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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-29-03 08:58 AM
Original message
bin Laden's money flow leads back to Midland, Texas
An old article that is relevant today:

QUESTIONABLE TIES
Tracking bin Laden's money flow leads back to Midland, Texas


by Wayne Madsen

On September 24, President George W. Bush appeared at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden to announce a crackdown on the financial networks of terrorists and those who support them. “U.S. banks that have assets of these groups or individuals must freeze their accounts,” Bush declared. “And U.S. citizens or businesses are prohibited from doing business with them.”

But the president, who is now enjoying an astounding 92 percent approval rating, hasn’t always practiced what he is now preaching: Bush’s own businesses were once tied to financial figures in Saudi Arabia who currently support bin Laden.

In 1979, Bush’s first business, Arbusto Energy, obtained financing from James Bath, a Houstonian and close family friend. One of many investors, Bath gave Bush $50,000 for a 5 percent stake in Arbusto. At the time, Bath was the sole U.S. business representative for Salem bin Laden, head of the wealthy Saudi Arabian family and a brother (one of 17) to Osama bin Laden. It has long been suspected, but never proven, that the Arbusto money came directly from Salem bin Laden. In a statement issued shortly after the September 11 attacks, the White House vehemently denied the connection, insisting that Bath invested his own money, not Salem bin Laden’s, in Arbusto.

In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests. In fact, Bath has extensive ties, both to the bin Laden family and major players in the scandal-ridden Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) who have gone on to fund Osama bin Laden. BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the ’80s in what has been called the “largest bank fraud in world financial history” by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. During the ’80s, BCCI also acted as a main conduit for laundering money intended for clandestine CIA activities, ranging from financial support to the Afghan mujahedin to paying intermediaries in the Iran-Contra affair.

CONTINUED...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/25/feature3.shtml

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Brucey Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-29-03 09:12 AM
Response to Original message
1. It's sad that the public doesn't know about this stuff.
Sad.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-29-03 09:22 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. True, Brucey! That's why it's up to us and those who are aware...
... to spread the word and keep kicking the BFEE in the yarblockos 24/7! Here's more on the Bush-Bath-bin Laden Axis:

Bin Laden’s Brother-in-law Had Close Ties to Bush

by Tom Flocco *
AmericanFreePress.net * And Scoop.co.nz
August 28, 2002

Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, an Osama bin Laden benefactor, has laundered money into tax-exempt U.S. entities for years as a foreign financier of terrorism. But a new 9/11 lawsuit is thrusting Mahfouz’s latent past business links to George W. Bush back into the spotlight and raising important questions about links between Saudi finance and terrorism in America.

Nine hundred families of September 11 victims recently filed a trillion-dollar lawsuit against members of the royal Saudi family, businessmen worth a combined $5 billion, and banks and charities. The lawsuit accuses them of financing Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban government. And one of the defendants - Saudi Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz -- will likely draw increasing attention in coming months due to his past business relationships with President George W. Bush - the sweetheart deals he made during the elder Bush's presidency.

According to a Saudi government audit acquired by U.S. intelligence officials, five of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest businessmen, including National Commercial Bank (NCB) founder and chairman Khalid bin Mahfouz, transferred personal funds along with $3 million diverted from a Saudi pension fund, to New York and London banks with accounts linked to terrorism. (USA Today, 10-28-99)

The money transfers were discovered in April, 1999 after the royal family ordered an audit of both NCB and Sheikh Mahfouz.

The plot thickens when we find Mahfouz is also linked by marriage to terrorist Osama bin Laden, as Mahfouz’s sister is married to the Al Qaeda leader, according to not only former CIA Director James Woolsey in 1998 Senate testimony, but also Jean-Charles Brisard, lead 9/11 lawsuit attorney Ronald Motley's researcher, and author of the book, The Forbidden Truth.

CONTINUED...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0208/S00148.htm


"Hi, George! Thanks, I got your I.O.U. right here!"

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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-29-03 09:20 AM
Response to Original message
2. Great to see this being kicked into the open once again!
Even more Bush links to cocaine related money laundering scams are sure to be outed in January next year when a group of BCCI creditors (some 20,000 at last count) takes on the Bank of England in a class action in the UK High Court to prove the Thatcher government knowingly aided and abetted BCCI in its clandestine fraudelent trading.

Although BCCI was registered offshore in Luxembpurg and its parent company in the Cayman Islands, it's administrative headquarters was London and it's global operations came under the aegis of UK banking regulations. One of the bank's general managers, John Hilberry, has turned state evidence in a plea bargain to avoid prosecution and thus eventually indict senior UK politicians linked through offshore bank accounts to George Bush Sr, who was VP at the time of the worst rackets becoming exposed.

For the last three to four years, highly sensitive documents were being withheld by the B of E in the run up to the 2000 US elections. However earlier this year an Appeal Court ruling forced these to become admissible and the B of E lost a huge chunk of priviledged gagging orders that would have silenced the whole Bush 1 involvement in this biz.

Never let it be forgotten either that Thatcher was prime minister when "God's banker" Roberto Calvi supposedly committed suicide after the Banco Ambrosiano fiasco in '82. The links between organised crime involved in this debacle and BCCI have never been aired in open court, although many details have already been exposed through private lawsuits.

2004 is going to be one hell of a year for Junior!



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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-29-03 09:51 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. Hey, Ana! These turds are ready for pre-emptive class warfare...
... and I'm feeling like economic cannon fodder. Oh yeah, and the regular cannon fodder, too. Since November 22, 1963, that feeling never leaves.

Operation GLADIO

By David Guyatt

When on the morning of 17 June 1982, the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging beneath London's Blackfriars bridge, it was to speed a process that prised open a series of events spanning four decades. The circumstances of Calvi's death led knowledgeable observers to darkly whisper of a Masonic ritual slaying. With his hands tied behind his back and a brick thrust into his coat pocket, Calvi had been strangled, apparently by the rope that had been noosed around his neck. Moreover, the location itself was believed to be symbolic. Blackfriars bridge sits astride the border that connects the Masonically named "Square Mile" of the City of London to the rest of the Capital city.

The initial inquest into his death returned a verdict of suicide. Appealing against what they believed to be prejudice on the part of the Coroner - and suspicious of the Masonic affiliations of the City police - Calvi's family called for a second, more thorough inquest, which belatedly returned an open verdict. Meanwhile, Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi's massive, privately-owned bank, collapsed on the news of his death, revealing a huge "black hole" in the balance sheet amounting to $1.3 billion. A large proportion of the missing money was later located in accounts owned by the Vatican bank. The connections that unfolded in the wake of the Calvi "affair" were to link Masons with Mafiosi, Monks with Murder and Spies with wanted Nazi war criminals.

World War Two had barely ground to a final halt when, in 1947, Allied strategists set about planning for World War Three. Even as British and US intelligence officials scoured Europe seeking to apprehend Nazi's wanted on war crimes charges, other more secretive USand British intelligence units were actively engaged in helping those same Nazi's to escape.

SNIP...

Secretly granted immunity these and thousands of other battle hardened Nazi soldiers were to form the fighting nucleus of a top secret Allied contingency group conceived by the first Director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. Loosely known as operation "Stay Behind," the idea was to build a Europe wide secret network of anti communist guerrillas who would fight behind the lines in the event of a Soviet invasion. The plan was later codified under the umbrella of the Clandestine Co-ordinating Committee of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the military arm of NATO.

CONTINUED... Great resource, BTW...

http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/gladio.html
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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 05:33 AM
Response to Reply #4
6. Go get 'em, Fodder! Things this side of the Pond is pretty busy
too. Not only does the BCCI creditors' class action lawsuit have all the offshore bank account numbers that were used to dosh up various Nazis and fascists, details of payments, transfers, tradings and transactions, it also lists all all subsequent fraud-related payments to the Bin Laden network that blithely turned a blind eye to the orchestration of the 9-11 atrocity.

This puts Bush 1 and Thatcher squarely in the driving seat if not the actual pilot's chair of mass murder.

Back-up documentation shows all the motivation for the 9-11 attack, as well as the people who were going to be framed for it, stripped of their assets and executed for war crimes.

Maybe they'll eventually publish all the names: it reads much like a Who's Who in the US Republican Party...

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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 10:04 AM
Response to Reply #6
7. During 1991 BCCI investigation here, 2/3 of Congress...
... including Orrin Hatch, were reported to be BCCI water-carriers. And they were the tip of the offshore iceberg of looted and direty monies BCCI moved. Some may remember GOPers DCIA Robert Gates, AG Richard Thornburgh and Assistant AG Robert Mueller (now FBI head) and later DEM AG Janet Reno seemed to do all the could to protect Hatch and the rest of the names from becoming public. The BCCI case is one of the main reasons why I support John Kerry — he was almost alone in Washington in going after this criminal bank. If our friends in the UK can get the Truth out in this trial, it may go a looong way in bringing down the Traitors behind 9-11. They are many of the same players who ran with BCCI.

Deals for Dubya

Bush’s family ties to shady bank BCCI help explain his “success.” in the oil biz


by Bob Fitrakis

Trying to make sense of George W. Bush’s days in the oil business and his bizarre Harken Energy stock transactions? Well, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find a core group of people surrounding the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (aka Bank of Crooks and Criminals International).

BCCI was, among other nefarious things, the bank of choice for al Qaeda, the CIA, Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega. This spooky collection of opium warlords, Arab sheiks, Pakistani financiers and organized crime perpetrated perhaps the greatest banking fraud in world history. BCCI’s global criminal conspiracy was aided by connections to Washington insiders like the Bush family, former secretary of defense and CIA co-founder Clark Clifford, Senator Orrin Hatch and President Jimmy Carter.

