The investigator role

[TayTay]

Some BCCI info and stuff on corruption in Government due to undue influence of money.

I just wanted to post some backup articles on this just to show how far back JK goes in fighting this stuff.

[TayTay]

1. Article from 6/17/90 -- Drug money & Corruption.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MONEY? BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ARE MISSING IN SAVINGS AND LOAN CRISIS
Buffalo News, Final, Sec. Viewpoints, p H7,8 06-17-1990
By JOHN KERRY - New York Times

WASHINGTON

Where did all the money go? That's the billion-dollar question in the $500 billion savings and loan crisis.

The American people will be angry to learn that by simply wiring money to another country, savings and loan criminals successfully sheltered looted funds. They will be angry to learn that foreign governments, through their secrecy laws, have been collaborators. And they should be angry to know that our government is doing very little about it.

William Seidman, chairman of the Resolution Trust Corp., which oversees the savings and loan bailout, recently said criminal fraud had been discovered in 60 percent of the institutions seized by the government to date. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh recently said he believed that fraud had caused as many as 30 percent of the thrifts to fail.

The attorney general also said that most of the money lost to fraud was not recoverable. Some of the assets, he said, "have dissipated, some are beyond our reach, and a lot of them were collateral which was vastly overvalued."

Yes, billions of dollars vanished down a black hole of ill-conceived building, loans and investments; that money will never be seen again. But a lot of the money that vanished was simply stolen from depositors.

Consider this:

The U.S. Attorney in Baltimore has indicted Tom J. Billman and two business associates on charges of looting Community Savings of Maryland of $28 million and laundering those funds in Swiss banks.

Charles H. Keating Jr., the former executive of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, has been sued by investors and accused of hiding more than $100 million in bank accounts in Switzerland, Panama and the Bahamas.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Houston is investigating the failure of Vision Banc Savings in Kingsville, Texas. One former executive is identified in Federal law enforcement records as a known money launderer. He may have wired as much as $40 million to a company in the Isle of Jersey, a tax haven on the English Channel.

These cases clearly show that there is a link between savings and loan fraud and offshore money laundering. Yet according to investigators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., less than $10 million has been recovered from the offshore accounts of savings and loan swindlers.

Because no serious investigation of the problem has occurred, even the extent of the money laundering is unknown. But if only 10 percent of the monies "lost" to fraud were laundered offshore, that would be roughly $10 billion -- equivalent to the entire federal budget for the war on drugs.

The Justice Department should immediately conduct an analysis of the amount of money and number of savings and loans involved in laundering. They need teams of highly trained investigators with the skill to untangle complicated financial transactions.

Make no mistake -- it will be difficult to recover these funds. For the same reason that international drug money laundering was for so long ignored, thrift money laundering has been ignored as well. The crime occurs in many jurisdictions, at high speed and under the guise of legitimate business. Financial fraud investigations are labor-intensive and require a high degree of expertise.

Assistant Attorney General Edward Dennis told the Senate that resources for money laundering investigations were stretched thin. It is inexplicable that the Justice Department has requested only $50 million to prosecute thrift fraud cases. Congress has appropriated $75 million, and recently 170 of its members asked President Bush to increase that amount to at least $100 million.

We also need to place increased pressure on foreign bank secrecy havens. The 1988 Omnibus Drug Bill requires international negotiations to achieve stricter banking standards in countries used to launder drug money. Those negotiations need to be put on the front burner to impress upon our counterparts that laundered money, whether the proceeds of drugs or savings and loan fraud, is the result of criminal activity and not money any bank should ever take.

With a real push from the Justice Department and stepped-up cooperation from the international banking community, maybe we can put some of the savings and loan criminals behind bars -- and save the taxpayers billions. We've got to try.

JOHN KERRY, a Democrat, is a member of the Senate banking committee and the subcommittee on narcotics.

[TayTay]

2. This always just haunted me.

TRAFFICKERS USED COSTA RICA AS DRUG HAVEN
BALTIMORE MORNING SUN, F, Sec. Perspective, p 6F 11-24-1996
By MARTHA HONEY

LATE ONE AFTERNOON in July 1987, the front door to our house in San Jose, Costa Rica, suddenly burst open. A half-dozen local narcotics agents, wearing blue jeans and gold chains, charged in, dragging in tow our hysterical secretary, Carmen Araya.

