq that doing so would empower Iran, which it has. Now the Yanks and Arab states are terrified of a Shiite revolution, one that has already taken place in Lebanon (thanks to Israel's serial invasions) and Iraq (thanks to the Yanks), where Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed out of power and their homes. That's why the Yanks, Israel, and Sunni Arab states all see eye-to-eye when it comes to putting the screws on Iran and its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
"The stolen election"
Even Robert Fisk finally admitted that Ahmadinejad won:
"But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi's support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.
"This is also my suspicion: that Ahmadinejad might have scraped in, but not with the huge majority he was awarded."
When will you people learn that these lies will get you nowhere? Where are the media shills who peddled the WMD lies about Iraq now? Disgraced and discredited, forced to bench their media careers and sell their services on the right-wing talk circuit. Is that where Timothy Garton Ash wants to end up?
Iran has no nukes - it was tempted, but decided it wasn't worth it. Iran's leader has popular support. Mousavi - nobody knows who he is outside of Tehran. The Yanks' real beef with Iran has nothing to do with either nukes or democracy. The neocons were warned before they went ahead and demolished Iraq that doing so would empower Iran, which it has. Now the Yanks and Arab states are terrified of a Shiite revolution, one that has already taken place in Lebanon (thanks to Israel's serial invasions) and Iraq (thanks to the Yanks), where Sunnis have been ethnically cleansed out of power and their homes. That's why the Yanks, Israel, and Sunni Arab states all see eye-to-eye when it comes to putting the screws on Iran and its proxies, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Dutch elections
You don't have to look as far as Latin America for an example of a successful radical left party. Just hundreds of miles from the UK, the Dutch Socialist Party became the third biggest party in Parliament in the last 2006 elections. Since then the Dutch Labour party has had to constantly look to its left, something that New Labour in Britain hardly ever had to do. There maybe a lesson here for the British Greens, who now have an MP. The Dutch Socialists were formed from the New Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s. In this week's election it is likely they will lose seats. Their current 25 may fall as low as 9 as the Dutch far right make gains. However, the lesson is there that extrparliamentary social movements, which is what the DSP is, can make inroads into mainstream politics as long as they don't forget their roots and become simply a parliamentary talking shop.
Read more
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Wednesday 9 June 2010
He who pays the piper - the payback
Prior to 1988, President George W. Bush is a failed oilman. Three times, friends and investors have bailed him out to keep his business from going bankrupt. However, in 1988, the same year his father becomes president, some Saudis buy a portion of his small company, Harken, which has never performed work outside of Texas. Later in the year, Harken wins a contract in the Persian Gulf and starts doing well financially. These transactions seem so suspicious that the Wall Street Journal in 1991 states it “raises the question of… an effort to cozy up to a presidential son.” Two major investors in Bush’s company during this time are Salem bin Laden and Khalid bin Mahfouz. Salem bin Laden dies in a plane crash in Texas in 1988. [Intelligence Newsletter, 3/2/2000; Salon, 11/19/2001] Salem bin Laden is Osama’s oldest brother; Khalid bin Mahfouz is a Saudi banker with a 20 percent stake in BCCI, the bank that uses Saudi and drug money to fund terrorism and the CIA also uses to fund covert operations. The bank will be shut down a few years later and bin Mahfouz will have to pay a $225 million fine (while admitting no wrongdoing) (see October 10, 2001)). [Forbes, 3/18/2002].
October 10, 2001: A 70-page French intelligence report claims: “The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.” The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCI’s (see July 1991 and After July 1991).
October 10, 2001: A 70-page French intelligence report claims: “The financial network of [Osama] bin Laden, as well as his network of investments, is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI for its fraudulent operations, often with the same people (former directors and cadres of the bank and its affiliates, arms merchants, oil merchants, Saudi investors). The dominant trait of bin Laden’s operations is that of a terrorist network backed up by a vast financial structure.” The BCCI was the largest Islamic bank in the world before it collapsed in July 1991 (see July 5, 1991). A senior US investigator will later say US agencies are looking into the ties outlined by the French because “they just make so much sense, and so few people from BCCI ever went to jail. BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations.” The report identifies dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed. Many went on to work in banks and charities identified by the US and others as supporting al-Qaeda. About six ex-BCCI figures are repeatedly named, including Saudi multi-millionaire Ghaith Pharaon (see October 10, 2001). The role of Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz in supporting bin Laden is emphasized in the report. In 1995, bin Mahfouz paid a $225 million fine in a settlement with US prosecutors for his role in the BCCI scandal. [Washington Post, 2/17/2002] Bin Laden lost money when BCCI was shut down, but may have benefited in the long term as other militants began relying on his financial network instead of BCCI’s (see July 1991 and After July 1991).
The drugs-intelligence-terror complex
I should apologies for all this faintly 'old' stuff about 911 and George Bush, but I want to record it in one place, as one of millions trying to understand the last decade. This memo from FB whistleblower Coleen Rowley to FBI director Robert Mueller is part of the jigsaw.
I have followed the various 911truth arguments and I have moved away from the missing planes and the demolition theories toward a more plausible conspiracy. It does not deny that WTC7 still looks very much like a controlled demolition. But a flaw in the claims that the Towers could not have collapsed due to fire only, is that they didn't. Both were hit by large jet aircraft, so to compare like with like, one has to compare the collapse of the Towers with like incidents of steel-frame buildings being hit by planes - that's right, there are very few!
Moreover, it seems to me that a lot of the energy has been expended to little effect in trying to prove the highly improbable - that Flight 77 at the Pentagon was 'disappeared' or that buildings were demolished without any eyewitnesses, evidence or whistleblowers coming forward.
On the other hand, following the money to Florida flight schools, the Saudis and Bush family history, you come to the conclusion that a criminal conspiracy involving an intricate global network was behind 911, and it involved a lot of people besides VP Cheney. The Saudi-Bush-Cheney links go back a long way, as does a history of US complicity and involvement in a network supporting global terrorism.
Rowley's memo suggests that elements of the FBI wanted to prevent the terrorist plot from being foiled. This has happened many times before, dating back to the stymying of investigations into BCCI and terrorism in the 1980s and the Bosnia connection in the 1990s.
The probable conspiracy is that senior government officials knew of the plot and did nothing, because the network behind it is 'untouchable' and is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and their shadows in the underworld of international criminal finance. Perhaps the whole thing should be called the drugs-intelligence-terror complex. There is also the fact that Saudi pilots were being trained on US military facilities and flight schools in the run-up to 911 - and that all the remaining high-level Saudis connected to this programme and plot were then flown out of the country in the wake of 911, bypassing the flight ban in place. Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI was implicated in terrorist funding and training while their boss was hanging out in Washington with the intelligence and security establishment and was embraced by them.
According to the other well-known FBI whistleblower Sibil Edmonds, Condoleeza Rice lied about the US not knowing a terror plot involving hijacked aircraft was imminent. Most of the world intelligence community seemed to know about it, including the Israelis, the French and Russians. Nothing was done, even after the authorities knew hijacked planes were in the air.
This, combined with the known ties between the President and Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, at Riggs Bank and going back to BCCI, is the substance of a credible conspiracy that has never been answered by an independent investigation. The 'too many must have known' argument does not hold with this conspiracy since some have already bravely come forward, while comparatively few people would need to be involved, and most of them are either foreign nationals or people directly involved in the criminal-drug-terror network behind the attacks. People made millions out of this - and were also culpable directly or indirectly for the attacks - and so have good reasons, alongside fear of reprisals, for remaining silent.
And this has happened before. Look at how our security services stood by while Pakistanii-Saudi-CIA criminal bank BCCI funded terrorism all over the world until it collapsed in 1991.
I have followed the various 911truth arguments and I have moved away from the missing planes and the demolition theories toward a more plausible conspiracy. It does not deny that WTC7 still looks very much like a controlled demolition. But a flaw in the claims that the Towers could not have collapsed due to fire only, is that they didn't. Both were hit by large jet aircraft, so to compare like with like, one has to compare the collapse of the Towers with like incidents of steel-frame buildings being hit by planes - that's right, there are very few!
Moreover, it seems to me that a lot of the energy has been expended to little effect in trying to prove the highly improbable - that Flight 77 at the Pentagon was 'disappeared' or that buildings were demolished without any eyewitnesses, evidence or whistleblowers coming forward.
On the other hand, following the money to Florida flight schools, the Saudis and Bush family history, you come to the conclusion that a criminal conspiracy involving an intricate global network was behind 911, and it involved a lot of people besides VP Cheney. The Saudi-Bush-Cheney links go back a long way, as does a history of US complicity and involvement in a network supporting global terrorism.
Rowley's memo suggests that elements of the FBI wanted to prevent the terrorist plot from being foiled. This has happened many times before, dating back to the stymying of investigations into BCCI and terrorism in the 1980s and the Bosnia connection in the 1990s.
The probable conspiracy is that senior government officials knew of the plot and did nothing, because the network behind it is 'untouchable' and is closely connected to the US intelligence agencies and their shadows in the underworld of international criminal finance. Perhaps the whole thing should be called the drugs-intelligence-terror complex. There is also the fact that Saudi pilots were being trained on US military facilities and flight schools in the run-up to 911 - and that all the remaining high-level Saudis connected to this programme and plot were then flown out of the country in the wake of 911, bypassing the flight ban in place. Meanwhile the Pakistani ISI was implicated in terrorist funding and training while their boss was hanging out in Washington with the intelligence and security establishment and was embraced by them.
According to the other well-known FBI whistleblower Sibil Edmonds, Condoleeza Rice lied about the US not knowing a terror plot involving hijacked aircraft was imminent. Most of the world intelligence community seemed to know about it, including the Israelis, the French and Russians. Nothing was done, even after the authorities knew hijacked planes were in the air.
This, combined with the known ties between the President and Saudis, including the Bin Ladens, at Riggs Bank and going back to BCCI, is the substance of a credible conspiracy that has never been answered by an independent investigation. The 'too many must have known' argument does not hold with this conspiracy since some have already bravely come forward, while comparatively few people would need to be involved, and most of them are either foreign nationals or people directly involved in the criminal-drug-terror network behind the attacks. People made millions out of this - and were also culpable directly or indirectly for the attacks - and so have good reasons, alongside fear of reprisals, for remaining silent.
And this has happened before. Look at how our security services stood by while Pakistanii-Saudi-CIA criminal bank BCCI funded terrorism all over the world until it collapsed in 1991.
Capitalist Destruction or New Civilization?
The most serious aspect of the crisis facing the global capitalist system is not the bankruptcy of financial corporations, or the global economic downturn, or the discrediting of its institutions of political control. The greatest threat to the continuity of the capitalist mode of production is the environmental crisis caused by the irrational destruction of nature, to the point of jeopardizing the ability of self-regeneration of the ecosystems on which our survival depends.
For many analysts, however, a new long cycle of economic growth would be able to take off thanks to the efforts of countries like China and India, now converted into more desirable markets for transnational capital because of their abundant and “unregulated” cheap labor.