Award-winning journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin document Dubya’s ties to al Qaeda’s favorite bank in their authoritative tome, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire.

SNIP...

When Dubya organized Arbusto Energy Inc. in the 1970s, James R. Bath, a well-known Texas businessman, provided some of the financing. During George Bush senior’s tenure as CIA director, the agency allegedly used Bath, a business associate of the Saudi Khalid Bin Mahfouz—described by Truell and Gurwin as a “BCCI insider”—to buy CIA planes from Air America and other secretly held agency airlines.

Public records show that in 1976 the CIA sold several planes to Skyway, a firm managed by Bath. Bath denies it, but his former business partner Bill White has alleged the CIA’s role in Skyway in lawsuits and also attested that Bin Mahfouz was an owner of Skyway.

Criminal and civil suits against BCCI established that Bath invested money on Bin Mahfouz’s behalf and that he and Bin Mahfouz were part owners of Houston’s Main Bank with Ghaith Pharaon, the son of a royal advisor to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal.

http://www.columbusalive.com/2002/20020829/082902/08290208.html

Hey DU! This thread explains why the unelected moron wants to keep all the Saudi-related references out of the public domain regarding 9-11. The Little Turd from Crawford is in it up to his eyeballs.

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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 10:15 AM
Response to Reply #7
8. The testimony of former BCCI London general manager
John Hilberry contains all the worldwide offshore account numbers and transaction details, with names, dates, sort codes, etc.

Hilberry himself went to ground after an alleged plea bargain, and has been living anonymously under cover of pseudonym for some 14 years. BUT he is connected to a mysterious disappearance/murder of a female accomplice who has never been traced by the UK police. Recent new evidence held by the London Metropolitan Police shows there was a sustained cover up of this homicide leading to the front ranks of UK Tory party involvement.

Light touch paper, retire and check ear plugs. This one is gonna blow!
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 10:40 AM
Response to Reply #8
9. John Hillbery must be a mighty scared fellah...
Thanks for the heads-up, emad aisat sana! I'm very sorry to hear that a woman may have lost her life over this criminality. The BFEE shows no mercy. Here's some background from a web site devoted to ending the Saudi monarchy corruption (the quote comes from "A Full Service Bank" by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz) and by extension, its ties to the House of Bush...

EXCERPT...

As soon as the internal report was finished, Rahman told the bank management that he was resigning. His fellow executives tried to persuade him to stay. They even asked his American wife to plead with him to remain, but Rahman was adamant and, on August 1, 1990, he resigned from the bank. In the days following his resignation, anonymous telephone callers threatened Rahman, his wife, and their two young children. The police in the London suburb of Guildford where the family lived set up special patrols in the neighborhood and hooked up an alarm system tied directly to the police station. About the same time, Rahman learned from another former BCCI executive, John Hillbery, that a shot had been fired through a window at Hillbery's home. Early that fall, the Rahmans pulled their children out of school and eventually the family fled to the United States.

Late in October, Rahman stepped forward. Through an intermediary, he contacted Morgenthau's office and arranged to be questioned informally. He provided a bombshell: two Price Waterhouse audits described BCCI's hidden ownership of First American Bankshares through a series of sham loan transactions with shareholders of CCAH. They had been given to the Bank of England in November 1989 and March 1990. While the prosecutors did not receive copies of the documents immediately, Rahman provided enough information for Morgenthau to ask the Bank of England for them.

http://www.geocities.com/saudhouse_p/thecritic.htm


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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 12:39 AM
Response to Reply #2
5. BCCI may jail Bush, bin Laden, and most of the global elite...
THE GW BUSH--OSAMA BIN LADIN CONNECTION

EXCERPT...

"...BCCI would make payments to key officials, sometimes in suitcases filled with cash. As BCCI officer Abdur Askhia stated in interviews tithe Subcommittee staff: Abedi's philosophy was to appeal to every sector. President Carter's main thing was charity, so he gave Carter charity. Pakistani President Zia's brother in law needed a job, he got a job. Bangladeshi president Ashraf's mistress needed a job, she got a job. Admission of your son to a top college, he would arrange it somehow. There was a world wide list of people who were in the payoff of BCCI...". from United States Senate Subcommittee Report on Bank Credit Commerce International, 1992--the Kerry Committee.

SNIP...

Osama bin Laden, whose funds were inherited from his father, Sheikh bin Laden's BCCI investments, has been operating out of Afghanistan since he was established as a conduit for CIA funds in the 1980's. "Afghanistan was by far the biggest; it was, in fact, the biggest CIA operationof all time, both in terms of dollars spent ($5-$6 billion) and personnel involved..."from the book The CIA's Greatest Hits.

SNIP...

The story of the Bush involvement in the BCCI scandal involved "trails that branched, crossed one another, or came to unexpected dead ends...". It was like a "three dimensional chess game." from The Outlaw Bank, page 227.

SNIP...

The BCCI bribery connection went straight to the George Bush oval office. The White House political director, a man whom the Senate noted sat in on presidential meetings, named Ed Rogers, was hired away from the Chief of Staff's Office to represent the BCCI's American representative, Sheik Adham.

SNIP...

"Q-Mr. President, considering your concern about propriety in government, what was your reaction when a senior member of your White House staff, Ed Rogers, left the White House employ and signed a contract with a Saudi sheikh accused of being a key figure in the BCCI scandal?

The President-Well, he is a free citizen to do anything he wants once he leaves the White House. My concern is about the White House itself, that it be beyond any perception of impropriety.

Q-Well, what do you think he was selling to the Saudis except for accessing---

The President--Ask him. I don't know anything what he's selling. I don't know anything about this man, excpet I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like what I read about him. But I would suggest that the matter is best dealt with by asking this man what kind of representation he is doing for this sheikh. But it has nothing to do, in my view, with the White House." from the Official Papers of the Presidents, Press Conference, October 25, 1991. George Herbert Walker Bush.

SNIP...

CONTINUED...

http://www.geocities.com/burningbush2000/3.html
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Unknown Known Donating Member (829 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 10:58 AM
Response to Original message
10. This is awesome and thanks for the thread!
I had no idea about this class action suit! I have been reading about BCCI for years and can't believe it is coming back into the limelight. This will be devastating for certain people! If Kerry can help get this out there - he's my candidate!

In case you care to read Kerry's report on BCCI, here's it is -

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 02:03 PM
Response to Reply #10
13. DUers danced with joy when we first heard last year!
As blm and emad have reported, BCCI is the Octopus exposed. The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, as ex-DCI and account holder Robert Gates called it, spread its tentacles around the globe and across the worlds of espionage, money laundering, arms trafficking, drug smuggling, and political corruption.

There's a great online overview (slow download) at:

http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/BCCI.htm

There are several great books, as well:

"False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire" — by Peter Truell, Larry Gurwin (Contributor)

"A Full Service Bank: How Bcci Stole Billions Around the World " — by James Ring Adams, et al.

"The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI" — by Jonathan Beaty, S. C. Gwynne (Contributor)

"Dirty Money BCCI: The Inside Story of the World's Sleaziest Bank" — by Mark Potts, et al

Most importantly: You're welcome Unknown Known! Thanks also for the link to Kerry's report. This IS important information for anyone who wants to destroy the BFEE.

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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 07:49 AM
Response to Reply #13
16. The journalist you cite as contributing to "False Profits....."
called Peter Truell - I used to know him well when we both worked for a major UK-based financial/economic publisher that specialised in the Middle East. Peter was a Saudi specialist and then went on to concentrate on Arab banks and financial institutions, circa 1982 - 86. Later he joined London-based publisher Euromoney and freelanced a bit on TV, before getting an untimely knock on his front door from the UK Police Special Branch at 6am one day, and told to cool it in his exposes of Saudi links to the US Vice President's family (circa '87/'88).

For nearly a decade, I ran a research and publications unit analysing Arab banks and financial institutions, and published a comprehensive and highly detailed annual reference book about it. For a long time it was very difficult to get hold of the actual list of BCCI shareholders, until a contact supplied me with a list that the Bank of England had finally managed to prise out of their London HQ opoerations chief -John Hillbery. The B of E had issued an ultimatum to BCCI that if they didn't disclose the full list of backers of the ultimate parent company BCCI Holdings and the offshore Carribean scam outfits that ran them, they would close them down under registration laws.

I published the list in the '82 edition of the Directory I edited and all hell broke loose, with BCCI threatening to sue and starting harrassing lawsuits against the company. In the end they finally withdrew but only after various colleagues in the banking analysis division had been threatened and hounded out of jobs.

Bob Morgenthau has that original list of shareholders/backers, the corporations and complex family trusts that they fronted, the plea-bargain deals that these individuals/corporations had struck with prosecutors in their own Middle East home states in exchange for grassing up their crime partners outside the Arab world, the crimes that were thus covered up - eg the murder of Bahrain-based banker Roger Tamraz in the mid 1980s - and the politicians in Thatcher's and Reagan's administrations who had been paid off via a series of covert offshore trusts to either shut up/withdraw or continue perpetuating the BCCI scam. And all the details of how much they'd been paid, on what dates, through which network of correspondent banks and credit card companies, the (often) pseudonymic names on the accounts that hid their true identities and subsequent details of where these slush-fund payments were next moved onto. Transaction analysis shows a fraud more widespread than all the previous banking scams of the 60s and 70s put together.