The agents ransacked file drawers in our ground-floor office and then tore through the rest of the house, looking for drugs. They found none. No matter, they said, they already had the "smoking gun." They produced a brown paper package addressed to us, with a return address from the Interior Ministry in Nicaragua. The package contained a letter signed "Tomas" and a book whose center had been hollowed out. A small plastic packet filled with white powder was inserted in the space. High-quality cocaine, the agents informed us.

Through tears, Carmen explained that after collecting our mail at the post office, she was seized by narcotics agents waiting outside, thrown into a car, and taken to a judge's chambers. There the package was ceremoniously opened, and the cocaine "discovered."

The letter, supposedly from the Sandinistas' interior minister. Tomas Borge, described a cocaine trafficking network involving my husband, Tony Avirgan, and me, several top Nicaraguan government officials, the Soviet Ambassador to Costa Rica, and Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat. The next day, right-wing newspapers throughout Central America ran identical articles, headlined: "Two journalists arrested as drug traffickers."

The charges were embarrassing and absurd, but it took us a year and a half and a good Costa Rican lawyer to get them dismissed.

Eventually we unraveled the truth. Postal workers said that the package had been inserted into the system in San Jose and that narcotics agents had cooled their heels for days waiting for one of us to collect it. The scheme had been cooked up over lunch by two Cuban Americans. A house servant for one of the men overheard the pair hatching the plot with the aim of forcing us to stop investigating the connection between the CIA, the contras, and Colombian cocaine traffickers.

We already knew a lot about this - the CIA-contra-cocaine triangle as well as about this Cuban-American duo. One of the men, a Bay of Pigs veteran, was listed as a "narcotrafficker" in Interpol's drug registry. The other, a convicted drug trafficker, had come to Costa Rica posing as a contra military trainer. Contra commanders said this man worked for the CIA. Both men claimed to be well connected in Washington, and later, both of their names showed up in Oliver North's diaries as players in Washington's covert war against the leftist Sandinistas.

The Cuban Americans had included John Kerry's name in the "Tomas" letter because he was spearheading a Senate investigation into contra- and CIA-linked drug trafficking. Over the course of the three-year probe, Kerry's staff ran into numerous other obstacles, as Kerry's chief investigator, Washington lawyer Jack Blum, testified during a recent Senate hearing. "We were subject to a systematic campaign to discredit everything we did," he said.

The 1989 Senate report, "Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy," concluded that "senior U.S. officials were not immune to the idea that drug money was the perfect solution to the contras' funding problems." The Kerry Report, as it was known, painted a devastatingly detailed picture of a complex web linking U.S. officials, contra leaders, Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega, a string of aviation companies in Miami and Central America, pilots, banks, drug traffickers, top Colombian drug lords and the contras' U.S., Cuban American and Latin American supporters.

It was this same web that my husband and I also, inadvertently, stumbled upon. We had been investigating the CIA's covert war against Nicaragua and the May 1984 bombing of a contra press conference which injured my husband and killed three journalists. Terrorism and covert operations were risky enough. We kept pushing away evidence of drug trafficking by the CIA's army. But it kept coming back.

During the 1980s, Costa Rica, like other Central American countries, became a bridge for moving cocaine from the coca fields and processing factories in South America to markets in North America. This coincided with the start of Washington's covert war against the Sandinistas. They formed, as Miami-based attorney John Mattes put it to me, "a marriage of convenience between the contras and coke smugglers. The smugglers had access to intelligence, airstrips, and most importantly, unimpeded access into the U.S. And that to a drug smuggler is worth all the tea in China," said Mattes.

The contras were, from inception, a covert CIA army: They were financed, trained and equipped with weapons, uniforms, food and planes from the agency. Their supply drops and military attacks were coordinated by the CIA station chief in the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica. Contra leaders, as well as a score of Costa Rican officials, businessmen, colonels, and journalists, received monthly stipends from the CIA. When, in late 1984, Congress officially cut off U.S. funding for the contras, National Security Council official Oliver North stepped in to keep the war going.

Up and down the contra chain of command were CIA agents, contract employees, and operatives who worked as military trainers, pilots, transporters, suppliers and logistical experts. A number of those on the CIA payroll had a history of drug trafficking. It was impossible, I became convinced, that the CIA was unaware that its contra military operation was deeply entwined with the cocaine traffickers. In the mid-1980s, several U.S.-based aviation companies, all under investigation for drug trafficking, received lucrative U.S. government contracts to move supplies for the contras.