What analysts often do not reveal is that the high rate of GDP growth in China is misleading if one takes into account that the figures do not include the serious environmental and social liabilities generated by the “market socialism” adopted by this nation since 1979. Indeed, since the late nineties, “the World Bank estimated that pollution cost the country the equivalent of 8% of its annual production. That is, the enviable growth in China (...) is almost offset by hidden environmental [and social] costs, such as reduced life expectancy and declining arable land.”[1]
The economies of China and India will be forced to include in their accounting, sooner or later, the huge economic losses caused by global warming and climate disasters, depletion and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of soils, chemical pollution of food, declining wild fish stocks, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, depletion and scarcity of renewable energies, overpopulation and pollution in cities, migration and pandemics. Each and every one of these environmental liabilities must be paid, on time, for all humanity.
The invoices generated by climate change, for example, have already begun to alarm some sectors of financial capitalism, such as insurance companies. In 2000 a group of researchers led by Andrew Dlugolecki, belonging to CGMU Insurance Group (the largest insurance group in Britain), published a report according to which the property damage caused by global climate change showed a growth rate of 10% annually. If this trend continues, by the year 2065 the upward curve of losses will surpass Gross World Product growth, estimated at 3% annually. This means that the magnitude of the damage caused by the greenhouse effect that year will be identical to the volume of all the wealth produced on the planet. According Dlugolecki, long before the two lines intersect, the global economy will become bankrupt.[2]
Given this evidence, there is increasing uncertainty as to the possibility that capitalism (powered by China, the U.S., or both) will reach a new cycle of expansion similar to what occurred between 1945 and 1970. Similarly, it is absurd to think that it is feasible to transform the prevailing social relations of production and build a new society that is truly equitable, participatory, and sustainable, using the same energy patterns, technology and products developed over the past three centuries by the system of domination it aims to transform.
This apparent impasse does not mean that we are doomed to barbarism or that we reject outright the entire scientific and technological legacy of modernity. What corresponds to this dilemma is to be cautious against the risk of shipwreck, which would be any alternative socio-political project, to be led by the compulsive desire for reproduction of productive forces deployed by capitalism, without a critical assessment of its ecological, social, political and cultural effects. Do not forget that the stranglehold on political democracy and workers’ management caused by giving priority to technology and arms competition with the West was one of the fundamental causes of the collapse or involution of the most important trials of the Twentieth Century socialists.
Read more
For many analysts, however, a new long cycle of economic growth would be able to take off thanks to the efforts of countries like China and India, now converted into more desirable markets for transnational capital because of their abundant and “unregulated” cheap labor.
What analysts often do not reveal is that the high rate of GDP growth in China is misleading if one takes into account that the figures do not include the serious environmental and social liabilities generated by the “market socialism” adopted by this nation since 1979. Indeed, since the late nineties, “the World Bank estimated that pollution cost the country the equivalent of 8% of its annual production. That is, the enviable growth in China (...) is almost offset by hidden environmental [and social] costs, such as reduced life expectancy and declining arable land.”[1]
The economies of China and India will be forced to include in their accounting, sooner or later, the huge economic losses caused by global warming and climate disasters, depletion and water pollution, deforestation and desertification of soils, chemical pollution of food, declining wild fish stocks, the mass extinction of plant and animal species, depletion and scarcity of renewable energies, overpopulation and pollution in cities, migration and pandemics. Each and every one of these environmental liabilities must be paid, on time, for all humanity.
The invoices generated by climate change, for example, have already begun to alarm some sectors of financial capitalism, such as insurance companies. In 2000 a group of researchers led by Andrew Dlugolecki, belonging to CGMU Insurance Group (the largest insurance group in Britain), published a report according to which the property damage caused by global climate change showed a growth rate of 10% annually. If this trend continues, by the year 2065 the upward curve of losses will surpass Gross World Product growth, estimated at 3% annually. This means that the magnitude of the damage caused by the greenhouse effect that year will be identical to the volume of all the wealth produced on the planet. According Dlugolecki, long before the two lines intersect, the global economy will become bankrupt.[2]
Given this evidence, there is increasing uncertainty as to the possibility that capitalism (powered by China, the U.S., or both) will reach a new cycle of expansion similar to what occurred between 1945 and 1970. Similarly, it is absurd to think that it is feasible to transform the prevailing social relations of production and build a new society that is truly equitable, participatory, and sustainable, using the same energy patterns, technology and products developed over the past three centuries by the system of domination it aims to transform.
This apparent impasse does not mean that we are doomed to barbarism or that we reject outright the entire scientific and technological legacy of modernity. What corresponds to this dilemma is to be cautious against the risk of shipwreck, which would be any alternative socio-political project, to be led by the compulsive desire for reproduction of productive forces deployed by capitalism, without a critical assessment of its ecological, social, political and cultural effects. Do not forget that the stranglehold on political democracy and workers’ management caused by giving priority to technology and arms competition with the West was one of the fundamental causes of the collapse or involution of the most important trials of the Twentieth Century socialists.
Read more
Unlearnt lessons from 13 years of Labour
From Ross McKibben in London review of Books:
Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.
The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.
...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.
Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.
Read more
Brown accepted as proven what he was told by the City and its spokespersons in the media. He moved from what was perceived to be an electoral necessity – you can’t win elections if you alienate the City – to a belief that prevailing City opinion was right, that it was on the side of history. Much followed from this: light-touch regulation, a culture of remuneration that scandalised most of the country, a banking crisis, dithering in response to that crisis, a colossal bail-out of the banks with consequences that hang over the country’s finances, and then a failure to make the banks behave responsibly even when they were owned by the government. Brown, and Blair, and their colleagues, forgot a lesson most Labour leaders once learned at their mothers’ knee: when the ideologues of finance capital and the market come calling, you keep the door shut.
The next mistake was to embrace ‘choice’. The belief in choice followed naturally from a belief in the efficacy of the market, which was taken for granted by the people Labour ministers listened to. This had very damaging consequences both in education and in health. In education it predicated parental choice as the foundation of policy. It gave parents unique rights. But why should parents have such rights? In the jargon, education is a ‘social good’ not a ‘private good’. How and where our children are taught must be a collective not an individual decision; and that is the view of most parents. They want their children to get a good education, but they are prepared to let the professionals do it, as surveys have repeatedly confirmed. Despite this, the right to choose was thought paramount by New Labour and was to be encouraged by creating an array of different kinds of school where efficient parents could find what they wanted. Except, of course, that they couldn’t. Only some got their choice, and they were often the best connected, best informed. Attempts to correct this via lotteries only outraged the losers even more. Far from encouraging social harmony, choice encouraged a war of all against all. Far from solidifying the Labour vote, choice undermined it. And it left the way open for the Conservative Party’s silly proposals for ‘free schools’: parent-run, state-financed independent schools spuriously claimed to empower the poor.
...Labour now has time to repent at leisure. What should it do? Disowning its immediate past would be a good first step, but it has to elect a new leader and all the serious candidates are heavily implicated, for better or worse, in the New Labour ‘project’. One thing it is in no danger of doing is retreating into socialist rhetoric of the early 1980s variety, which is a relief. It could, of course, do nothing, since as the only opposition party it might expect to be the inevitable beneficiary of the coalition’s unpopularity. That would be risky. The coalition need not become unpopular, and even if it does the smaller parties could also benefit. Rather, Labour should emphasise the extent to which it is the party of public provision and collective life. It should also accept that the obsession with choice was a dead end, that the middle classes, aspirational or otherwise, do not always demand choice or pursue their own interests at the expense of everything else. All that choice has done is to create false markets in which there are as many losers as winners. Such markets do nothing to consolidate the Labour vote.
Then their is constitutional reform....Fundamentally, Labour has a Tory conception of the British state, which is why a Con-Lab government is not as mad an idea as it sounds. Bit by bit over its history Labour has come to accept the political institutions of the imperial state: monarchy, aristocracy, primitive electoral systems, independent nuclear weapons, the intelligence services (once thought the class enemy), the special relationship.
Read more
Tuesday 8 June 2010
Bush's former oil company linked to Bin Laden family
In 2001 after 911, President Bush signed an executive order to freeze the US financial assets of corporations doing business with Osama bin Laden. He described the order as a "strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network."
"If you do business with terrorists, if you support or succor them, you will not do business with the United States," said President Bush.
He didn't say anything about doing business with a terrorist's brother - or his wealthy financier.
When President George W. Bush froze assets connected to Osama bin Laden, he didn't tell the American people that the terrorist mastermind's late brother was an investor in the president's former oil business in Texas. He also hasn't levelled with the American public about his financial connections to a host of Saudi characters involved in drug cartels, gun smuggling, and terrorist networks.
Doing business with the enemy is nothing new to the Bush family. Much of the Bush family wealth came from supplying needed raw materials and credit to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Several business operations managed by Prescott Bush - the president's grandfather - were seized by the US government during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank's shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two other corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being front organizations for Hitler's Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler.
Doing business with the bin Laden empire, therefore, is only the latest extension of the Bush family's financial ties to unsavory individuals and organizations. Now that thousands of American citizens have died in terrorist attacks and the nation is going to war, the American people should know about George W. Bush's relationship with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother, was an investor in Arbusto Energy, the Texas oil company started by George W. Bush. Arbusto means "Bush" in Spanish. Salem bin Laden died in an airplane crash in Texas in 1988.
Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, the family patriarch and founder of its construction empire, also died in a plane crash. Upon his death in 1968, he left behind 57 sons and daughters - the offspring he sired with 12 wives in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. About a dozen brothers manage Bin Laden Brothers Construction - one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East.
Fresh out of Harvard Business School, young George W. Bush returned to Midland, TX, in the late 1970s to follow his father's footsteps in the oil business. Beginning in 1978, he set up a series of limited partnerships - Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and so on - to drill for oil.
One of President Bush's earliest financial backers was James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker. Bath served with President Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. Bath has a mysterious connection to the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
During a bitter legal fight between White and Bath, the real estate partner disclosed that Bath managed a portfolio worth millions of dollars for Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis. Among the investments made by Bath with Mahfouz's money was the Houston Gulf Airport.
A powerful banker in Saudi Arabia, Mahfouz was one of the largest stockholders in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was a corrupt global banking empire operating in 73 nations and was a major financial and political force in Washington, Paris, Geneva, London, and Hong Kong. Despite the appearance of a normal banking operation, BCCI was actually an international crime syndicate providing "banking services" to the Medellin drug cartel, Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal, and Khun Sa, the heroin kingpin in Asia's Golden Triangle.
The BCCI scandal implicated some of the biggest political names in Washington - both Democrats and Republicans - during the first Bush White House. The bank was accused of laundering money for drug cartels, smuggling weapons to terrorists, and using Middle Eastern oil money to influence American politicians.
The chief of the Justice Department's criminal division under former President Bush was Robert Mueller. Because the major players came out of the scandal with slaps on the wrists, many critics accused Mueller of botching the investigation. Mr. Mueller was appointed by President George W. Bush as the Director of the FBI, replacing Louis Freeh.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the Justice Department, reviewed allegations by Bill White in 1992 that James Bath funneled money from wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen to American companies to influence the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Robert Mueller, the new FBI chief, was in a senior position at the Justice Department at the time of the review.
White told a Texas court in 1992 that Bath and the Justice Department had "blackballed" him professionally and financially because he refused to keep quiet about his knowledge of an Arab conspiracy to launder Middle Eastern money into the bank accounts of American businesses and politicians.
In sworn depositions, Bath admitted he represented four wealthy Saudi Arabian businessmen as a trustee. He also admitted he used his name on their investments and received, in return, a five- percent stake in their business deals.
Indeed, Texas tax documents revealed that Bath owned five percent of Arbusto '79 Ltd., and Arbusto '80 Ltd. Bush Exploration Company controlled the limited partnerships, the general partnership firm owned by young George W. Bush.