But, better than that, Morgethau also has the printouts of the full laboratory analyses of these individuals' DNA. The complex financial links between them are mirrored in the genetic links that they share. It shows P2 Lodge DNA similarities to those of various Al-Qaeda frontsment. The posting you made about SHAPE Nazis/fascists is what links all these individuals together.

This complex BCCI shareholder/backer frontsmen's list is also before the UK High Court in the forthcoming BCCI class action that starts in January 2004: what a GREAT election campaign opener that's going to be for the BFEE! Promise!

The Bank of England is being sued by a group of mainly Asian small time businessmen and women (shopkeepers, traders etc) who can prove that they were bankrupted of their livelihoods and savings by deliberate complicity of the Thatcher/Reagan and Bush 1 administrations. The action was due to have started in late '97/'98 but Tony Blair went to court to get gagging orders, saying it would jeopardise sensitive negotiations on the Good Friday Agreement to get the IRA off the hook and into office in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The reason for this was that during the lengthy investigations into the murder of Roberto Calvi and the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and related Vatican slush funds like the Institute of Reglious Works, a parallel network of European corruption was discovered that showed the huge drug trafficking and money laundering scams perpetrated by the P2 Lodge via Opus Dei members that funded terrorism in Northern Ireland, bankrolled senior clerics in the Catholic Church, myriad terrorist organisations and fascist politicians in the European Union, as well as silencing witnesses, juries and judges involved in trying corruption lawsuits. In fact, anyone who was linked to the BCCI frontsmen's list - either financially or by way of family ties.

Upshot was, the Bank of England was given permission to withold this vital evidence and the class action was stalled. Meanwhile Blair said his 'historic' Good Friday Agreement meant that the IRA would give up all its weapons by 2000 and a fully democratic and devolved Northern Ireland Assembly would be responsible for all decision making in the region. Of course that collapsed. The IRA knows the mercenary nature of their organisation is easily exposed through the drug trafficking/money laundering links and refuses to give up their stash of bazookas etc. Northern Ireland Police Service chief Commander Hugh Orde went on the record recently and said that the last 40 years of 'The Troubles' as they are known is the history of sustained political cover-up of trafficking and laundering and is totally bi-partisan in that both loyalists and separatists are involved throughout.

Earlier this year a series of Bank of England gagging orders was lifted after appeals in the High Court and House of Lords showed that there was no case for priviledge because no national security implications were involved: it was only the politicians' asses that were in a sling. This followed on after a number of private lawsuit details were admitted in evidence showing which Labour Party front bench members - and their family relatives - had been involved in UK money laundering in the 70s and 80s, alongside Tory counterparts who thought they could carry on basking in prosecution immunity after deals struck by - inter alia - John Major and Michael Howard (the stooge who put his name forward as Tory leadership contender yesterday). Howard was Home Secretary and blocked the murder investigation of John Hillbery's female accomplice*** who went missing in the late 1980s.

To cut a long and complex story short, around the time of Blair's "Good Friday Agreement" an East European economist called Jonathan Becker (pseudonym) with CIA connections was found to have perpetrated a huge theft/money laundering fraud in the UK and US, alongside Bahraini and Saudi partners. He ran the consultancy division of the publishing company I was working with during the 1980s and was found to have fronted for various crooks who had worked in security/intelligence before being outed, doing a plea-bargain and retiring early 'for health reasons'.

Becker had business connections to Khodorkhovsky (the Yukos chief who got busted last weekend) and other Russian oligarchs, as was proven when they nailed him for being instrumental in setting up part of the matrix that evolved from the BCCI moneylaundering network referred to above. He owned property in Key West, Florida and had used banking facilities in Belize owned by former UK Tory party treasurer and principal donor, Michael Ashcroft, to launder offshore fund flows.

Becker was finally identified as being the son of former Stasi chief Marcus Wolf and as being a key partner in UK and Europe of ex-CIA convicted traitor Aldrich Ames. He ran various disaffected intelligence/security personnel who had been aware of the Thatcher/Reagan administrations' coverups centred on BCCI and was outed after blackmailing Blair about his own party members' involvement of the disappearance/murder of John Hillbery's female accomplice. He died of AIDS before being sentenced in a court case that was conducted under media blackout.

Further, 'Becker' was found to have links going back to the early 1980s to ex-FBI convicted traitor Bob Hanssen - a self-confessed Opus Dei member - and may have initiated Hanssen himself, as there had been a number of instances in the 1980s when Becker was arrested in the US andinvestigated by the FBI for corruption, theft and money laundering in investigations directly or indirectly connected with Hanssen working on the team.

***Finally, Becker is known to have blackmailed Jack Straw when he was Home Secretary (1997-2002) about the 'disappearance' and subsequent murder investigation of the Hillbery accomplice, a woman estate agent who alleged that Tony Blair's wife Cherie was personally and directly connected with the forgery of some $350 million of UK property leasehold and freehold deeds - documents of ownership and any associated financial encumbrances such as mortgages - in the early 1980s, which in turn had been used to raise cash that was then laundered through the Banco Ambrosiano scam and later BCCI Holdings. This was allegedly perpetrated when Cherie and her husband worked in the chambers of Derry Irvine - the now disgraced Lord Chancellor who was (surprisingly!) booted out of office earlier this year, to be replaced with Blair crony Charles Falconer.

In a separate, civil lawsuit centred on a property mortgage scam in the UK that went successfully through the UK High Court all the way to the House of Lords, a witness came forward with subsequently corroborated evidence testifying to the cold blooded murder of Hillbery's woman accomplice. A case that the police had treated as a 'mysterious dissappearance' was a murder carried out to hide the cover-up that Thatcher instigated to get Bush Senior's ass out of a sling, which in turn covered up Junior's direct involvement in the 1970s and 80s with Ambrosiano, BCCI and all the attendant scams that DU posters have outlined in their contributions above and previously.

Now, wasn't it convenient to have a War Against Iraq to earn some gravitas and profile, ahead of any unsavoury details which it just might be possible to gag ahead of the January 2004 court case.....

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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 05:37 PM
Response to Reply #16
21. Hey, DU! Read the work of a real journalist!
WOW!!!!!! Thanks for the great reply, emad aisatsana!

The criminals of the BFEE span both sides of the Iron Curtain. These scum represent all political ideologies. They benefit wherever men strive to steal the land and treasure of others. They live to enslave the minds and bodies of humanity. They are the beast.

Here's the BFEE overview I see: Whenever there's a chance at global peace, they strike to remove from power the person or persons who are in a position to effect positive change. When JFK decided to make peace with the Soviets ... When Nixon made the overtures to China...When Reagan said "Duh, OK" to Gorbachev's offer to eliminate all nukes...They soon were gone — eliminated either through assassination or politics.

Wow! What a truly great read! Thanks for the information. Almost all of it is news here. The truth is exactly what we need. It is the weapon the BFEE fears most.

And you certainly know your stuff, er, backwards and forwards. I knew you were a journalist, based on your writing style — on this and other threads. Not that I ever was on your level, but I, too, covered the criminality that is the House of Bush.

Way back when, I was an IR at a small daily in Michigan where we busted a corrupt Savings and Loan in 1990. The story was typical of the criminality going on nationwide. A guy who looked clean got a post as "commercial lending officer." Soon, every crook and politician's brother was lined up at the S&L with their hands out and the ink barely dry on their xeroxed phony collateral documents. When the Feds finally closed the place down, the taxpayers were out $62 million and the crooks declared bankruptcy and got to hide their money with relatives or offshore. I won't bore you with the details, but the same story played out across the nation and around the world.

The odd thing was, the bosses up the ladder still didn't like to investigate conspiracies. Strange, huh? Me they labeled a "conspiracy nut," much to the detriment of my career. All worked out for the best, however. At the company picnic, one of my colleagues derided by interest in "conspiracies" in front of my then-fiancee. She never looked at me the same. When she dumped me, she said I "knew more about conspiracies than the people in (her) family."

Ho-kay. A few years later, I got set up on a blind date with the most wonderful woman in the multiverse. She and I now have two kids and a semi-profitable business. If you visit Motown, let me know. You're welcome at our house, DU Friend emad aisatsana!


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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Nov-03-03 08:02 AM
Response to Reply #21
38. Thanks for the plaudit Octafish!
Bad luck about how things turned out in your Michigan job but sounds like that cloud certainly had a silver lining.... And thanks for the Motown invite - me and mine (we have six kids!) sometimes cross the pond and it would be a pleasure to meet up and swap some journalistic notes. I will certainly inbox you when we next make a trip.

Meanwhile, don't give up on that investigative angle. This BCCI business merely confirms how alleged conspiracy 'theories' often turn out to be conspiracy facts such as conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, conspiracy to gag witnesses judges and juries, conspiracy to committ mass murder, invade foreign countries, bribe foreign politicians, etc etc etc. That's why asshole's state visit to the UK this month is going to be such a wonderfully commemorative event for those of us who don't forget that it's almost 40 years since they shot JFK.

There's a lot more on this BCCI stuff that I'd like to post but feel constrained to keep a low profile about because the really juicy bits are sub-judice until the January High Court hearing. Mostly it concerns the direct link to Enron and Ken Lay's gang.

However, here's one snippet that really must be aired and anyone able to unravel this further will get a pretty damned good picture of just how corrupt and monumentally stupid the BFEE really is:

The journalist/author Peter Truell - that name is a pseudonym for a poacher turned gamekeeper turned poacher. After the disappearance/murder of John Hillbery's woman accomplice in 1986 that I cited above, 'Truell' was found to have laundered some of the $350 million from the UK to Texas via carribean offshore scam companies, where it ended up in the coffers of the Enron Founding Fathers (the ones that must have gone over to the US on the Titanic and not the Mayflower.....)