From interviews in Costa Rica, Miami, and elsewhere, I eventually identified four different drug networks linked to the contra operations. One was the Norwin Meneses-Oscar Blandon network detailed in the San Jose Mercury News series. This network was aligned in Costa Rica with the smallest contra armies, headed by Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro.

The second network was the so-called International Brigade, a dozen or so Cuban Americans who claimed that they came to Costa Rica to help the contras.

The third contra-drug network involved a CIA operative who was an elderly farmer whose vast ranches along the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border were the main staging area for the contra army.

In visits to the contra camps, it became apparent that most of the drug millions never reached the foot soldiers, who were badly clothed, fed and armed throughout the war. As one young contra defector put it in describing his disgust with the contra leadership and their CIA handlers, "These people are involved in drug and arms trafficking and they are making money off the blood of my brothers."

The fourth network involved General Noriega, who, by the early 1980s, was the CIA's most important asset in Central America. The agency know of, but tolerated, Noriega's ties to the drug cartels. Noriega's stable of pilots flew drug dollars, packed in cardbord boxes from Miami to Panama, where Panama Defense Forces armored cars met the planes and transported the money to BCCI and other banks protected by Panama's strict secrecy laws.

Noriega's pilots also flew arms and drugs for the Costa Rican-based contras, using rebel airstrips, fuel depots, and front dollars in Panama, and Noriega received millions of dollars in commissions.

In the late 1980s, Costa Rican legislative and judicial investigations into drug trafficking concluded that Noriega and his pilots were principally responsible for using the contras' clandestine military infrastructure to open up Costa Rica to drug traffickers.

In 1989, in a highly unusual move, the Costa Rican legislature concluded its probe into drug trafficking by declaring persona non grata several U.S. officials involved with Noriega and the contras. These included Oliver North, the CIA station chief in Costa Rica, U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, and Adm. John Poindexter, Reagan's National Security Council Adviser.

Like the Kerry Report, this courageous move caused nary a ripple in official Washington or the major media.

Martha Honey is the author of "Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s" (University Press of Florida) and director of the Peace and Security Program for the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. Much of the documentation for this article comes from her book.

[karynnj]

3. The Sirota "follow the money" article on BCCI that BLM posted

earlier clearly belongs here. (It's the clearest easiest descprition of Kerry's work.) link:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

Excerpts:

Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade. It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with respected figures around the world.
All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of whom were eager to see him succeed.

By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge.

<snip>

But legislation is only one facet of a senator's record. As the BCCI investigation shows, Kerry developed a very different record of accomplishment--one often as vital, if not more so, than passage of bills. Kerry's probe didn't create any popular new governmental programs, reform the tax code, or eliminate bureaucratic waste and fraud. Instead, he shrewdly used the Senate's oversight powers to address the threat of terrorism well before it was in vogue, and dismantled a key terrorist weapon. In the process, observers saw a senator with tremendous fortitude, and a willingness to put the public good ahead of his own career. Those qualities might be hard to communicate to voters via one-line sound bites, but they would surely aid Kerry as president in his attempts to battle the threat of terrorism.

The young senator from Massachusetts, thus, faced a difficult choice. Kerry could play ball with the establishment and back away from BCCI, or he could stay focused on the public interest and gamble his political reputation by pushing forward.


(I'm glad he uses such long parargraphs!) This article not only fits the investigator category but has quotes that are great when he's accused of being poll driven.

[karynnj]

4. Does anyone else find it hard to reconcile this

very detail oriented, determined, unrelenting investigator (and the similarly serious legislator) with the warm, personable Kerry you lucky people met in Boston?

[TayTay]

5. Well, we have seen both sides before.

In the 'Going Upriver' film, both sides were present at the VVAW demonstration in Washington back in '71. There was the person who kept the demonstration peaceful and who kept it from vering off into sheer anger. That required the brains to plan it, yes, but also that consummate communicator who could go up to people and defuse all the little bad situations. I think I heard several times in the film that Kerry was the one who went up to angry people and told them, 'It's okay, it'll be alright' and so forth and kept the anger at being denied entry to Arlington Cemetery and anger at almost being kicked off the Mall from erupting. There was that ability to be with people and calm situations. That went hand-in-glove with the absolutely riveting testimony that was given before SRFC. It was the same guy just drawing on different skill sets he had.

The good ones have these different skill sets. That's what makes them special people.