Although George W. Bush's Texas oil ventures were financial failures, his financial backers recovered their investments through a series of mergers and stock swaps. He changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration, then merged the new firm into Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation in 1984.
The Bush-controlled oil business eventually ended up being folded into Harken Energy Corp., a Dallas-based corporation. Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986 and was given 212,000 shares of Harken stock. Bush used his White House connections to land a lucrative contract for the obscure Harken Energy Corp. with the Middle Eastern government of Bahrain. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold his Harken stock for $848,000 and paid off his loan he took out to buy his small share in the Texas Rangers. The Bahrain deal was brokered by David Edwards, a close pal to Bill Clinton and a former employee of Stephens Inc. Shortly after Bush sold his stock, Harken's fortunes nose-dived when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Some critics claim young George was tipped off in advance by his father about the soon-coming Gulf War.
George W. Bush, however, worked wonders for Harken Energy Corp. before the stock collapse. Using the Bush family name, he managed to bring much-needed capital investment to the struggling firm. George W. Bush traveled to Little Rock, AR, to attend a meeting with Jackson Stephens - a powerful Arkansas tycoon who help bankroll the state campaigns of young Bill Clinton. He first gained political prominence as a fund-raiser for President Jimmy Carter. Stephens was also deeply involved in the BCCI scandal by helping the corrupt bank take control of First American Bank in Washington, DC.
Jack Stephens didn't need an introduction to young George W. Bush. Mary Anne Stephens, his wife, managed Vice President George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign in Arkansas. Stephens Inc., the well connected brokerage firm owned by Jack Stephens, donated $100,000 to a Bush campaign fundraising dinner in 1991. When George W. Bush won the contested Florida election in 2000, Jack Stephens made a substantial contribution to the Bush inauguration. Former President Bush played golf on April 11, 2001, with Jack Stephens at the Jack Stephens Youth Golf Academy in Little Rock. The former president told Stephens, "Jack, we love you and we are very, very grateful for what you have done."
Perhaps the former president was thanking him for the money Stephens provided young George W. Bush. Stephens arranged for a $25 million investment from the Union des Banques Suisses. The Swiss Bank held the minority interest in the Banque de Commerce et de Placements, a Geneva-based subsidiary of BCCI.
Both Stephens and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a wealthy and well-connected Saudi real estate investor, signed the financial transaction. The Geneva transaction was paid through a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland and its Geneva branch of BCCI.
The BCCI connection, therefore, linked George W. Bush with Saudi banker Khaled bin Mahfouz. Known in Arab circles as the "king's treasurer," Mahfouz held a 20 percent take in BCCI between 1986 and 1990. Mahfouz is no stranger to the Bush family. He was a big investor in the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment group with deep connections to the Republican Party establishment. Former President Bush is a former member of the company's board of directors. George W. Bush also held shares in Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary. Sami Baarma, a powerful player in the Mahfouz-owned Prime Commercial Bank of Pakistan, is a member of the Carlyle Group's international advisory board.
President Bush certainly is aware that his former Saudi funder is still financing Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. USA Today newspaper reported in 1999 that a year after bin Laden's attacks on US embassies in Africa, Khaled bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis were funneling tens of millions of dollars each year into bin Laden's bank accounts. Five top Saudi businessmen ordered the National Commercial Bank to transfer personal funds and $3 million taken from a Saudi pension fund to the Capitol Trust Bank in New York City. The money was deposited into the Islamic Relief and Bless Relief - Islamic charities operating in the US and Great Britain as fronts for Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi who cosigned the $25 million cash infusion into George W. Bush's Harken Energy Corporation, appointed Talat Othman to manage his 17.6 percent share in Harken Energy Corp. Othman, a native Palestinian, is president and CEO of Dearborn Financial Inc, an investment firm in Arlington Heights, IL.
Bakhsh also bought a 9.6 percent stake in Worthen Banking Corporation, the Arkansas bank controlled by Jack Stephens. Abdullah Bakhsh's share was the identical percentage as the amount of shares sold by Mochtar Riady, the godfather of the wealthy Indonesian family with close ties to the Chinese communists, Bill Clinton and evangelist Pat Robertson.
Independent investigative reporter David Twersky reported in the early 1990s that Othman had a seat on Harken's board of directors and met three times in the White House with President George Herbert Walker Bush. Organized by Chief of Staff John Sununu, Othman's first meeting with President Bush at the White House was in August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
There exist to this day a Saudi-Texas connection. Khalid bin Mahfouz, financier of both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, still maintains a palatial estate in Houston, TX. Former President George Bush also lives in Houston. James Bath, Texas political confidant of George W. Bush, managed to obtain a $1.4 million loan from Mahfouz in 1990. Bath and Mahfouz, along with former Secretary of Treasury John Connally, were also co-investors in Houston's Main Bank. Bath was also president of Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd, a Texas air charter company registered in the Cayman Islands. According to published reports in the early 1990s, the real owner was bin Mahfouz. When Salem bin Laden, Osama' brother, died in 1988, his interest in the Houston Gulf Airport was transferred to bin Mahfouz.
Since the attacks on America on September 11, the federal government has moved quickly to freeze bank accounts connected to Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, and a host of Islamic charities.
Perhaps federal agents should freeze the financial assets of the Bush family too. It would not be the first time Bush-family assets were seized by the US government for trading with the enemy.
Copyright 2001 American Freedom News
"If you do business with terrorists, if you support or succor them, you will not do business with the United States," said President Bush.
He didn't say anything about doing business with a terrorist's brother - or his wealthy financier.
When President George W. Bush froze assets connected to Osama bin Laden, he didn't tell the American people that the terrorist mastermind's late brother was an investor in the president's former oil business in Texas. He also hasn't levelled with the American public about his financial connections to a host of Saudi characters involved in drug cartels, gun smuggling, and terrorist networks.
Doing business with the enemy is nothing new to the Bush family. Much of the Bush family wealth came from supplying needed raw materials and credit to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Several business operations managed by Prescott Bush - the president's grandfather - were seized by the US government during World War II under the Trading with the Enemy Act.
On October 20, 1942, the federal government seized the Union Banking Corporation in New York City as a front operation for the Nazis. Prescott Bush was a director. Bush, E. Roland Harriman, two Bush associates, and three Nazi executives owned the bank's shares. Eight days later, the Roosevelt administration seized two other corporations managed by Prescott Bush. The Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation, both managed by the Bush-Harriman bank, were accused by the US federal government of being front organizations for Hitler's Third Reich. Again, on November 8, 1942, the federal government seized Nazi-controlled assets of Silesian-American Corporation, another Bush-Harriman company doing business with Hitler.
Doing business with the bin Laden empire, therefore, is only the latest extension of the Bush family's financial ties to unsavory individuals and organizations. Now that thousands of American citizens have died in terrorist attacks and the nation is going to war, the American people should know about George W. Bush's relationship with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother, was an investor in Arbusto Energy, the Texas oil company started by George W. Bush. Arbusto means "Bush" in Spanish. Salem bin Laden died in an airplane crash in Texas in 1988.
Sheik Mohammed bin Laden, the family patriarch and founder of its construction empire, also died in a plane crash. Upon his death in 1968, he left behind 57 sons and daughters - the offspring he sired with 12 wives in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. About a dozen brothers manage Bin Laden Brothers Construction - one of the largest construction firms in the Middle East.
Fresh out of Harvard Business School, young George W. Bush returned to Midland, TX, in the late 1970s to follow his father's footsteps in the oil business. Beginning in 1978, he set up a series of limited partnerships - Arbusto '78, Arbusto '79, and so on - to drill for oil.
One of President Bush's earliest financial backers was James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker. Bath served with President Bush in the Texas Air National Guard. Bath has a mysterious connection to the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to a 1976 trust agreement, Salem bin Laden appointed James Bath as his business representative in Houston. Revelation about Bath's relationship with the bin Laden financial empire and the CIA was made public in 1992 by Bill White, a former real estate business partner with Bath. White informed federal investigators in 1992 that Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role since 1976 - the same year former President George Herbert Walker Bush served as director of the CIA.
During a bitter legal fight between White and Bath, the real estate partner disclosed that Bath managed a portfolio worth millions of dollars for Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis. Among the investments made by Bath with Mahfouz's money was the Houston Gulf Airport.
A powerful banker in Saudi Arabia, Mahfouz was one of the largest stockholders in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was a corrupt global banking empire operating in 73 nations and was a major financial and political force in Washington, Paris, Geneva, London, and Hong Kong. Despite the appearance of a normal banking operation, BCCI was actually an international crime syndicate providing "banking services" to the Medellin drug cartel, Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal, and Khun Sa, the heroin kingpin in Asia's Golden Triangle.
The BCCI scandal implicated some of the biggest political names in Washington - both Democrats and Republicans - during the first Bush White House. The bank was accused of laundering money for drug cartels, smuggling weapons to terrorists, and using Middle Eastern oil money to influence American politicians.
The chief of the Justice Department's criminal division under former President Bush was Robert Mueller. Because the major players came out of the scandal with slaps on the wrists, many critics accused Mueller of botching the investigation. Mr. Mueller was appointed by President George W. Bush as the Director of the FBI, replacing Louis Freeh.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a division of the Justice Department, reviewed allegations by Bill White in 1992 that James Bath funneled money from wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen to American companies to influence the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. Robert Mueller, the new FBI chief, was in a senior position at the Justice Department at the time of the review.
White told a Texas court in 1992 that Bath and the Justice Department had "blackballed" him professionally and financially because he refused to keep quiet about his knowledge of an Arab conspiracy to launder Middle Eastern money into the bank accounts of American businesses and politicians.
In sworn depositions, Bath admitted he represented four wealthy Saudi Arabian businessmen as a trustee. He also admitted he used his name on their investments and received, in return, a five- percent stake in their business deals.
Indeed, Texas tax documents revealed that Bath owned five percent of Arbusto '79 Ltd., and Arbusto '80 Ltd. Bush Exploration Company controlled the limited partnerships, the general partnership firm owned by young George W. Bush.
Although George W. Bush's Texas oil ventures were financial failures, his financial backers recovered their investments through a series of mergers and stock swaps. He changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration, then merged the new firm into Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation in 1984.
The Bush-controlled oil business eventually ended up being folded into Harken Energy Corp., a Dallas-based corporation. Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986 and was given 212,000 shares of Harken stock. Bush used his White House connections to land a lucrative contract for the obscure Harken Energy Corp. with the Middle Eastern government of Bahrain. On June 20, 1990, George W. Bush sold his Harken stock for $848,000 and paid off his loan he took out to buy his small share in the Texas Rangers. The Bahrain deal was brokered by David Edwards, a close pal to Bill Clinton and a former employee of Stephens Inc. Shortly after Bush sold his stock, Harken's fortunes nose-dived when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Some critics claim young George was tipped off in advance by his father about the soon-coming Gulf War.
George W. Bush, however, worked wonders for Harken Energy Corp. before the stock collapse. Using the Bush family name, he managed to bring much-needed capital investment to the struggling firm. George W. Bush traveled to Little Rock, AR, to attend a meeting with Jackson Stephens - a powerful Arkansas tycoon who help bankroll the state campaigns of young Bill Clinton. He first gained political prominence as a fund-raiser for President Jimmy Carter. Stephens was also deeply involved in the BCCI scandal by helping the corrupt bank take control of First American Bank in Washington, DC.