Ever wondered how Enron could have really gotten such a massive black hole in their accounts that needed so much patching over with scam outfits and creative accounting?

The rightful owners of the UK property portfolio went to court in the US, sued, won and got their assets back. Much of this was kept out of the public domain because evidence overlapped with Bob Morgenthau's criminal proceedings when he busted BCCI in New York, and also formed part of a criminal investigation in the UK. Upshot of this in the UK was that Thatcher was given an ultimatum and was booted out of office. She had been directly responsible for Hillbery's woman accomplice's death.

She did a partial immunity deal. First she tried claiming priviledge as a former prime minister but then agreed to a deal to name the rest of the money laundering gang, handing over vital documents that would have otherwise have got buried in obscure civil service bureacracy. Among those documents were birth, marriage and death certificates, passport applications, travel visas, duplicates and forgeries, other i.d. documentation such as social security records, tax returns, bank statements, health records etc. These relate directly to Bush 1 and Bush 2 and some others of their so called nuclear family. It is hardly any wonder that when Pinochet subsequently got busted in London and held for extradition on a Spanish prosecutor's warrant application, Thatcher went hotfoot to his housedetention pad, oozing chummy sympathy and spitting venom at 'socialist forces'.....

I guess asshole has not been exactly forthcoming to the US electorate either in his campaigns to get elected as Texas governor, nor in 2000 - when he must have thought that if no one had put him on the spot pre-Texas then Poppy must have ensured the slate was clean for him to have a clear run to the White House.

The most pertinent questions the media could have asked him relate to his own fecundity: did he sow some wild oats in his youth perhaps - maybe in the UK??? Does he have family ties that he's a bit, errr, shy to mention in public??? And could there be positive proof that like begets like, both in terms of personality, character and inclination? If they ever discover a gene for criminality, stupidity and arrogance, they'll know who to name it after!

It may be hard to gag inconvenient issue when running for public office, but money usually works pretty well in the end. It can buy time, sanitised records and convenient memory lapses. Where it falls short is when inconvenient issue themselves have issue - with the same megalomanical ambitions of world domination, empire building and public priviledge. What is needed in such cases is a staunch Poodle to run a PR campaign of such massive bullshit and spin that a new romantic icon is born for joe public to lap up. Then a dynastic mythology takes over from media campaigns until another fairytale wedding can be concocted, thus paving the way for yet another war against terra with some 'unsuspecting, oil-sodden towelheads ready for a beating'.

Roll on November 19th! The Brits are preparing a magic carpet for the prez and his first lady, the likes of which he ain't ever ridden.
And for some, it's personal. Very personal.










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Spazito Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 11:09 AM
Response to Original message
11. CBC's Fifth Estate did a documentary on 9/11 and the Bush/Bin Laden..
connection, aired last night. Here is a link to a website where you can watch it. I highly recommend it!

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5103.htm

(my thanks to lefty_mcduff and other DUers who first posted this link!)
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 01:51 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. Good show, Spazito! Saw it last noche!
Metro Detroit picks up CBC from our friends to the south in Windsor. The show was dynamite for those who are unfamiliar with the facts linking the House of Bush and the Saudi Roils and bin Ladens. I especially liked the part with Mr. White describing how James R Bath handled bin Laden investments of "more than a million dollars."

The anti-conspiracy slant of the beginning part bugged me. The CBC reporter implied Ruppert was on the same level as the French guy who says a missile hit the Pentagon (whoo, boy). The Vreeland part of the story ommitted the telephone call to his office in the Pentagon from the Canadian courtroom. The reporter also said Vreeland skipped bail. He was released by a judge, without notification of Vreeland's lawyer. Strange timing because Vreeland was very vulnerable physically.

Still for those who are unfamiliar with the 9-11 connection to the Bushes and BCCI, it was an excellent introduction. The stuff on this thread should help fill in some gaps for those seeing how these treasonous bastids have been hard at looting the world's treasure, and enslaving* the world's people, for a looooong time.

* Those people they don't kill first.
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Unknown Known Donating Member (829 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 08:27 PM
Response to Original message
14. This thread needs to stay kicked!
:kick:
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9215 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Oct-30-03 08:36 PM
Response to Original message
15. It was a Morganthau that heade Roosevelt's denazification
program during WWII and after. The McCarthyites really went after him.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-04-03 11:59 PM
Response to Reply #15
43. Morgenthau's son is the one who first prosecuted BCCI.
Yes, the Morgenthaus are a great family. The father was one of FDR's closest confidants. When evidence of BCCI criminality came up, the Poppy Bush Justice Department wanted nothing to do with it. So the people with evidence went to John Kerry's Senate subcommittee. They forwarded what they had to New York City, where Morgenthau Jr. had gone from being US Attorney to being city attorney for Manhattan (removed from his post by the Reagan Justice Department). Morgenthau then got the indictments and investigations going by the US Justice Department.


Investigating BCCI and Savings and Loan Fraud

The BCCI scandal and the savings and loan crisis are complicated by near-incomprehensible numbers, multitudes of players, and the heightened secrecy that often protects negligent and criminal behavior. Allan Dodds Frank, a business investigative reporter and producer at ABC News, observed that "(these) people are spending lifetimes constructing complex crimes....(I)f it were so easy, they wouldn't have made them so complicated."

In spite of the magnitude of numbers, names, and places, the BCCI affair and the savings and loan crisis can be reduced to a few basic themes. Reporters who discussed the coverage of these stories at The Annenberg Washington Program provided brief overviews of the scandals and tried to distill the issues for conference participants in much the same way they would for viewers or readers.

Although the scandal surrounding the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) is perhaps the biggest banking scandal in history, it received limited media coverage. BCCI was a Pakistani-managed, Middle East-financed international bank with branches in 70 countries. Peter Truell, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who has written some of the most significant stories on BCCI, described the essence of the scandal:

It is a story about stealing very large amounts of money and using it for a multitude of illegal purposes, perverting governments, corrupting politicians, corrupting regu-lators, corrupting bank regulators.

CONTINUED...

http://www.annenberg.nwu.edu/pubs/news/news03.htm
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KharmaTrain Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 08:02 AM
Response to Original message
17. Anyone Remember The Riyadis? BCCI Link?
The wingnuts couldn't shut up enough about the conflict between that family and Clinton and how when the "scandal" broke all the felons went scurrying to China and other places, never to be seen again. Amazingly when Herr Ashkroft came to power he never thought those connections were worth investigating...just like the bin Laden stuff.

Isn't there a BCCI link that covers the BFEE, bin Laden and Riyadi and other top interational swindlers?? I've never heard any connections here...I'm sure they are.
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emad Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 08:39 AM
Response to Reply #17
18. It might be in the Kerry evidence or the Morgenthau papers
connected to the NY bust.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-02-03 12:50 AM
Response to Reply #17
35. BCCI, Jackson Stephens, Mochtar Riady... plenty o' BFEE connections...
... to tangle even the slickest Octopus. What infuriates me is the bipartisan nature of the corruption. Don't any of these turds put their country ahead of their wallets? Then again, perhaps they know their own "anthrax is in the mail." Here's a handy timeline with plenty of names for starting online searches:

EXCERPT...

1989 Bahrain officials suddenly break off offshore drilling negotiations with Amoco and decide to deal with Harken Energy, George W. Bush's firm. Harken has had a series of failed ventures and no cash, so the Bass brothers are brought in to finance Harken's efforts at a cost of $50 million. Harken's investment banker is the same firm that helped in BCCI's acquisition of First American. Among the other BCCI-connected figures that help the deal: Bahrain's prime minister.

1990 Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornberg, is warned about BCCI but does nothing.

1991 Stephens Inc gives $100,000 to a Bush dinner committee. With Stephens, Mochtar Riady buys BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators. A former top aide to White House Chief of Staff John Sununu goes to work for a prominent figure in the BCCI scandal less than a month after leaving the Bush administration. Edward Rogers Jr. signs a $600,000 contract to give legal advice to Sheik Kamal Adham, an ex-Saudi intelligence officer who is being investigated for his role in BCCI's takeover of First American Bankshares. The Miami acting US Attorney is reportedly rebuffed by the Justice Department in his efforts to indict BCCI and some of its principal officers on tax fraud charges. Justice Department later denies this occurred.

1992 Ronald Reagan is introduced at the GOP convention by former senator Paul Laxalt, whose law firm represented BCCI in a drug money case. The chair of the convention, Craig Fuller, has been the number two official of Hill & Knowlton which was involved in the BCCI-First American case. Bush's campaign press representatives has done PR for a Saudi sheik accused of involvement in the BCCI affair, earning $200,000 in fees in just two months. Employees of Stephens Inc. give more money to the Clinton campaign than those of any other firm except Goldman, Sachs and the NY law firm of Wilke, Farr & Gallagher. Stephens' Worthen Bank gives Clinton a $3.5 million line of credit allowing the cash-strapped candidate to finish the primaries. Little RockWorldwide Travel provides Clinton with $1 million in deferred billing for his campaign trips. Without the Worthen and Worldwide largess, it is unlikely that the cash-strapped candidate could have survived through the later primaries.

CONTINUED...

http://www.questionsquestions.net/bushladen/profiles/bcci2.html



How I feel (with apologies to Tuco Benedito Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez).