Jack Stephens didn't need an introduction to young George W. Bush. Mary Anne Stephens, his wife, managed Vice President George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign in Arkansas. Stephens Inc., the well connected brokerage firm owned by Jack Stephens, donated $100,000 to a Bush campaign fundraising dinner in 1991. When George W. Bush won the contested Florida election in 2000, Jack Stephens made a substantial contribution to the Bush inauguration. Former President Bush played golf on April 11, 2001, with Jack Stephens at the Jack Stephens Youth Golf Academy in Little Rock. The former president told Stephens, "Jack, we love you and we are very, very grateful for what you have done."
Perhaps the former president was thanking him for the money Stephens provided young George W. Bush. Stephens arranged for a $25 million investment from the Union des Banques Suisses. The Swiss Bank held the minority interest in the Banque de Commerce et de Placements, a Geneva-based subsidiary of BCCI.
Both Stephens and Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, a wealthy and well-connected Saudi real estate investor, signed the financial transaction. The Geneva transaction was paid through a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland and its Geneva branch of BCCI.
The BCCI connection, therefore, linked George W. Bush with Saudi banker Khaled bin Mahfouz. Known in Arab circles as the "king's treasurer," Mahfouz held a 20 percent take in BCCI between 1986 and 1990. Mahfouz is no stranger to the Bush family. He was a big investor in the Carlyle Group, a defense-industry investment group with deep connections to the Republican Party establishment. Former President Bush is a former member of the company's board of directors. George W. Bush also held shares in Caterair, a Carlyle subsidiary. Sami Baarma, a powerful player in the Mahfouz-owned Prime Commercial Bank of Pakistan, is a member of the Carlyle Group's international advisory board.
President Bush certainly is aware that his former Saudi funder is still financing Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. USA Today newspaper reported in 1999 that a year after bin Laden's attacks on US embassies in Africa, Khaled bin Mahfouz and other wealthy Saudis were funneling tens of millions of dollars each year into bin Laden's bank accounts. Five top Saudi businessmen ordered the National Commercial Bank to transfer personal funds and $3 million taken from a Saudi pension fund to the Capitol Trust Bank in New York City. The money was deposited into the Islamic Relief and Bless Relief - Islamic charities operating in the US and Great Britain as fronts for Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the Saudi who cosigned the $25 million cash infusion into George W. Bush's Harken Energy Corporation, appointed Talat Othman to manage his 17.6 percent share in Harken Energy Corp. Othman, a native Palestinian, is president and CEO of Dearborn Financial Inc, an investment firm in Arlington Heights, IL.
Bakhsh also bought a 9.6 percent stake in Worthen Banking Corporation, the Arkansas bank controlled by Jack Stephens. Abdullah Bakhsh's share was the identical percentage as the amount of shares sold by Mochtar Riady, the godfather of the wealthy Indonesian family with close ties to the Chinese communists, Bill Clinton and evangelist Pat Robertson.
Independent investigative reporter David Twersky reported in the early 1990s that Othman had a seat on Harken's board of directors and met three times in the White House with President George Herbert Walker Bush. Organized by Chief of Staff John Sununu, Othman's first meeting with President Bush at the White House was in August 1990, just days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
There exist to this day a Saudi-Texas connection. Khalid bin Mahfouz, financier of both George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, still maintains a palatial estate in Houston, TX. Former President George Bush also lives in Houston. James Bath, Texas political confidant of George W. Bush, managed to obtain a $1.4 million loan from Mahfouz in 1990. Bath and Mahfouz, along with former Secretary of Treasury John Connally, were also co-investors in Houston's Main Bank. Bath was also president of Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd, a Texas air charter company registered in the Cayman Islands. According to published reports in the early 1990s, the real owner was bin Mahfouz. When Salem bin Laden, Osama' brother, died in 1988, his interest in the Houston Gulf Airport was transferred to bin Mahfouz.
Since the attacks on America on September 11, the federal government has moved quickly to freeze bank accounts connected to Osama bin Laden, Khalid bin Mahfouz, and a host of Islamic charities.
Perhaps federal agents should freeze the financial assets of the Bush family too. It would not be the first time Bush-family assets were seized by the US government for trading with the enemy.
Copyright 2001 American Freedom News
The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11
This blog from Rigorous Intuition contains so many coincidences that even if only a few of them are true it's really quite mind shattering. RigINt is now here.
That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.
That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there’s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!
That Jonathan Bush’s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.
That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.
That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama’s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.
Read more
That governments have permitted terrorist acts against their own people, and have even themselves been perpetrators in order to find strategic advantage is quite likely true, but this is the United States we're talking about.
That intelligence agencies, financiers, terrorists and narco-criminals have a long history together is well established, but the Nugan Hand Bank, BCCI, Banco Ambrosiano, the P2 Lodge, the CIA/Mafia anti-Castro/Kennedy alliance, Iran/Contra and the rest were a long time ago, so there’s no need to rehash all that. That was then, this is now!
That Jonathan Bush’s Riggs Bank has been found guilty of laundering terrorist funds and fined a US-record $25 million must embarrass his nephew George, but it's still no justification for leaping to paranoid conclusions.
That George Bush's brother Marvin sat on the board of the Kuwaiti-owned company which provided electronic security to the World Trade Centre, Dulles Airport and United Airlines means nothing more than you must admit those Bush boys have done alright for themselves.
That George Bush found success as a businessman only after the investment of Osama’s brother Salem and reputed al Qaeda financier Khalid bin Mahfouz is just one of those things - one of those crazy things.
Read more
Bush's uncle Jonathan was director at bank that funded terrorists
In late 2002, US federal banking investigators began looking into transactions at Riggs Bank because of news reports that some money may have passed from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington through Riggs Bank to the associates of two 9/11 hijackers in San Diego (see December 4, 1999). But in July 2003, the probe expands as investigators discover irregularities involving tens of millions of dollars also connected to the Saudi embassy.
As of May 2000, Jonathan J. Bush, brother of President George H.W. Bush, was "Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of J. Bush & Co., an investment management company he founded in 1970, which Riggs acquired in 1997", according to a Riggs Bank Press Release. At the same time, Mr. Jonathan J. Bush was also elected President & Chief Executive Officer and a Director of "RIMCO, a wholly owned investment management subsidiary".
The Wall Street Journal will later report, “Riggs repeatedly failed in 2001 and 2002 to file suspicious-activity reports related to cash transactions in the low tens of millions of dollars in Saudi accounts, said people familiar with the matter.” Riggs Bank “handles the bulk of [Washington’s] diplomatic accounts, a niche market that revolves around relationships and discretion.” [Wall Street Journal, 1/14/2004]
Newsweek will later report that “investigators say the embassy accounts show a large commingling of funds with Islamic charities that have been the prime target of US probes.” In one instance, on July 10, 2001 the Saudi embassy sent $70,000 to two Saudis in Massachusetts. One of the Saudis wrote a $20,000 check that same day to a third Saudi who had listed the same address as Aafia Siddiqui, a microbiologist who is believed to have been a US-based operative for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (see Late September 2001-March 2003). [Newsweek, 4/12/2004] The Wall Street Journal will later discover that Riggs Bank “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and US government officials” (see December 31, 2004). The relationship included top Riggs executives receiving US government security clearances.
Riggs also overlooked tens of millions of dollars in suspicious transactions by right wing dictators from Africa and South America such as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. [Wall Street Journal, 12/31/2004] A connection between the CIA and Riggs Bank goes back to at least the early 1960s. And in 1977, journalist Bob Woodward tied Riggs Bank to payments in a CIA operation in Iran. [Slate, 1/10/2005]
The CIA tie leads to suspicions that the bank’s failure to disclose financial activity by Saudi diplomats and other foreign officials may have been implicitly authorized by parts of the US government. Some of the suspicious Saudi accounts belong to Saudi diplomats, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the US.
Shortly after these irregularities are discovered, Prince Bandar meets with Treasury Secretary John Snow and details his work for the CIA. For instance, during the 1980s, Prince Bandar helped fund the anticommunist Nicaraguan Contra rebels at the request of the White House and CIA as part of what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, and he also helped the CIA support Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union. It is not known what was discussed but US intelligence officials suggest Prince Bandar disclosed his CIA connections “as an explanation for the prince’s large unexplained cash transactions at Riggs.” [Wall Street Journal, 12/31/2004] It will later come to light that for many years $30 million a month were being secretly deposited into a Riggs Bank account controlled by Prince Bandar.
It has been alleged that major British arms contractor BAE Systems funneled up to $2 billion in bribes through this account over the years as part of an $80 billion weapons deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. Riggs Bank never knew the source of the funds. After the probe uncovers these suspicious transactions, the bank cuts off all business with the Saudis. [Newsweek, 6/11/2007]
The US Treasury will later impose unusually strict controls on Riggs Bank and fine the bank $25 million. [Wall Street Journal, 1/14/2004] The bank will also plead guilty to one felony count of failing to file suspicious activity reports and pay an additional fine of $16 million. [Washington Post, 1/28/2005]
As of May 2000, Jonathan J. Bush, brother of President George H.W. Bush, was "Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of J. Bush & Co., an investment management company he founded in 1970, which Riggs acquired in 1997", according to a Riggs Bank Press Release. At the same time, Mr. Jonathan J. Bush was also elected President & Chief Executive Officer and a Director of "RIMCO, a wholly owned investment management subsidiary".
The Wall Street Journal will later report, “Riggs repeatedly failed in 2001 and 2002 to file suspicious-activity reports related to cash transactions in the low tens of millions of dollars in Saudi accounts, said people familiar with the matter.” Riggs Bank “handles the bulk of [Washington’s] diplomatic accounts, a niche market that revolves around relationships and discretion.” [Wall Street Journal, 1/14/2004]
Newsweek will later report that “investigators say the embassy accounts show a large commingling of funds with Islamic charities that have been the prime target of US probes.” In one instance, on July 10, 2001 the Saudi embassy sent $70,000 to two Saudis in Massachusetts. One of the Saudis wrote a $20,000 check that same day to a third Saudi who had listed the same address as Aafia Siddiqui, a microbiologist who is believed to have been a US-based operative for 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (see Late September 2001-March 2003). [Newsweek, 4/12/2004] The Wall Street Journal will later discover that Riggs Bank “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and US government officials” (see December 31, 2004). The relationship included top Riggs executives receiving US government security clearances.
Riggs also overlooked tens of millions of dollars in suspicious transactions by right wing dictators from Africa and South America such as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. [Wall Street Journal, 12/31/2004] A connection between the CIA and Riggs Bank goes back to at least the early 1960s. And in 1977, journalist Bob Woodward tied Riggs Bank to payments in a CIA operation in Iran. [Slate, 1/10/2005]
The CIA tie leads to suspicions that the bank’s failure to disclose financial activity by Saudi diplomats and other foreign officials may have been implicitly authorized by parts of the US government. Some of the suspicious Saudi accounts belong to Saudi diplomats, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the US.
Shortly after these irregularities are discovered, Prince Bandar meets with Treasury Secretary John Snow and details his work for the CIA. For instance, during the 1980s, Prince Bandar helped fund the anticommunist Nicaraguan Contra rebels at the request of the White House and CIA as part of what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, and he also helped the CIA support Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet Union. It is not known what was discussed but US intelligence officials suggest Prince Bandar disclosed his CIA connections “as an explanation for the prince’s large unexplained cash transactions at Riggs.” [Wall Street Journal, 12/31/2004] It will later come to light that for many years $30 million a month were being secretly deposited into a Riggs Bank account controlled by Prince Bandar.
It has been alleged that major British arms contractor BAE Systems funneled up to $2 billion in bribes through this account over the years as part of an $80 billion weapons deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia. Riggs Bank never knew the source of the funds. After the probe uncovers these suspicious transactions, the bank cuts off all business with the Saudis. [Newsweek, 6/11/2007]
The US Treasury will later impose unusually strict controls on Riggs Bank and fine the bank $25 million. [Wall Street Journal, 1/14/2004] The bank will also plead guilty to one felony count of failing to file suspicious activity reports and pay an additional fine of $16 million. [Washington Post, 1/28/2005]
BP's OTHER Spill this Week
With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there's no space in the press for British Petroleum's latest spill, just this week: over 100,000 gallons, at its Alaska pipeline operation. A hundred thousand used to be a lot. Still is.
On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors. "Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.
Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.
There's another reason to keep their name off the Pipe: their management of the pipe stinks. It's corroded, it's undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP never heard of.
How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it: bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.
Read more
On Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors. "Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.
Few Americans know that BP owns the controlling stake in the trans-Alaska pipeline; but, unlike with the Deepwater Horizon, BP keeps its Limey name off the Big Pipe.
There's another reason to keep their name off the Pipe: their management of the pipe stinks. It's corroded, it's undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP never heard of.
How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it: bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.
Read more
Monday 7 June 2010
Criminal drug-related conspiracy within FBI linked to 911
From BreakForNews, June 2004
Sibel Edmonds has already become somewhat of a flag-bearer for the diverse 9/11 truth movement, which ranges across advocacy groups, families of victims, individual investigators and a host of online web sites --all disputing the official 'Al-Qaida conspiracy' theory.
But an article today by Scott Loughrey on the Baltimore Chronicle online, alleges that Edmonds is offering a limited hangout version of events, and accuses her of "repeating the propaganda of the state."
Loughrey writes that Edmonds blames intelligence failures, rather than more sinister explanations, for the failure to prevent the attacks.
That's misleading and unfair. Yes, the superficial reports of her claims in the mainstream media focus mainly on intelligence failures. Yes, Edmonds was coy in her early public statements --out of defenence to the sensitivity of her information and the gung-ho public sentiment at the time, no doubt.
But in closed session testimony to Congressional inquiries, Edmonds has given a much fuller account of her concerns. So dangerous an account that Ashcroft seeks to retrospectively cloak that testimony with state secret privilege
And as a disillusioned Edmonds has seen her evidence disappear unremarked into the black hole of those inquiries, she has blown the whistle publicly --as unreservedly as the gag order allows:
She says the pre-9/11 US intelligence system had been penetrated by a drug-linked, semi-legitimate criminal intelligence network, operating with seeming impunity inside the FBI.
The post-9/11 intelligence 'failures' included the willful quashing by the government, of investigations tracing those criminal networks.
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on --to quote Edmonds.
If that's a limited hangout, God help us. The truth must be awful.
If it's true, as Edmonds asserts, the official line is a shallow sham.
Sibel Edmonds has already become somewhat of a flag-bearer for the diverse 9/11 truth movement, which ranges across advocacy groups, families of victims, individual investigators and a host of online web sites --all disputing the official 'Al-Qaida conspiracy' theory.
But an article today by Scott Loughrey on the Baltimore Chronicle online, alleges that Edmonds is offering a limited hangout version of events, and accuses her of "repeating the propaganda of the state."
Loughrey writes that Edmonds blames intelligence failures, rather than more sinister explanations, for the failure to prevent the attacks.
That's misleading and unfair. Yes, the superficial reports of her claims in the mainstream media focus mainly on intelligence failures. Yes, Edmonds was coy in her early public statements --out of defenence to the sensitivity of her information and the gung-ho public sentiment at the time, no doubt.
But in closed session testimony to Congressional inquiries, Edmonds has given a much fuller account of her concerns. So dangerous an account that Ashcroft seeks to retrospectively cloak that testimony with state secret privilege
And as a disillusioned Edmonds has seen her evidence disappear unremarked into the black hole of those inquiries, she has blown the whistle publicly --as unreservedly as the gag order allows:
She says the pre-9/11 US intelligence system had been penetrated by a drug-linked, semi-legitimate criminal intelligence network, operating with seeming impunity inside the FBI.
The post-9/11 intelligence 'failures' included the willful quashing by the government, of investigations tracing those criminal networks.
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on --to quote Edmonds.
If that's a limited hangout, God help us. The truth must be awful.
If it's true, as Edmonds asserts, the official line is a shallow sham.
Whistleblowers on 911: Daniel Ellsberg and Sibel Edmonds
In a recent interview with BreakFornews.com, Sibel Edmonds alleged that the US State Department had blocked investigations showing links between criminal drug trafficking networks and the terror attacks on 9/11.
"Certain investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations," she said. (Interview - 4:00 min.)
Edmonds also indicated that the FBI's intelligence translation service had been penetrated by a criminal, semi-legitimate intelligence group --not linked to any government. Her measured words hinted at politically explosive connections between non-terrorist criminal networks and the 9/11 attacks.
Since October, 2002 Edmonds has been bound by provisional gag orders while awaiting an opportunity for a full hearing and a definitive ruling. The recent moves in the case arose from a government bid to exclude her testimony from a class action lawsuit by families of 9/11 victims.
Judge Walton had scheduled Monday as the first ever hearing at which Edmonds was to be allowed counter the state secret privilege assertion by Ashcroft. But after an in camera presentation last week by the government side, he called off the hearing. Unofficial reports say a new date may be set for early July.
Talk of US government interference in 9/11 investigations, and the considerable volume of online analysis discounting the official conspiracy theory, resonate with Ellsberg.
"I'm not an expert on all this," he admits. "But I am increasingly open to the explanation that people in the administration did see this coming... and may have indeed reduced some obstacles.., or opened the door, in effect. I haven't been absolutely convinced on that, but it does seem to me to be an open question that deserves investigation."
"Now beyond that... it seems to me quite plausible that --plausible, that's all I'd say-- that Pakistan was quite involved in this, and that many Saudis were well informed on this," says Ellsberg.
"And to say that. To say Pakistan-- is to me, to say C.I.A. Because I think the relations between the Pakistan I.S.I. [intelligence service] and CIA were very close from the beginning. And it's hard to say that the I.S.I knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of."
"So if you say, do I accept confidently, and do I rely on the official interpretation? Certainly not. But, I wouldn't say that I have been yet been thoroughly convinced by any alternative."
"I can add one thing though -from my own experience, that's relevant."
"Is it possible... that an American president could have... welcomed an attack on America that he would interpret [as] justifying an invasion of another country?"
"Well, that's more than possible, that happened --under a president that I served. Lyndon Johnson did put American destroyers in harms way, deliberately provoking an attack.. in the Tonkin Gulf. Not only in August of '64, but in February of '65. ...There was an attack on August 2nd, and that was not unwelcome to the United States at that point."
"Certain investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations," she said. (Interview - 4:00 min.)
Edmonds also indicated that the FBI's intelligence translation service had been penetrated by a criminal, semi-legitimate intelligence group --not linked to any government. Her measured words hinted at politically explosive connections between non-terrorist criminal networks and the 9/11 attacks.
Since October, 2002 Edmonds has been bound by provisional gag orders while awaiting an opportunity for a full hearing and a definitive ruling. The recent moves in the case arose from a government bid to exclude her testimony from a class action lawsuit by families of 9/11 victims.
Judge Walton had scheduled Monday as the first ever hearing at which Edmonds was to be allowed counter the state secret privilege assertion by Ashcroft. But after an in camera presentation last week by the government side, he called off the hearing. Unofficial reports say a new date may be set for early July.
Talk of US government interference in 9/11 investigations, and the considerable volume of online analysis discounting the official conspiracy theory, resonate with Ellsberg.
"I'm not an expert on all this," he admits. "But I am increasingly open to the explanation that people in the administration did see this coming... and may have indeed reduced some obstacles.., or opened the door, in effect. I haven't been absolutely convinced on that, but it does seem to me to be an open question that deserves investigation."
"Now beyond that... it seems to me quite plausible that --plausible, that's all I'd say-- that Pakistan was quite involved in this, and that many Saudis were well informed on this," says Ellsberg.
"And to say that. To say Pakistan-- is to me, to say C.I.A. Because I think the relations between the Pakistan I.S.I. [intelligence service] and CIA were very close from the beginning. And it's hard to say that the I.S.I knew something that the CIA had no knowledge of."
"So if you say, do I accept confidently, and do I rely on the official interpretation? Certainly not. But, I wouldn't say that I have been yet been thoroughly convinced by any alternative."
"I can add one thing though -from my own experience, that's relevant."
"Is it possible... that an American president could have... welcomed an attack on America that he would interpret [as] justifying an invasion of another country?"
"Well, that's more than possible, that happened --under a president that I served. Lyndon Johnson did put American destroyers in harms way, deliberately provoking an attack.. in the Tonkin Gulf. Not only in August of '64, but in February of '65. ...There was an attack on August 2nd, and that was not unwelcome to the United States at that point."
The Foreign Agent Factor
By Sibel Edmonds
In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned that America must be constantly awake against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence…since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
Today, foreign influence, that most baneful foe of our republican government, has its tentacles entrenched in almost all major decision making and policy producing bodies of the U.S. government machine. It does so not secretly, since its self-serving activities are advocated and legitimized by highly positioned parties that reap the benefits that come in the form of financial gain and positions of power.
Foreign governments and foreign-owned private interests have long sought to influence U.S. public policy. Several have accomplished this goal; those who are able and willing to pay what it takes. Those who buy themselves a few strategic middlemen, commonly known as pimps, while in DC circles referred to as foreign registered agents and lobbyists, who facilitate and bring about desired transactions. These successful foreign entities have mastered the art of ‘covering all the bases’ when it comes to buying influence in Washington DC. They have the required recipe down pat: get yourself a few ‘Dime a Dozen Generals,’ bid high in the ‘former statesmen lobby auction’, and put in your pocket one or two ‘ex-congressmen turned lobbyists’ who know the ropes when it comes to pocketing a few dozen who still serve.
The most important facet of this influence to consider is what happens when the active and powerful foreign entities’ objectives are in direct conflict with our nation’s objectives and its interests and security; and when this is the case, who pays the ultimate price and how. There is no need for assumptions of hypothetical situations to answer these questions, since throughout recent history we have repeatedly faced the dire consequences of the highjacking of our foreign and domestic policies by these so-called foreign agents of foreign influence.
Let’s illustrate this with the most important recent case, the catastrophe endured by our people; the September Eleven terrorist attacks. Let’s observe how certain foreign interests, combined with their U.S. agents and benefactors, overrode the interests and security of the entire nation; how thousands of victims and their loved ones were kicked aside to serve the interests of a few; foreign influence and its agents.
Senator Graham’s Revelation
It has been established that two of the 9/11 hijackers had a support network in the U.S. that included agents of the Saudi government, and that the Bush administration and the FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship.