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NicRic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 09:01 AM
Response to Original message
19. If a Dem Pres , start the impeachment !!
yet the repugs still talk about the "liberal media" .Its gotten so bad that I have stopped watching the news on T.V., or just about any talk radio .Al Gore has the right idea on creating a independant TV station ,that tries to balance out all of the B.S. being fed the American public .The most truobling thing about this ,is apprently its not that hard to push public opinion to your favor. I was giving the American public to much credit ,thought they would see threw all of this B.S. ! Apprently I was dead wrong,of course thats assuming the polls saying the public for the most part agree's with this pResident, are accurate ,I hope for the sake of this great country Iam wrong and will be proven wrong when bush is ousted in 2004 !
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Oct-31-03 09:29 AM
Response to Reply #19
20. Duhbya is tied to BCCI at the hip...and 9/11.
The middle east oil billionaires used BCCI to pad their fortunes and corrupt governments worldwide, while the world's drug-dealers, money-launderers, terrorists of the right and left, and the intelligence agencies that seemed to control most all of them used the bank for their nefarious activities. Even George W Bush was a "young man on the rise" and so his wheels received some of that oily BCCI grease:

Bush & Bin Laden - George W. Bush Had Ties to Billionaire bin Laden Brood

EXCERPT...

President Bush and the bin Laden family have been connected through dubious business deals since 1977, when Salem, the head of the bin Laden family business, one of the biggest construction companies in the world, invested in Bush's start-up oil company, Arbusto Energy, Inc.

James R. Bath, a friend and neighbor, was used to funnel money from Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, to set up George W. Bush in the oil business, according to The Wall Street Journal and other reputable sources.

Through a tangled web of Saudi multi-millionaires, Texas oilmen, and the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Bush was financially linked with the bin Laden family until Salem met an untimely end in a freak flying accident near San Antonio in 1988.

CONTINUED...

http://www.americanfreepress.net/10_07_01/Bush___Bin_Laden_-_George_W__B/bush___bin_laden_-_george_w__b.html


PS: As you noted, the media giants are in the pockets of the BFEE. That's why they're doing all they can to control the Internet. Keep spreading the word, NicRic! Our country's freedom and the Bush Organized Crime Family's future unemployment depend on it.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 11:25 AM
Response to Reply #19
22. 9-11 Investigation Chair Tied to Bin Ladens...
Former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean has EXTENSIVE business ties to Middle East and the bin Ladens...

Meet the New Boss

By Matthew Callan

EXCERPT...

Kean is also a director at Amerada Hess, a petroleum company whose green and white gas stations are a familiar sight in the New York metropolitan area. The Hess family is well known for its ownership of the New York Jets, but their company is less famous for being a partner in Hess-Delta, an oil exploration and development joint venture incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Little is known about Delta-Hess's interests besides its investments in the Caspian Sea region, Azerbaijan, and other former Soviet republics. What is known is that Hess's partner in this joint venture is Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia, a company with some extremely suspicious executives.

Two of Kean's Hess-Delta business partners—Mohammed Hussein al Amoudi and Khalid bin Mahfouz—have been under investigation as far back as 1999 for suspected ties to Al Qaeda (Boston Herald, 12/11/2001). Both men have numerous overlapping oil interests in Saudi Arabia, one of which is Delta. Both men are accused by name in a $1 trillion lawsuit, filed on behalf of families of the victims of September 11, as alleged financiers of Al Qaeda.

Khalid bin Mahfouz, head of Saudi Arabia's powerful National Commercial Bank, has led a storied and very public career in fraud. He was implicated in the BCCI banking scandal during the early 1990s, when the Bank of Commerce and Credit International robbed depositors of $10 billion. He eventually paid a $225 million settlement to escape prosecution. In the mid-1990s, he was caught in a citizenship-for-sale scandal, in which he courted investors for business ventures in Ireland, in exchange for Irish passports and huge tax exemptions.

Shortly thereafter, it appears that bin Mahfouz made the jump from white-collar criminal into terrorist sugar daddy. In 1999, he was reportedly placed under house arrest by the Saudi government on suspicion of supporting terrorism. An audit of his National Commerce Bank discovered that $2 billion dollars had gone missing, and US and Saudi officials feared it was funneled to Al Qaeda via numerous charity fronts. One of the "charities" to which bin Mahfouz may have "contributed" heavily, the Advice and Reformation Committee, was founded by Osama bin Laden himself and financed the 1998 African embassy bombings. US officials also suspect bin Mahfouz to be financially linked to the USS Cole attack, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and numerous failed terrorist actions. Bin Mahfouz's son was on the board of the Sudanese chapter of Blessed Relief, a charity whose assets were frozen by the Treasury Department in October 2001 for suspected terrorist links. (Ottawa Citizen, 9/29/2001)

http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/analysis/2003/0117boss.htm

Question for DU: Where's the press on this?
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9215 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 12:50 PM
Response to Reply #22
23. EXPLOSIVE: investigatees controlling the investigation
I have sent this to my national representatives. Here is where politicians can do some good. They need this kind of information voice an opinion.

This is why Bush was stonewalling. He was looking for a "good" person to replace Kissinger.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 03:49 PM
Response to Reply #23
25. 9-11 Families need to know, too!
Thanks, 9215! We need to spread the word. Government types, on the whole, are good people.

Speaking of whom...The 9-11 families have got THE case against the BFEE. They need all the help they can get to win. Lord knows they deserve to. And if they win, we win.
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9215 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 04:37 PM
Response to Reply #25
27. Want to start a seperate topic on this?
I was going to p-mail you. Dude, you are onto the quintessence of how these fascist bastards operate like few others on this board. This shows how they kill investigations, even into areas of vital importance like national security, to keep their political image untarnished.

I have sent this to my national reps and think that maybe even Ted Koeppel would be interested after telling Powell last night that he was "Flat ass wrong" on Iraq. I'm going to get a letter to him.


This is a matter of the utmost seriousness. The SOB's have a vested interest in seeing the Saudi's get away with their involvement in 9/11!!
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 05:15 PM
Response to Reply #27
28. Be my guest, 9215!
These BFEE so-and-sos fear one thing. The truth.
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julka Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 05:33 PM
Response to Reply #28
29. not when they put weasels like this in charge of investos
Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel.
Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact.

A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush
about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney “kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,” the source said. “He kept saying if we go
down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.”

So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as
contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether.

Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House
Republican to sign the final report.

Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to
sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that
denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred.

The watered-down Iran-contra majority report essentially let Vice President Bush off the hook.
Bush’s political career was saved.


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/110500b.html

much much more on this flaccid tool

I still remember my disgust with Hamilton and that creep Senator who wouldn't serve along with Kissinger as head of the current 911 board.
They both bent over BACKwards to quash any serious inquiries into IranContra.

and you'll note who was the point man for the pugs during the house IC whitewash? none other than President Cheney. what was Bush I's reward for such a fine performance?
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 05:51 PM
Response to Reply #29
30. Hamilton helped bury October Surprise, too.
Agree 100 percent, julka. That's why I'm happy to see you and the others bring these traitorious bed-wetters..and Reagan and Bush begat Bush Jr. and Cheney. Here's more detail from real journalist Robert Parry on Hamilton's role in BFEE:

The Consortium

The Russian Report


But two days before the news conference, a cable arrived from Moscow. It was a response to a query dated Oct. 21, 1992, that Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who headed the House task force, had sent to Sergey Vadimovich Stepashin, then chairman of the Supreme Soviet's Committee on Defense and Security Issues. Hamilton asked Stepashin -- whose job was roughly equal to chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee -- what information the Russian government had about the so-called "October Surprise" charges.

The Supreme Soviet's response was delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow by Nikolay Kuznetsov, secretary of the subcommittee on state security. Kuznetsov apologized for the "lengthy preparation of the response." It was quickly translated by the U.S. embassy and forwarded to Hamilton.

SNIP...

To the shock of the task force, the six-page Russian report stated, as fact, that Casey, George Bush and other Republicans had met secretly with Iranian officials in Europe during the 1980 presidential campaign. The Russians depicted the hostage negotiations that year as a two-way competition between the Carter White House and the Reagan campaign to outbid one another for Iran's cooperation on the hostages. The Russians asserted that the Reagan team had disrupted Carter's hostage negotiations after all, the exact opposite of the task force conclusion.

As described by the Russians, the Carter administration offered the Iranians supplies of arms and unfreezing of assets for a pre-election release of the hostages. One important meeting had occurred in Athens in July 1980 with Pentagon representatives agreeing "in principle" to deliver "a significant quantity of spare parts for F-4 and F-5 aircraft and also M-60 tanks ... via Turkey," according to the Russian report. The Iranians "discussed a possible step-by-step normalization of Iranian-American relations the provision of support for President Carter in the election campaign via the release of American hostages."

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile1.html
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julka Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 06:35 PM
Response to Reply #30
31. I know......I have Parry's book.....more on something else here, tho
this is old news, but, in light of the reluctance to release any of the daily WH brief material, does this stuff become more relevant, and does it deserve thread of its own? never get any traction when I start em



this simple chart is the distillation of zillions of octopus-like connections

here's one, which shows some of the ties between the CIA/ISI/binLaden:

"Dr. Rice's statement regarding the ISI chief at her May 16 press conference, is an obvious cover-up. While General Ahmad was talking to U.S. officials at the CIA and the Pentagon, he had allegedly also been in contact (through a third party) with the September 11 terrorists. What this suggests is that key individuals within the U.S. military-intelligence establishment knew about these ISI contacts with the September 11 terrorist ‘ring leader', Mohammed Atta, and failed to act. But this conclusion is, in fact, an understatement.

Everything indicates that CIA Director George Tenet and ISI Chief General Mahmoud Ahmad, had established a close working relationship. General Mahmoud had arrived a week prior to September 11 for consultations with George Tenet. Bear in mind that the CIA's George Tenet also has a close personal relationship with President Bush. Prior to September 11, Tenet would meet the President nearly every morning at 8:00 a.m. sharp, for about half an hour.