In his book, "Intelligence Matters," Senator Bob Graham made clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties in the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Here is an excerpt from Senator Graham’s statement from the July 24, 2003 congressional record on the classified 27 pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11: “The most serious omission, in my view, is part 4 of the report, which is entitled Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters. Those 27 pages have almost been entirely censured [sic]….The declassified version of this finding tells the American people that our investigation developed information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States. In other words, officials of a foreign government are alleged to have aided and abetted the terrorist attacks on our country on September 11, which took over 3,000 lives.”
In his book Graham reveals, “Our investigators found a CIA memo dated August 2, 2002, whose author concluded that there is incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government. On September 11, America was not attacked by a nation-state, but we had just discovered that the attackers were actively supported by one, and that state was our supposed friend and ally Saudi Arabia.” He then cites another case, “We had discovered an FBI asset who had a close relationship with two of the terrorists; a terrorist support network that went through the Saudi Embassy; and a funding network that went through the Saudi Royal family.”
The most explosive revelation in Graham’s book is the following statement with regard to the administration’s attitude on page 216: “It was as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” Further, he states that he asked the FBI to undertake a review of the Riggs Bank records on the terrorists’ money trail, to look at other Saudi companies with ties to al-Qaeda, to plan for monitoring suspect Saudi interests in the United States; however, Graham adds: “To my knowledge, none of these investigations have been completed…Nor do we know anything else about what I believe to be a state-sponsored terrorist support network that still exists, largely undamaged, within the United States.”
What Graham is trying to establish in his book and previous public statements in this regard, and doing so under state imposed ‘secrecy and classification’, is that the classification and cover up of those 27 pages is not about protecting ‘U.S. national security, methods of intelligence collection, or ongoing investigations,’ but to protect certain U.S. allies. Meaning, our government put the interests of certain foreign nations and their U.S. beneficiaries far above its own people and their interests. While Saudi Arabia has been specifically pointed to by Graham, other countries involved have yet to be identified.
In covering up Saudi Arabia’s direct role in supporting Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission goes even a few steps further than the congress and the Executive Branch. The report claims "there is no convincing evidence that any government financially supported al-Qaeda before 9/11." Their report ignores all the information provided by government officials to Congress, as well as volumes of published reports and investigations by other nations, regarding Muslim and Arab regimes that have supported al Qaeda. It completely disregards the terrorist lists of the Treasury and State Departments, which have catalogued the Saudi government's decades of support for Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Why in the world would the United States government go so far to protect Saudi Arabia in the face of what itself declares to be the biggest security threat facing our nation and the world today?
Why is the United States willing to set aside its own security and interests in order to advance the interests of another state?
How can a government that’s been intent upon using the terrorist attacks to carry out many unjustifiable atrocities, prevent bringing to justice those who’ve been established as being directly responsible for it?
More importantly, how is this done in a nation that prides itself as one that operates under governance of the people, by the people, for the people?
How did our government bodies, those involved in drafting and implementing our nation’s policies, evolve into this foreign influence-peddling operation?
In order to answer these questions one must first establish who stands to lose and who stands to gain by protecting Saudi Arabia from being exposed and facing consequences of its involvement in terrorist networks activities. In addition to identifying the nations in question, we must identify the interests as well as the actors; their agents. Let’s look at Saudi Arabia as one of the successful foreign nations that have mastered the art of ‘covering all the bases’ when it comes to buying and peddling influence in Washington DC, and identify its hired ‘agents’ and ‘agents by default.’
Foreign Agents by Default
Although when it comes to our complex diplomatic threading with Saudi Arabia the easiest answer appears to be the ‘oil factor,’ upon further inspection the Saudi’s influence and role extends into other areas, such as the Military Industrial Complex and the too familiar Lobbying Games.
According to the report published by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Saudi Arabia is America’s top customer. Since 1990 the U.S. government, through the Pentagon’s arms export program, has arranged for the delivery of more than $39.6 billion in foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia, and an additional $394 million worth of arms were delivered to the Saudi regime through the State Department’s direct commercial sales program. Oil rich Saudi Arabia is a cash-paying customer; a compulsive buyer of our weaponry. The list of U.S. sellers includes almost all the major players such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.
The report by FAS establishes that despite the show of U.S. support demonstrated by this astounding quantity of arms sales, Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is extremely poor; see the U.S. State Department’s 2000 Human Rights Report. Saudi Arabia’s position as a strategic Gulf ally has blinded U.S. officials into approving a level and quality of arms exports that should never have been allowed to a non-democratic country with such a poor human rights record.
Further, there are indications of Saudi’s active role as a player in the nuclear black-market. According to Mohammed Khilewi, first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations until July 1994, the Saudis have sought a bomb since 1975; they sought to buy nuclear reactors from China, supported Pakistan's nuclear program, and contributed $5 billion to Iraq's nuclear weapons program between 1985 and 1990. While the U.S. government vocally opposes the development or procurement of ballistic missiles by non-allies, it has been very quiet in Saudi Arabia’s case, considering the fact that it possesses the longest-range ballistic missiles of any developing country.
The Military Industrial Complex certainly seems to be a winner in having the congressional report pertaining to the Saudi government’s role in supporting the 9/11 terrorist activities being classified. The exposure would have meant grounds for U.S. sanctions and retributions; it would have risked the loss of billions of dollars in revenue from its ‘top customer.’ These companies don’t even have to officially register as foreign agents; after all, their strong loyalty and unbreakable bond with foreign elements exists by default; it is called mutual benefit. They are ‘Foreign Agents by Default.’
This holds true for other parties and players involved within the MIC network; the contractors and the investors. Let’s look at one of these famous and influential players; another foreign agent even if only by default; a man who defended the Saudis against a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 victims’ family members; a man who happens to be the senior counsel for the Carlyle Group, which invests heavily in defense companies and is the nation's 10th largest defense contractor with ties to the Saudi Royal Family, Enron, Global Crossing, among others; James Baker; Papa Bush’s Secretary of State. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Baker was reportedly at a Carlyle investor conference with members of the Bin Laden family in the Ritz Carlton in Washington DC, while Bush Sr. was on the payroll of the Carlyle group.
The Carlyle Group, a Washington, DC based private equity firm that employs numerous former high-ranking government officials with ties to both political parties, was the ninth largest Pentagon contractor between 1998 and 2003, an ongoing Center for Public Integrity investigation into Department of Defense contracts found. According to this report, overall, six private investment firms, including Carlyle, received nearly $14 billion in Pentagon deals between 1998 and 2003. Considering the fact that Saudi Arabia is the top buyer of the U.S. weapons industry, Carlyle’s investment and its stake, and of course Jimmy Baker’s far reaching influence within the Pentagon and congress, everything seems to come together and fit perfectly to shield this foreign interest no matter the price to be paid by the American public.
The political action committees (PACs) of the biggest defense companies have given $14.2 million directly to federal candidates since Clinton's first presidential bid, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). In 1997 alone the defense industry spent $49.5 million to lobby the nation's decision-makers.
Between 1998 and 2004, for the six-year period, Boeing Company spent more than $57 million in lobbying. For the same period of time, Lockheed Martin poured over $55 million into lobbying activities. Northrop Grumman exceeded both by investing $83 million in lobbying, and based on a report issued by POGO, it contributed over $4 million to individuals and PACs.
With ‘dime a dozen’ generals on their boards of directors, numerous high-powered ex congressmen and senators at their disposal in the ‘K Street Lobby Quarter,’ tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations, and billions of dollars at stake, the Military Industrial Complex surely had all the incentives to act just as foreign agents would, and fight for their highly valued client; the Saudi Government. They appear to have had all the reasons to ensure that the report would not see the light of the day; no matter what the effect on the country, its security, and its interests.
K Street Lobby Quarter
The fact that Saudi Arabia pours large sums into lobbying firms and public relations companies with close ties to congress does not come as a big surprise. The FARA database under the DOJ website lists Qorvis Communications as one of Saudi Arabia’s registered foreign agents. In 2003, for only a six months period, Qorvis received more than $11 million from the Saudi government. Another firm, Loeffler Tuggey Pauerstein Rosenthal LLP, another registered foreign agent, received more than $840,000 for the same six-month period, and the list goes on. Just for this six month period the government of Saudi Arabia paid a total of more than $14 million to 13 lobbying and public relations companies; all registered as foreign agents.
Why do the Saudis spend nearly $20 million per year in lobbying activities in the U.S. via their hired agents? What kind of return on investment are they getting out of the United States Congress?
Let’s take Loeffler’s group and examine its value for the Saudi government, since it was paid over $3 million in three years between 2003 and 2005. The firm was founded by former Republican Congressman Tom Loeffler of Texas. Loeffler served in the Republican Leadership as Deputy Whip, and as Chief Deputy Whip during his third and fourth term. He was a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee and Budget Committee. In the two Bush campaigns for governor, Loeffler, who contributed $141,000, was the largest donor. In 1998, he served as national co-chair of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100" program for donors of $100,000 or more, and afterwards held the same title during George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Loeffler’s generosity extends to the members of congress as well. In 6 years, he has given more than $185,000 to members of congress, 97% of it going to only Republican members. During the same six-year period, Loeffler’s firm received more than $18 million in lobbying fees.
The firm’s managing director happens to be William L. Ball. Ball served as Chief of Staff to Senators John Tower (R-TX) and Herman Talmadge (D-GA). In 1985, he joined the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. Later he was assigned to the White House to serve President Reagan as his chief liaison to the Congress. Wallace Henderson is also a Partner; he was Chief Counsel and Chief of Staff to Representative W. J. Tauzin (R-LA), Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator John Breaux (D-LA).
By having foreign agents such as the Loeffler Group, in addition to their foreign agents by default, the MIC, the Saudis seem to have all their bases covered. Former secretaries and deputy secretaries with open access to the current ones, former congressmen and senators who used to be positioned on strategically valuable committees and know the rules of the congressional game, and millions of dollars available to be spent and channeled and re-channeled to various PACs go a long way toward ensuring results. Money counts. Money is needed to bring in votes. Professional skills and discretion are required to get this money to various final destinations. The registered foreign agents, the lobby groups, are geared for this task. The client is happy in the end; so are the foreign agents and the congressional actors.
Other Savvy Nations
Of course, the sanction and legitimization of far reaching foreign influence and strongholds in the U.S., despite the many dire consequences endured by its citizens, is not limited to the government of Saudi Arabia. Numerous well-documented cases can be cited for others such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Israel, to name a few.
I won’t get into the details and history of my own case, where the government invoked the state secrets privilege to gag my case and the congress in order to ‘protect certain sensitive diplomatic relations.’ The country, the foreign influence, in this case was the Republic of Turkey. The U.S. government did so despite the far reaching consequences of burying the facts involved, and disregarded the interests and security of the nation; all to protect a quasi ally engaged in numerous illegitimate activities within the global terrorist networks, nuclear black-market and narcotics activities; an ally who happens to be another compulsive and loyal buyer of the Military Industrial Complex; an ally who happens to be another savvy player in recruiting top U.S. players as its foreign agents and spending million of dollars per year to the lobbying groups headed by many ‘formers.’ Turkey’s agent list includes generals such as Joseph Ralston and Brent Scowcroft, former statesmen such as William Cohen and Marc Grossman, and of course famous ex-congressmen such as Bob Livingston and Stephen Solarz. Turkey too seems to have all its bases covered.
Another well-known and documented case involves Pakistan. Over two decades ago Richard Barlow, an intelligence analyst working for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a startling report. After reviewing classified information from field agents, he had determined that Pakistan, despite official denials, had built a nuclear bomb. In the March 29, 1993 issue of New Yorker, Seymour Hersh noted that “even as Barlow began his digging, some senior State Department officials were worried that too much investigation would create what Barlow called embarrassment for Pakistan.” Barlow's conclusion was politically inconvenient. A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, and it would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad. A few months later a Pentagon official downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in his testimony to Congress. When Barlow protested to his superiors, he was fired. A few years later, the Executive Branch would slap Barlow with the State Secrets Privilege.
As we all now know, Pakistan provided direct nuclear assistance to Iran and Libya. During the Cold War, the U.S. put up with Pakistani lies and deception about their nuclear activities, it did not enforce its restrictions on Pakistan's nuclear program when it counted, and as a result Pakistan ended up with a U.S.-made nuclear weapons system. Yet again, after 9/11, the Bush administration issued a waiver ending the implementation of almost all sanctions on Pakistan because of the perceived need for Pakistani assistance in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who ironically were brought to power by direct U.S. support in the 1980s in the first place.
Weiss, in the May-June 2004 issue of the Bulletin states: “We are essentially back where we were with Pakistan in the 1980s. It is apparent that it has engaged in dangerous nuclear mischief with North Korea, Iran, and Libya (and perhaps others), but thus far without consequences to its relationship with the United States because of other, overriding foreign policy considerations--not the Cold War this time, but the war on terrorism.” He continues: “But now there is a major political difference. It was one thing for Pakistan, a country with which the United States has had good relations generally, to follow India and produce the bomb for itself. It is quite another for Pakistan to help two-thirds of the "axis of evil” to get the bomb as well.”
FARA & LDA
An agent of a ‘foreign principal’ is defined as any individual or organization which acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal, or whose activities are directed by a foreign principal who engages in political activities, or acts in a public relations capacity for a foreign principal, or solicits or dispenses any thing of value within the United States for a foreign principal, or represents the interests of a foreign principal before any agency or official of the U.S. government.
In 1938, in response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S., Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was established to insure that the American public and its lawmakers know the source of propaganda intended to sway public opinion, policy, and laws. The Act requires every agent of a foreign principal to register with the Department of Justice and file forms outlining its agreements with, income from, and expenditures on behalf of the foreign principal. Any agent testifying before a committee of Congress must furnish the committee with a copy of his most recent registration statement. The agent must keep records of all his activities and permit the Attorney General to inspect them. However, as is the case with many laws, the Act is filled with exemptions and loopholes that allow minimization of, and in some cases complete escape from, warranted scrutiny.
There are a number of exemptions. For example, persons whose activities are of a purely commercial nature or of a religious, academic, and charitable nature are exempt. Any agent who is engaged in lobbying activities and is registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) is exempt. The LDA of 1995 was passed after decades of effort to make the regulation and disclosure of lobbying the federal government more effective. However, LDA also has serious and important loopholes and limitations that can be summed up as: Inadequate Disclosure, Inadequate Enforcement, and Inadequate Regulation of Conduct. The recent congressional scandals make this point very clear.
In addition, neither act deals with an important issue: Conflict of Interest. Many of these agents, with their loyalty to the foreign hand that feeds them, end up being appointed to various positions, commissions and special envoys by our government. Recall Kissinger and his appointment to head the 9/11 Commission, and of course the recent revelation by Woodward on his advisory position to the current White House. Take a look at Jimmy Baker’s current appointment on the Iraq commission. Same goes for the father of all the ‘dime a dozen generals’, Brent Scowcroft, and one of his new protégés, General Joseph Ralston. In short, neither FARA nor LDA creates meaningful oversight, control, or enforcement; neither deals with conflict of interest issues, and neither provides any deterrence or consequences for unethical or illegal conduct.
It used to be congressional ‘pork projects’ and ‘corporate influence’ that raised eyebrows now and then; here and there. Gone are those days. Today the unrestricted and uncontrollable money game and influence peddling tricks within the major decision-making and policy producing bodies of the U.S. government have reached new heights; yet, no raised eyebrows are registered. Sadly, today, a new version of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ would have to be produced as a documentary.
~~~~~
Sibel Edmonds is the founder and director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her case have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege”; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.
© Copyright 2006, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Information in this release may be freely distributed and published provided that all such distributions make appropriate attribution to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
In his farewell address in 1796, George Washington warned that America must be constantly awake against “the insidious wiles of foreign influence…since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”
Today, foreign influence, that most baneful foe of our republican government, has its tentacles entrenched in almost all major decision making and policy producing bodies of the U.S. government machine. It does so not secretly, since its self-serving activities are advocated and legitimized by highly positioned parties that reap the benefits that come in the form of financial gain and positions of power.
Foreign governments and foreign-owned private interests have long sought to influence U.S. public policy. Several have accomplished this goal; those who are able and willing to pay what it takes. Those who buy themselves a few strategic middlemen, commonly known as pimps, while in DC circles referred to as foreign registered agents and lobbyists, who facilitate and bring about desired transactions. These successful foreign entities have mastered the art of ‘covering all the bases’ when it comes to buying influence in Washington DC. They have the required recipe down pat: get yourself a few ‘Dime a Dozen Generals,’ bid high in the ‘former statesmen lobby auction’, and put in your pocket one or two ‘ex-congressmen turned lobbyists’ who know the ropes when it comes to pocketing a few dozen who still serve.
The most important facet of this influence to consider is what happens when the active and powerful foreign entities’ objectives are in direct conflict with our nation’s objectives and its interests and security; and when this is the case, who pays the ultimate price and how. There is no need for assumptions of hypothetical situations to answer these questions, since throughout recent history we have repeatedly faced the dire consequences of the highjacking of our foreign and domestic policies by these so-called foreign agents of foreign influence.
Let’s illustrate this with the most important recent case, the catastrophe endured by our people; the September Eleven terrorist attacks. Let’s observe how certain foreign interests, combined with their U.S. agents and benefactors, overrode the interests and security of the entire nation; how thousands of victims and their loved ones were kicked aside to serve the interests of a few; foreign influence and its agents.
Senator Graham’s Revelation
It has been established that two of the 9/11 hijackers had a support network in the U.S. that included agents of the Saudi government, and that the Bush administration and the FBI blocked a congressional investigation into that relationship.
In his book, "Intelligence Matters," Senator Bob Graham made clear that some details of that financial support from Saudi Arabia were in the 27 pages of the congressional inquiry's final report that were blocked from release by the administration, despite the pleas of leaders of both parties in the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Here is an excerpt from Senator Graham’s statement from the July 24, 2003 congressional record on the classified 27 pages of the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11: “The most serious omission, in my view, is part 4 of the report, which is entitled Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters. Those 27 pages have almost been entirely censured [sic]….The declassified version of this finding tells the American people that our investigation developed information suggesting specific sources of foreign support for some of the September 11 hijackers while they were in the United States. In other words, officials of a foreign government are alleged to have aided and abetted the terrorist attacks on our country on September 11, which took over 3,000 lives.”
In his book Graham reveals, “Our investigators found a CIA memo dated August 2, 2002, whose author concluded that there is incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government. On September 11, America was not attacked by a nation-state, but we had just discovered that the attackers were actively supported by one, and that state was our supposed friend and ally Saudi Arabia.” He then cites another case, “We had discovered an FBI asset who had a close relationship with two of the terrorists; a terrorist support network that went through the Saudi Embassy; and a funding network that went through the Saudi Royal family.”
The most explosive revelation in Graham’s book is the following statement with regard to the administration’s attitude on page 216: “It was as if the President’s loyalty lay more with Saudi Arabia than with America’s safety.” Further, he states that he asked the FBI to undertake a review of the Riggs Bank records on the terrorists’ money trail, to look at other Saudi companies with ties to al-Qaeda, to plan for monitoring suspect Saudi interests in the United States; however, Graham adds: “To my knowledge, none of these investigations have been completed…Nor do we know anything else about what I believe to be a state-sponsored terrorist support network that still exists, largely undamaged, within the United States.”
What Graham is trying to establish in his book and previous public statements in this regard, and doing so under state imposed ‘secrecy and classification’, is that the classification and cover up of those 27 pages is not about protecting ‘U.S. national security, methods of intelligence collection, or ongoing investigations,’ but to protect certain U.S. allies. Meaning, our government put the interests of certain foreign nations and their U.S. beneficiaries far above its own people and their interests. While Saudi Arabia has been specifically pointed to by Graham, other countries involved have yet to be identified.
In covering up Saudi Arabia’s direct role in supporting Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission goes even a few steps further than the congress and the Executive Branch. The report claims "there is no convincing evidence that any government financially supported al-Qaeda before 9/11." Their report ignores all the information provided by government officials to Congress, as well as volumes of published reports and investigations by other nations, regarding Muslim and Arab regimes that have supported al Qaeda. It completely disregards the terrorist lists of the Treasury and State Departments, which have catalogued the Saudi government's decades of support for Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
Why in the world would the United States government go so far to protect Saudi Arabia in the face of what itself declares to be the biggest security threat facing our nation and the world today?
Why is the United States willing to set aside its own security and interests in order to advance the interests of another state?
How can a government that’s been intent upon using the terrorist attacks to carry out many unjustifiable atrocities, prevent bringing to justice those who’ve been established as being directly responsible for it?
More importantly, how is this done in a nation that prides itself as one that operates under governance of the people, by the people, for the people?
How did our government bodies, those involved in drafting and implementing our nation’s policies, evolve into this foreign influence-peddling operation?
In order to answer these questions one must first establish who stands to lose and who stands to gain by protecting Saudi Arabia from being exposed and facing consequences of its involvement in terrorist networks activities. In addition to identifying the nations in question, we must identify the interests as well as the actors; their agents. Let’s look at Saudi Arabia as one of the successful foreign nations that have mastered the art of ‘covering all the bases’ when it comes to buying and peddling influence in Washington DC, and identify its hired ‘agents’ and ‘agents by default.’
Foreign Agents by Default
Although when it comes to our complex diplomatic threading with Saudi Arabia the easiest answer appears to be the ‘oil factor,’ upon further inspection the Saudi’s influence and role extends into other areas, such as the Military Industrial Complex and the too familiar Lobbying Games.
According to the report published by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Saudi Arabia is America’s top customer. Since 1990 the U.S. government, through the Pentagon’s arms export program, has arranged for the delivery of more than $39.6 billion in foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia, and an additional $394 million worth of arms were delivered to the Saudi regime through the State Department’s direct commercial sales program. Oil rich Saudi Arabia is a cash-paying customer; a compulsive buyer of our weaponry. The list of U.S. sellers includes almost all the major players such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing.
The report by FAS establishes that despite the show of U.S. support demonstrated by this astounding quantity of arms sales, Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is extremely poor; see the U.S. State Department’s 2000 Human Rights Report. Saudi Arabia’s position as a strategic Gulf ally has blinded U.S. officials into approving a level and quality of arms exports that should never have been allowed to a non-democratic country with such a poor human rights record.