A document, known as the President's Daily Briefing, or PDB, 'is prepared at Langley by the CIA's analytical directorate, and a draft goes home with Tenet each night. Tenet edits it personally and delivers it orally during his early morning meeting with Bush.' This practice of 'oral intelligence briefings' is unprecedented. Bush's predecessors at the White House, received a written briefing.... Did Bush, with his minimal understanding of foreign policy issues, know all the details regarding General Mahmoud and the 'ISI connection'?

Did Tenet and Cheney distort the facts, so as to get the Commander-in-Chief's 'thumbs up' for a military operation which was already in the pipeline? In a bitter irony, a meeting between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and General Mahmoud, the 9-11 'money man', was scheduled at the State Department for the morning after September 11 to discuss their strategy."


http://www.btinternet.com/~nlpwessex/Documents/armitageISIatta.htm

whatever happened to this guy Ahmad? there seems to be ample evidence that $100K was sent at his direction to ATTA!!!! has he been held for questioning?

I'm sure that I've read/forgotten this before, but the refreshing has made me angrier than I've been for awhile, and it certainly bears re-witnessing, given the current discussion of junta recalcitrance and certain insistence on executive privilege WRT daily briefing.

there's SO much more on just this (key?) aspect of money/911 links, at everybody's fingertips
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 06:56 PM
Response to Reply #31
33. ISI and the 9-11-2001 attack by Michel Chossudovsky
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111A.html
Here is a link to Huffman Aviation's flight school, alleged site of the alleged hijacker's flight training-note the prominance of Wally Hilliard PNACer and spooky friend of Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof {of Moussaoui Venice, Fl. connection}
http://www.madcowprod.com/

And here is Paul Thompson's 9-11 timeline page, a useful tool for researchers everywhere.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/911timeline2pg
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julka Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 08:39 PM
Response to Reply #33
34. GEE-ZUSS!!!
Edited on Sat Nov-01-03 08:42 PM by julka
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.html

love that picture of Jeb with the WFEE

their fingers are EVerywhere, aren't they?

that article is unbefricking leevable.

I remember Dekkers as having CIA connections, not being questioned in the aftermath of his flight school's beig cited as one of those at which the 911 terrorist trained.

but that Williams family sounds like a scaled-down version of the BFEE........guess they're one of the outer branches.

the picture, though, cracks me up. they're SO shameless; as if they know nothing's EVER going to happen to them--nobody's EVER going to slap the cuffs on

this airline thing is so similar to what the cons who bled the SandL industry dry did. they KNEW from the start that they were going under, and got the students to pay up to $100K in ADVANCE!

read that Pete Brewton book about Bush, CIA, Mafia/S&L scandal, and you'll see the blueprints. lots of things never change, and they STILL keep getting away with EVERYthing
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9215 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-02-03 01:48 AM
Response to Reply #33
36. You nailed it dude!!
Rudi dekkers in two small aircraft crashes after heading the school????

The fascists trained the, IMHO, dupes to get, or look like they were getting, into the airline jets and then remotely flew them into buildings. This guaranteed the deed would be done with scientific precision destroying all the material evidence. No black boxes, no bodies, no NOTHING!!

The perfect crime that took a whole nation into terror alert mode. It was all the fascist fuckbrain conservatives had left to get control of a nation that grew out of their bullshit.

IT WAS ALL THEY HAD!!!
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bobthedrummer Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 01:03 PM
Response to Original message
24. The Saudi Connection again-BAe military contracts used to fund terrorism
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 03:57 PM
Response to Reply #24
26. BCCI + Terror + Drugs + Money Laundering = BFEE
Thanks, bobthedrummer! Excellent resource I will spend time reviewing over the coming days. I especially liked the referents to the money-drugs-terror link — something I'd describe as one of the main cash cows of the BFEE. Here's a bit of news regarding a new book examining BCCI's role:

Author Details Drug/Terrorism Link in Post-9/11 World

By Steve Brown
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 30, 2003

EXCERPT...

Research into money laundering used to fund the narcotics market and in turn terrorist organizations led to her 1992 work, Evil Money. Ehrenfeld discovered that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which closed in 1991 after a U.S. Justice Department sting operation, had served as the epicenter of the money laundering.

"I looked into the political agenda they (the BCCI) had. This was the biggest and the first international Islamic bank that was created by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani," Ehrenfeld explained. "When it was closed down, there were tons and tons of documents around the world about the PLO assets, how they funneled money to Abu Nidal (alleged terrorist, now dead, who founded an organization that split from the PLO in 1974), Iran, Iraq, everybody. The BCCI, as far as I could tell, was the beginning of a concerted effort to fund Islamic terrorist activities."

In her latest book, Ehrenfeld writes about the still-operational National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia and the Al-Barakaat Exchange in Dubai, founded in 1989 by Somali Ahmed Nur Jimali, close personal friend of Osama bin Laden. Nur Jimali learned the U.S. banking system by working for Citibank from 1979 to 1986, which itself founded the Saudi American Bank.

The Al-Barakaat Exchange has U.S. headquarters in Dorchester, Mass., with branches in Minnesota, Ohio and Washington state.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has alleged that "the al-Barakaat companies are the money movers, the quartermasters of terror." Ehrenfeld details in the new book how the Al-Barakaat Exchange, along with other banks, was used to funnel nearly $1 million to the 9/11 hijackers through Western Union.

CONTNUED...

http://www.cnsnews.com/Nation/archive/200310/NAT20031030a.html


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Capn Sunshine Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-01-03 06:41 PM
Response to Original message
32. and THIS is what is important
NOT the parsing of a primary candidates latest comment.

It's so hard to keep on the ball with all the crap they shovel out there to distract you.

Some here at DU get paid by the line, I have no doubt.

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9215 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-02-03 01:58 PM
Response to Reply #32
37. I have no doubt either. n/t
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dusty64 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Nov-03-03 09:04 AM
Response to Original message
39. Between this and the money
flowing between Iraqi contracts and our regime's donors and back again, I think we've found our smoking gun. Will the dots be connected by our corporate media though?
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-04-03 12:36 PM
Response to Reply #39
40. "Connect the Dots." John Swinton said in 1953...
When asked to toast the nation's free press, the "Dean" of the New York Times told the New York Press Club...

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?

"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

http://www.constitution.org/pub/swinton_press.htm




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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-04-03 01:48 PM
Response to Original message
41. My very humble addition
The opening of a long-delayed civil suit in a London courtroom; a brief, buried article on a judical nomination; a fluctuation in the commodities market; three mundane, seemingly-unrelated items in the news last week that combined to give a fleeting glimpse of the ugly reality behind the frantic, diversionary facade of the "civilized world."

The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used by the first Bush Administration to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD naterial supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the U.S. like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill.

As soon as the BNL case broke, President Bush 1 moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts--where the supervised the officals investigating their old companies.

Which brings us to the judical appointment. One of the White House aids who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. ByBee. Last week, said factotum was nominated by the current warmer of the Oval Office seat, George W. Bush, to a place on the federal appeals court--a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. ByBee was confirmed on March 13,2003

And the commodities connection? President Pretzel's relentless hissy-fit for war on Iraq has of course goosed the price of gold enormously-- and that's set Bush Family coffers a clinking. How so? In the waning days of his failed presidency, Bush 1 invoked an obscure 1872 statue to give a Canadian firm, Barrick Corporation, the right to mine $10 billion in gold from U.S. public lands.( U.S. taxpayers got a whopping $10,000 fee in return. Bush then joined Barrick as a highly paid "international consultant," brokering deals with various dictators of his close acquaintance. Barrick reciprocated with big bucks for Junior's presidental run. And in another quid for the pro quo, last year Junior dutifully approved Barrick's controversial acquistition of a major rival.
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd02152003.html

Interesting note Barrick was started by Khashoggi, at least that's what Greg Palast says.

Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, Rwanada and Congo/Zaire are wars where factions are armed with U.S. made weapons (M16s,SAMs, TAnks); where U.S. covert forces undertake brutal secret missions and psychological operations; accountable to no one; behind the headlines. They are wars where the Central Intelligence Agency is deeply and maliciously entrenched in subverting democracy and orchestrating chaos that is expediently advertised as such by our dubious media. At the roots, however, these are wars like any other war.

Essential to the superalloys and weaponry of the global economy of war are Congo's cobalt, uranium and columbium tantalite (coltan). Cobalt is elementao to nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, tank armor, industrial furnaces and aerospace, and for 50 years the CIA has insured the free flow of cobalt out of Congo. The human devastation in poverty, disease, torture and massacres is uncountable. Similarly, coltan is essential for cellphones and childrens playstations, and companies like Sony and Nokia have been cashing in on this windfall paid in human blood.

President Bush 1 helped Barrick get a gold mining consession in Tanazania. There was a political problem you see, the gold field in Tanzania already had gold miners on it, Tanzanians you would be suprised to hear and which got in the way of the Canadian-Saudi-American deal-so the Tanzanians had to go for Barrick to buy the land- so it was cleared by running bulldozers across the property- August 1996 they ran bulldozers across the property-smashed the workers houses, filled the mine pits and chased away 30,000 workers-all but 50-because according to our reports 50 miners were in the mining pits when they were sealed.
http://democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/22/1529206&mode=thread&tid=29

Three Million Lives have been lost since 1998 in Congo.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Nov-04-03 11:09 PM
Response to Reply #41
42. Only the BFEE wouldn't treasure what you say, seemslikeadream.
For yours is a mighty addition to the record and much appreciated by everyone who values freedom and loves America. These turds have put profit ahead of people all day, every day, since the days of genocide against North America's native peoples.

Regarding Banco Nazionale del Lavoro: The Bush Organized Crime Family used it to funnel US taxpayer "loans" in order to SPONSOR Iraq's WMD programs, as well as the purchase of uranium, nerve gas, and bioligical agents. Here's an excellent overview from the Institute for Policy Studies (IF Stone folk):

UNDERSTANDING THE U.S.-IRAQ CRISIS:

The History of U.S.-Iraq Relations


By Phyllis Bennis

A pamphlet of the Institute for Policy Studies, January 2003


EXCERPT...

Other Republican insiders were involved in shady deals that helped build Iraq's WMDs. In 1989, news broke of a secret $4 billion loan made to Iraq by a U.S. branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) of Italy, which at the time employed Henry Kissinger on its Consulting Board for International Policy. Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chair of the banking committee, also noted that an executive of Kissinger Associates met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in June 1989 at a meeting in which the Iraqi leader apparently expressed interest in expanding commercial relations with the U.S. "Many Kissinger Associates clients received U.S. export licenses for exports to Iraq. Several were also the beneficiaries of BNL loans to Iraq," Congressman Gonzalez wrote in a letter to then-President Bush (senior). Iraq also used the BNL loans to attempt to buy difficult-to-manufacture nuclear weapons components.

CONTINUED...

http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/primer4.htm

Regarding the shenigans with lootig the Earth's resources, the name of the turd Khashoggi turns up, his infamy stretches from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra to Selection 2000 to PNAC Richard Perle. An All-Star Lackey of the BFEE. If I may be allowed to remind people of how the Bush Organized Crime Family represents so much of our world's current troubles:


LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?

Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED…

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 01:50 PM
Response to Reply #42
44. "know a hawk from a handsaw"
Octafish and emad aisat sana, this is the most consequential thread on DU and I have to find it on page four. I hope you will continue to post.

I am just starting to read the offical "1992 Congressional Record Documents" of Henry B. Gonzalez, his longstanding investigations into a range of related dealings which included BCCI, Banco Nazionale Lavoro (BNL), Iraqgate, illicit arms dealings, and especially attempts by the Bush government to block his investigations.

The Rostow Gang

Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Speaker, today I will provide an update on the Rostow gang which will reveal that President Bush, his legal advisor, Boyden Gray, and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, were all directly involved in the efforts to thwart the congressional investigation of the Iraq policy. I will also detail some of the more prominent exmples of why the President is continuing to thwart the Banking Committee's inquiry of the Banca Nazionale del Lvoro. These include new evidence that shows that 2 days prior to winning approval for a $1 billion fiscal year 1990 Commodity Credit Corportation program for Iraq-- those are taxpayer-guaranteed programs--the National Security Council and the State Department received a detailed secret CIA report on BNL indicating that BNL loans were used to fund Iraq's clandestine missle and nuclear weapons procurement program.

...The meeting was chaired by Nick Rostow, the individual referred to, the General Counsel to the NSC. Mr. Rostow's previous experience includes playing a key role in the White House efforts to cover up the Iran-Contra scandal and to obstruct a 1988 GAO invesitigation of then Vice-President Bysh's ties to Panamanian leader and drug lord, one Gen Manuel Noriega. Also at the meeting were President Bush's General Council, Boyden Gray, and the top lawyers for the Department of Justice, Defence, State, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Energy and the CIA. Each of the agencies had received requsts for information from the Congress, and these lawyers were responsible for overseeing the collection and submission of the information. That is where I referred to this high-level legal team as the 'Rostow gang.'
http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920707g.htm

There's just so much (sigh)
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 02:15 PM
Response to Reply #44
45. Without Henry B. Gonzalez, we'd never know about the BFEE....
If it wasn’t for courageous individuals like Henry B. Gonzalez, the late, great US Representative who chaired the House Banking Committee, we would never find out about the REAL criminality that is the Bush Family Evil Empire.

Gonzalez wanted to impeach Bush because of this stuff. Democrats like Lee Hamilton ignored Gonzalez and helped bury all this stuff. The retired Lee now is co-chair of the 9-11 commission.

So, things are worse today, thanks to the GOP-led House and Senate. Of course, the crooks stole the White House in 2000. And the courts will never do a thing about it, because you-know-what runs them, too.

Here’s some more background on the subject of the Bush Organized Crime Family in action:

Bush Administration Uses CIA To Stonewall Iraqgate Investigation

by Jack Colhoun

In House floor speeches, Rep. Henry Gonzalez has documented how pre-Gulf War U.S. policy helped Iraq develop weapons of mass destruction. But President George Bush, taking a page from one of the darkest chapters of the Nixon presidency, has enlisted the CIA as part of his campaign to derail the Texas Democrat's Iraqgate investigation. The CIA is investigating Gonzalez for revealing allegedly secret intelligence information, which it claims has harmed U.S. national security interests.

Involving the CIA in domestic political affairs is one of the few remaining taboos in U.S. politics, and so far, Bush has gotten away scot-free with it. His predecessor, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign a few days after the infamous "smoking gun" tape revealed that he had instructed White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman to tell CIA Director Richard Helms to refuse to cooperate with the FBI's investigation of Watergate.

While the media and the Washington pundits have duly reported the CIA's investigation of Gonzalez, they have failed to note the resemblance between the way Bush and Nixon instigated domestic involvement of the CIA to protect their administrations. Nor have the media explored the ominous political implications of Bush-the first former CIA director elected president- using the Agency to discredit his political foes.

SNIP…

Gonzalez, who has made public more classified U.S. doc- uments than anyone since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the "Pentagon Papers," believes Bush is using the CIA to taint the Iraqgate investigation. Again the parallel is clear. In 1971, Nixon's White House "plumbers," led by CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, launched a campaign to discredit former Pentagon analyst Ellsberg and even broke into his psychiatrist's office to search for incriminating dirt.

CONTINUED…

http://mediafilter.org/MFF/BushCIAstonewall.html

PS: I'd say it's me, because I'm pro-Kerry, but it IS odd seeing stuff like this ignored on DU, seemslikeadream. Then again, a lot of DUers don't want to think about the unthinkable. It's safer to hit the mental "Ignore" button.

PPS: Don't worry, SLaD: There are many, many people interested in getting the Truth out. And a lot of them serve in our Government.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 02:29 PM
Response to Reply #44
47. What the Wall Street Journal said re: Mueller and BCCI
From an editorial regarding Mueller's nomination to head the FBI. The WSJ said "NO" to Mueller — Believe it or Not!

EXCERPT...

The BCCI scandal was the most important corruption story of the 20th century. Crooked international bankers cast a world-wide web of influence. They bought and sold politicians around the globe, ripped off depositors for some $10 billion, laundered drug money, worked with assorted spooks and trafficked with terrorists.

In the U.S., they illegally bought a major Washington bank, First American, and installed Democratic Party icon Clark Clifford as its head. George H.W. Bush headed the CIA during BCCI's early days and was President when its wrongdoing first began to surface. Even George W. Bush bumped up against the outer fringes of the BCCI crowd during his tenure with Harken Energy and in his friendship with Texas entrepreneur James Bath.

BCCI holds important lessons for the future. Our dawning century is one of international criminal gangs operating with increasing sophistication in a shadowy world beyond the control of fragmented national authorities. The banking and political systems are particularly vulnerable to this sort of corruption. BCCI is a prototype for this new form of global crime. As FBI Director, Mr. Freeh got a foothold on these problems; his successor will find them a major preoccupation.

SNIP...

Mr. Mueller also engaged in a running series of battles with the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. According to news reports over the years, Justice prosecutors were instructed not to cooperate with Mr. Morgenthau's office, documents were withheld, and attempts were made to block other federal agencies from cooperating. In July 1992, both Mr. Mueller and Mr. Morgenthau simultaneously but separately indicted Mr. Clifford and his top aide Robert Altman in the BCCI scandal, with Mr. Morgenthau finally winning the right to try the men. Mr. Clifford was later dropped from the case due to infirmity and Mr. Altman was eventually acquitted. The curious and distracting fight over jurisdiction stands to be revisited.

CONTINUED...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95000708
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Room101 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 02:26 PM
Response to Original message
46. BBC did a documentary on this and much more-
I have posted the video link several times, yet get only 2 responses each time. Funny this post is about the print story and my post linked to the documentary. I need to work on my thread titles, marketing is not my strong suit. .
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 02:32 PM
Response to Reply #46
48. Hey, BEFOREATHOUGHT! I'd appreciate the link!
Sorry if I didn't see your thread.

Regarding headline writing: Make the most important thing stand out. Never ask a question. Use it as a chance to tell the reader what the story is about.

PS: I once ran my high school paper's features department.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 06:10 PM
Response to Reply #46
49. Sorry I missd your post also
please post a link. Marketing is not my strong suit either, I started a thread THREE MILLION LIVES LOST SINCE 1998 and got no replies sounded important to me.

I'm wondering what has happened to these guys Gunther Russbacher and Robert Hunt.