Further, there are indications of Saudi’s active role as a player in the nuclear black-market. According to Mohammed Khilewi, first secretary at the Saudi mission to the United Nations until July 1994, the Saudis have sought a bomb since 1975; they sought to buy nuclear reactors from China, supported Pakistan's nuclear program, and contributed $5 billion to Iraq's nuclear weapons program between 1985 and 1990. While the U.S. government vocally opposes the development or procurement of ballistic missiles by non-allies, it has been very quiet in Saudi Arabia’s case, considering the fact that it possesses the longest-range ballistic missiles of any developing country.
The Military Industrial Complex certainly seems to be a winner in having the congressional report pertaining to the Saudi government’s role in supporting the 9/11 terrorist activities being classified. The exposure would have meant grounds for U.S. sanctions and retributions; it would have risked the loss of billions of dollars in revenue from its ‘top customer.’ These companies don’t even have to officially register as foreign agents; after all, their strong loyalty and unbreakable bond with foreign elements exists by default; it is called mutual benefit. They are ‘Foreign Agents by Default.’
This holds true for other parties and players involved within the MIC network; the contractors and the investors. Let’s look at one of these famous and influential players; another foreign agent even if only by default; a man who defended the Saudis against a lawsuit brought by the 9/11 victims’ family members; a man who happens to be the senior counsel for the Carlyle Group, which invests heavily in defense companies and is the nation's 10th largest defense contractor with ties to the Saudi Royal Family, Enron, Global Crossing, among others; James Baker; Papa Bush’s Secretary of State. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Baker was reportedly at a Carlyle investor conference with members of the Bin Laden family in the Ritz Carlton in Washington DC, while Bush Sr. was on the payroll of the Carlyle group.
The Carlyle Group, a Washington, DC based private equity firm that employs numerous former high-ranking government officials with ties to both political parties, was the ninth largest Pentagon contractor between 1998 and 2003, an ongoing Center for Public Integrity investigation into Department of Defense contracts found. According to this report, overall, six private investment firms, including Carlyle, received nearly $14 billion in Pentagon deals between 1998 and 2003. Considering the fact that Saudi Arabia is the top buyer of the U.S. weapons industry, Carlyle’s investment and its stake, and of course Jimmy Baker’s far reaching influence within the Pentagon and congress, everything seems to come together and fit perfectly to shield this foreign interest no matter the price to be paid by the American public.
The political action committees (PACs) of the biggest defense companies have given $14.2 million directly to federal candidates since Clinton's first presidential bid, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). In 1997 alone the defense industry spent $49.5 million to lobby the nation's decision-makers.
Between 1998 and 2004, for the six-year period, Boeing Company spent more than $57 million in lobbying. For the same period of time, Lockheed Martin poured over $55 million into lobbying activities. Northrop Grumman exceeded both by investing $83 million in lobbying, and based on a report issued by POGO, it contributed over $4 million to individuals and PACs.
With ‘dime a dozen’ generals on their boards of directors, numerous high-powered ex congressmen and senators at their disposal in the ‘K Street Lobby Quarter,’ tens of millions of dollars in campaign donations, and billions of dollars at stake, the Military Industrial Complex surely had all the incentives to act just as foreign agents would, and fight for their highly valued client; the Saudi Government. They appear to have had all the reasons to ensure that the report would not see the light of the day; no matter what the effect on the country, its security, and its interests.
K Street Lobby Quarter
The fact that Saudi Arabia pours large sums into lobbying firms and public relations companies with close ties to congress does not come as a big surprise. The FARA database under the DOJ website lists Qorvis Communications as one of Saudi Arabia’s registered foreign agents. In 2003, for only a six months period, Qorvis received more than $11 million from the Saudi government. Another firm, Loeffler Tuggey Pauerstein Rosenthal LLP, another registered foreign agent, received more than $840,000 for the same six-month period, and the list goes on. Just for this six month period the government of Saudi Arabia paid a total of more than $14 million to 13 lobbying and public relations companies; all registered as foreign agents.
Why do the Saudis spend nearly $20 million per year in lobbying activities in the U.S. via their hired agents? What kind of return on investment are they getting out of the United States Congress?
Let’s take Loeffler’s group and examine its value for the Saudi government, since it was paid over $3 million in three years between 2003 and 2005. The firm was founded by former Republican Congressman Tom Loeffler of Texas. Loeffler served in the Republican Leadership as Deputy Whip, and as Chief Deputy Whip during his third and fourth term. He was a member of the powerful Appropriations Committee, Energy and Commerce Committee and Budget Committee. In the two Bush campaigns for governor, Loeffler, who contributed $141,000, was the largest donor. In 1998, he served as national co-chair of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100" program for donors of $100,000 or more, and afterwards held the same title during George W. Bush's presidential campaign. Loeffler’s generosity extends to the members of congress as well. In 6 years, he has given more than $185,000 to members of congress, 97% of it going to only Republican members. During the same six-year period, Loeffler’s firm received more than $18 million in lobbying fees.
The firm’s managing director happens to be William L. Ball. Ball served as Chief of Staff to Senators John Tower (R-TX) and Herman Talmadge (D-GA). In 1985, he joined the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. Later he was assigned to the White House to serve President Reagan as his chief liaison to the Congress. Wallace Henderson is also a Partner; he was Chief Counsel and Chief of Staff to Representative W. J. Tauzin (R-LA), Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator John Breaux (D-LA).
By having foreign agents such as the Loeffler Group, in addition to their foreign agents by default, the MIC, the Saudis seem to have all their bases covered. Former secretaries and deputy secretaries with open access to the current ones, former congressmen and senators who used to be positioned on strategically valuable committees and know the rules of the congressional game, and millions of dollars available to be spent and channeled and re-channeled to various PACs go a long way toward ensuring results. Money counts. Money is needed to bring in votes. Professional skills and discretion are required to get this money to various final destinations. The registered foreign agents, the lobby groups, are geared for this task. The client is happy in the end; so are the foreign agents and the congressional actors.
Other Savvy Nations
Of course, the sanction and legitimization of far reaching foreign influence and strongholds in the U.S., despite the many dire consequences endured by its citizens, is not limited to the government of Saudi Arabia. Numerous well-documented cases can be cited for others such as Turkey, Pakistan, and Israel, to name a few.
I won’t get into the details and history of my own case, where the government invoked the state secrets privilege to gag my case and the congress in order to ‘protect certain sensitive diplomatic relations.’ The country, the foreign influence, in this case was the Republic of Turkey. The U.S. government did so despite the far reaching consequences of burying the facts involved, and disregarded the interests and security of the nation; all to protect a quasi ally engaged in numerous illegitimate activities within the global terrorist networks, nuclear black-market and narcotics activities; an ally who happens to be another compulsive and loyal buyer of the Military Industrial Complex; an ally who happens to be another savvy player in recruiting top U.S. players as its foreign agents and spending million of dollars per year to the lobbying groups headed by many ‘formers.’ Turkey’s agent list includes generals such as Joseph Ralston and Brent Scowcroft, former statesmen such as William Cohen and Marc Grossman, and of course famous ex-congressmen such as Bob Livingston and Stephen Solarz. Turkey too seems to have all its bases covered.
Another well-known and documented case involves Pakistan. Over two decades ago Richard Barlow, an intelligence analyst working for then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney issued a startling report. After reviewing classified information from field agents, he had determined that Pakistan, despite official denials, had built a nuclear bomb. In the March 29, 1993 issue of New Yorker, Seymour Hersh noted that “even as Barlow began his digging, some senior State Department officials were worried that too much investigation would create what Barlow called embarrassment for Pakistan.” Barlow's conclusion was politically inconvenient. A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, and it would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad. A few months later a Pentagon official downplayed Pakistan's nuclear capabilities in his testimony to Congress. When Barlow protested to his superiors, he was fired. A few years later, the Executive Branch would slap Barlow with the State Secrets Privilege.
As we all now know, Pakistan provided direct nuclear assistance to Iran and Libya. During the Cold War, the U.S. put up with Pakistani lies and deception about their nuclear activities, it did not enforce its restrictions on Pakistan's nuclear program when it counted, and as a result Pakistan ended up with a U.S.-made nuclear weapons system. Yet again, after 9/11, the Bush administration issued a waiver ending the implementation of almost all sanctions on Pakistan because of the perceived need for Pakistani assistance in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who ironically were brought to power by direct U.S. support in the 1980s in the first place.
Weiss, in the May-June 2004 issue of the Bulletin states: “We are essentially back where we were with Pakistan in the 1980s. It is apparent that it has engaged in dangerous nuclear mischief with North Korea, Iran, and Libya (and perhaps others), but thus far without consequences to its relationship with the United States because of other, overriding foreign policy considerations--not the Cold War this time, but the war on terrorism.” He continues: “But now there is a major political difference. It was one thing for Pakistan, a country with which the United States has had good relations generally, to follow India and produce the bomb for itself. It is quite another for Pakistan to help two-thirds of the "axis of evil” to get the bomb as well.”
FARA & LDA
An agent of a ‘foreign principal’ is defined as any individual or organization which acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal, or whose activities are directed by a foreign principal who engages in political activities, or acts in a public relations capacity for a foreign principal, or solicits or dispenses any thing of value within the United States for a foreign principal, or represents the interests of a foreign principal before any agency or official of the U.S. government.
In 1938, in response to the large number of German propaganda agents in the pre-WWII U.S., Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was established to insure that the American public and its lawmakers know the source of propaganda intended to sway public opinion, policy, and laws. The Act requires every agent of a foreign principal to register with the Department of Justice and file forms outlining its agreements with, income from, and expenditures on behalf of the foreign principal. Any agent testifying before a committee of Congress must furnish the committee with a copy of his most recent registration statement. The agent must keep records of all his activities and permit the Attorney General to inspect them. However, as is the case with many laws, the Act is filled with exemptions and loopholes that allow minimization of, and in some cases complete escape from, warranted scrutiny.
There are a number of exemptions. For example, persons whose activities are of a purely commercial nature or of a religious, academic, and charitable nature are exempt. Any agent who is engaged in lobbying activities and is registered under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) is exempt. The LDA of 1995 was passed after decades of effort to make the regulation and disclosure of lobbying the federal government more effective. However, LDA also has serious and important loopholes and limitations that can be summed up as: Inadequate Disclosure, Inadequate Enforcement, and Inadequate Regulation of Conduct. The recent congressional scandals make this point very clear.
In addition, neither act deals with an important issue: Conflict of Interest. Many of these agents, with their loyalty to the foreign hand that feeds them, end up being appointed to various positions, commissions and special envoys by our government. Recall Kissinger and his appointment to head the 9/11 Commission, and of course the recent revelation by Woodward on his advisory position to the current White House. Take a look at Jimmy Baker’s current appointment on the Iraq commission. Same goes for the father of all the ‘dime a dozen generals’, Brent Scowcroft, and one of his new protégés, General Joseph Ralston. In short, neither FARA nor LDA creates meaningful oversight, control, or enforcement; neither deals with conflict of interest issues, and neither provides any deterrence or consequences for unethical or illegal conduct.
It used to be congressional ‘pork projects’ and ‘corporate influence’ that raised eyebrows now and then; here and there. Gone are those days. Today the unrestricted and uncontrollable money game and influence peddling tricks within the major decision-making and policy producing bodies of the U.S. government have reached new heights; yet, no raised eyebrows are registered. Sadly, today, a new version of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ would have to be produced as a documentary.
~~~~~
Sibel Edmonds is the founder and director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her case have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege”; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.
© Copyright 2006, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. Information in this release may be freely distributed and published provided that all such distributions make appropriate attribution to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
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