Several days prior to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on July 25, 1990 (which was set up and provoked by the Bush administration and the government of Kuwait), Bush prepared a secret deal with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, in which the USSR would not intervene if the US invaded Iraq. In exchange for this agreement, the US would provide the USSR with large amounts of financial aid. Naval intelligentce/ONI-CIA operative Gunter Russbacher was one of eight people (along with CIA Director William Webster and National Security Advisor Brent Scrowcroft) who flew one of the four CIA SR-71 aircraft to Moscow to secure Gorbachev's signature. Russbacher spoke Russian, had been assigned to the US Embassy in Moscow and knew Gorbachev personally. Russbacher, who participated in numerous CIA deep-cover operations, including the "October Suprise" (he was one of the pilots who flew Bush to Paris), Inslaw, Iran-Contra and looting (via CIA front companies), was promoted following this Moscow mission. Because he posed a serious threat to high officals as a whistleblower, Russbacher was charged with numerous federal offenses, jailed, and silenced.

CIA/ONI/Navy Seal Commander Robert Hunt participated in a 1992 war game exercise known as Operation Auger Mace. According to Hunt: "Our mission was to go into Bagdad and actually try to bring Saddam back to the United States. The purpose was to help President Bush win re-election. Bush knew at that point in the game that he was in trouble. So we went into Bahrain, and from Bahrain, we went to Tel Aviv, working with an Israeli general by the name of Uri Simhoni. He was an attache at the Israeli Embassy in Washington at one time.He was a major general and with his intel network we were to go into Bagdad, extract Saddam Hussein, bring him back, similar to what we did with Noriega. This operation was put together with my unit and also a Delta unit, and we were to go in there with the Israeli and extract him from his quarters, right outside of Bagdad, and just take him out."

Like Russbacher and other whistleblowers, Hunt was jailed on trumped-up charges and later released.
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Nov-05-03 07:57 PM
Response to Reply #49
50. Sarah McClendon believed Russbacher
Edited on Wed Nov-05-03 07:58 PM by Octafish
From a fax to another reporter, Ms. McClendon said she believed:

EXCERPT...

I do think that Vice President Candidate George Bush went to Paris in 1980 to seal a deal between the Iranian government's top officials, the Republican candidates, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and the Republican Party; to keep 52 Americans hostage 71 more days in Iran.

At least eight of these hostages have said they believe this to be true. A number of them do not talk as they work now for the government.

I do believe (although differing with my good friend and co-worker Barbara Honegger) that Gunther was the top skilled pilot of the CIA, who was brought to Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, to pilot Bush to Paris to seal the deal with the Iranians after they had demanded either Reagan or Bush come there. I do believe that Bani Sadr thought so, as did Aril Ben-Menash of Israel who was there and saw Bush go into the room in Paris for the conference.

Bush has always denied he was there. The Secret Service who tried valiantly to place Bush in the U.S. all the time he was in Paris, filed another report to that affect later. The conference was held somewhere in the Paris suburbs. Therefore, they could say it was not "in Paris."

CONTINUED...

http://www.rumormillnews.net/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=6201

EDIT: Typo in headline.
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rman Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 11:12 AM
Response to Original message
51. kick for great justice
-
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 01:57 PM
Response to Reply #51
52. Thanks, rman! Here's an interesting bit of news...
Author Details Drug/Terrorism Link in Post-9/11 World

By Steve Brown
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
October 30, 2003

(CNSNews.com) - Narcotics trafficking, organized crime, money laundering and terrorism are inextricably linked and coordinated on American soil and in many countries allied with the U.S., according to the author of a new book on the financing of terrorism.

Rachel Ehrenfeld, who wrote Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, also asserts that this nexus of wrongdoing continues to take place in the midst of the U.S. public, its institutions and elected officials, even in the post-9/11 world.

Ehrenfeld's book underscores the reality in the aftermath of the worst attack on the United States in its history, what allowed it to happen, what must be done to prevent it from happening again and how the window of opportunity to prevent another 9/11 attack is shrinking.

As director of the American Center for Democracy (ACD), Ehrenfeld is an acknowledged expert on corruption, money laundering, transnational organized crime, international terrorism, drug trafficking and substance abuse. She is also credited with coining the term "narcoterrorism" in her 1990 book, Terrorism.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cnsnews.com/Nation/archive/200310/NAT20031030a.html
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RandomKoolzip Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 03:36 PM
Response to Original message
53. KICK! KICK!
I think this oughta be front page news EVERYDAY of the week. Kinda explains a lot of well...VAGUELY IMPORTANT things.
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Name removed Donating Member (0 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 03:47 PM
Response to Original message
54. Deleted message
Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.
 
Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 04:25 PM
Response to Reply #54
55. The point? Ever hear of the Bush Organized Crime Family?
From gold to oil to drugs, they loot the world's treasures.
They enslave the world's peoples.
They start illegal wars.
They kill millions.
Without people being aware of what they do, they would get away with it.
Do you have a problem with that?
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spotbird Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Nov-06-03 04:49 PM
Response to Reply #54
56. And how do you suggest we do that?
Please tell me you think that all our problems would be solved if we milked the prospect for 6 months of oil in Alaska.
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seemslikeadream Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-07-03 10:51 AM
Response to Original message
57. John Kerry The BCCI Affair
Edited on Fri Nov-07-03 11:14 AM by seemslikeadream
Great link from Unknown Known
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/

A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations
United States Senate
by
John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown
December 1992
102d Congress 2d Session Senate Print 102-104

Just noticed its already been posted here but here's a link from Maxine Waters
"The California Story"
http/www.house.gov/waters/31698pr.htm

The average reader likely will find the structure of this report bizarre and confusing. I also question the Report's methodology, its sweeping conclusions, its cleverly worded denials and its selective quoting of documents. The Report states that 365 interviews were conducted, but only summarizes statements from 12 individuals connected to the South Central Los Angeles specific allegations. I have a list of over 70 individuals who should have been interviewed under oath by the CIA if the investigation was to be considered credible. Did the CIA interview all of these people? Because the Report fails to list who was interviewed, we have no way of knowing
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JackRiddler Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-07-03 02:10 PM
Response to Reply #57
58. kick!!!
k
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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Fri Nov-07-03 08:05 PM
Response to Reply #57
59. Ollie North was so scared, he sicced the FBI on John Kerry
Here's what Jonathan Vankin wrote, back when Iran-Contra drug dealing was merely a risqué subject (today, it’s gone taboo, with reporters losing their jobs for writing stories about it):

EXCERPT:

… To comprehend the government’s role in cocaine traffic, (Manuel) Noriega is useful as a kind of focal point. He was on the payroll of the CIA at the same time he worked for the Medellin Cartel for four million dollars per month. The Medellin Cartel is the Columbian cocaine syndicate, responsible for most of the cocaine that enters the U.S.A.

SNIP...

Bush, North, and other government insiders at the CIA and the National Security Council (which under Reagan got heavily into covert operations) most likely knew about Noriega’s involvement with drugs. Revelations about Noriega, and about direct contra and CIA involvement with cocaine smuggling, found their way into public record via a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by John Kerry.

In 1986, Senator Kerry received information that the Costa Rican branch of a Miami-based shrimp company Ocean Hunter, widely regarded as a drug-running front, had received checks for more than $200,000 dollars from the U.S. government. The money was part of the “humanitarian aid” allocated for the contras by Congress. Wondering why the cash was channeled to this shrimp-and-dope outfit, Kerry went to the FBI asking for an inquiry. Instead, the FBI investigated Kerry himself.

SNIP…

But wait, it gets better!

According to the FBI reports, North asked the FBI to investigate Kerry, to find links between the Massachusetts senator and the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. The investigation was reportedly initiated by a crack FBI counterintelligence group usually employed to track foreign agents in the United States.

SOURCE: Jonathan Vankin. Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes: Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America, Paragon House, New York, pp. 163–164 (1991):


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Octafish Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-08-03 10:36 AM
Response to Original message
60. Arbusto and HARKEN both got money from BCCI & bin Ladens.
BUSH BIN-LADEN MONEY CONNECTION:
A Second Bush Oil Deal to Come with Murky Ties to Saudi Financiers and Osama Bin Laden


EXCERPT...

When Salem Bin Laden died in 1988, powerful Saudi Arabian banker and BCCI principal Khalid Bin Mahfouz inherited his interests in Houston. Bath ran a business for bin Mahfouz in Houston and joined a partnership with Bin Mahfouz and Gaith Pharaon, BCCI's front man in Houston's Main Bank.

The Arbusto deal wasn't the last time Bush looked to highly questionable sources to invest in his oil dealings. After several incarnations, Arbusto emerged in 1986 as Harken Energy Corporation. When Harken ran into trouble a year later, Saudi Sheik Abdullah Taha Bakhsh purchased a 17.6 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh was a business partner with Pharaon in Saudi Arabia; his banker there just happened to be Bin Mahfouz.

Though Bush told the Wall Street Journal he had "no idea" BCCI was involved in Harken's financial dealings, the network of connections between Bush and BCCI is so extensive that the Journal concluded their investigation of the matter in 1991 by stating: "The number of BCCI-connected people who had dealings with Harken-all since George W. Bush came on board-raises the question of whether they mask an effort to cozy up to a presidential son." Or even the President: Bath finally came under investigation by the FBI in 1992 for his Saudi business relationships, accused of funneling Saudi money through Houston in order to influence the foreign policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Worst of all, Bin Mahfouz allegedly has been financing the Bin Laden terrorist network-making Bush a U.S. citizen who has done business with those who finance and support terrorists. According to USA Today, Bin Mahfouz and other Saudis attempted to transfer $3 million to various Bin Laden front operations in Saudi Arabia in 1999. ABC News reported the same year that Saudi officials stopped Bin Mahfouz from contributing money directly to Bin Laden. (Bin Mahfouz's sister is also a wife of Osama Bin Laden, a fact that former CIA Director James Woolsey revealed in 1998 Senate testimony.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.jihadunspun.net/BinLadensNetwork/articles/tbblc.cfm
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