[karynnj]

6. I realize it's the same guy, but he does have an amazing

range of skill sets to draw on. Which I assume was why friends in college already saw him as likely to be President. The Going Upriver video was great because it's easy to forget how crazy that time was and how easily things could have gone out of control. It's also easy to forget he wasn't just the spell binding speaker, but the key organizer, soft spoken spokesman, and peace maker.

[ProSense]

7. Spell binding speaker!

Imagine that. Even though we know Kerry is an effective speaker, the point you make smacks down the BS posted in GD by detractors.

[blm]

8. That's why he will be one of our greatest presidents.

.

[sandnsea]

9. Wow, I missed that one

They tried to set him up to be a drug trafficker. Oh joy. I am convinced the reason he didn't get in a twirl over every potshot last year is because he's been through so much more. How seriously do you take purple band-aids after having Nixon spy on you and the CIA, or whoever, try to hang drug dealer smears on you. Not to mention being a cancer survivor. Maybe he just gave every day Americans too much credit in dismissing this nonsense.

[rox63]

13. Another possible factor

Smaller, more locally-based smear campaigns about his Vietnam service and anti-war protest years have been launched against him here in MA. And those controversies eventually died down and became irrelevant. And they were rarely effective, except for his 1972 campaign. And even then, the carpetbagger label did as much or more damage than the Vietnam War smears in that campaign. It hasn't even registered on the political radar in his last few Senate campaigns. I think he may have figured that attacks like the Swift Boat Liars would be just as ineffective, and would only get more publicity if he punched back at them aggressively.

[blm]

10. Great story to remind the left exactly how BushInc operates when they're

feeling threatened by investigations.

[karynnj]

11. I think you're right

Especially when there are people talking about him as a coward, having no backbone, standing for nothing - and this is a person who has at least 3 profiles in courage type moments. No one does that!

On one of the threads yesterday, they were saying they needed someone with a story or a song etc. They mentioned Clinton's "man from Hope" and they are right that that story did help - but Kerry's problem wasn't the lack of a story, but not having the platform to tell it from. The poster clearly thought Clark has a story (which I frankly don't know)- but I doubt it beats Kerry's. (Even cute little stories (from Tour of Duty)like convincing his parents to let him take a bike on a ferry from Norway to England and then biking to Sherwood Forrest and camping out because Robin Hood was a hero - then again the RW would claim this was hanging out with the ghosts of outlaws at a young age - how like him.)

[blm]

12. Can you point me to that thread?

.

[karynnj]

14. It's a huge thread - here's the post I referred to

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5691309#5692381

[ProSense]

15. Thanks for the articles TayTay. Here's another good one

The Case That Kerry Cracked

By Lucy Komisar, AlterNet
Posted on October 22, 2004, Printed on December 10, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/

One gets an eerie sense of déjà vu watching John Kerry battle the Bush clan. He’s done it once before, against the old man, President Bush’s father, though many voters have probably forgotten. That battle involved the first Bush administration’s attempt to put the lid on an investigation that connected a worldwide criminal bank to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and to Middle East money men who helped the Bush family make piles of cash. Those links connect to people now on the U.S. post-9/11 terrorist list.


Snip...

Kerry The Investigator

As a former prosecutor, Kerry knew a lot about the workings of financial crime. Kerry pointed out how billions of dollars looted from U.S. savings and loans in the 1980s — after Ronald Reagan deregulated the thrift industry — had been stashed in secret offshore accounts. After he became head of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Kerry had wanted to look into cocaine trafficking by Contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the connection to Oliver North’s illegal offshore Contra-support operation. So, in 1986, Kerry hired Washington lawyer Jack Blum to head the investigation.

As an investigator for Senator Frank Church’s subcommittee on multinational corporations, Blum had exposed the Lockheed bribes and ITT’s attempts to destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

“The Foreign Relations Committee was looking at the relationship between drug trafficking and arms dealing and the way we run foreign policy,” says Blum. “’Did we ignore all the stuff going on to support the war in Nicaragua?’ We got into the issue of money laundering.” Blum said he “stumbled across Lee Ritch,” who told the panel, “I used to launder my money in the Cayman Islands. The U.S. wised up, and the bankers told me to shift to Panama. In Panama, I’m told the only guy to talk to is Noriega. He sends me to BCCI.”

Blum says, “We go poking around. I found a guy who had worked for BCCI. I met him in Miami. He said, ‘That’s their major line of work. They’re a bunch of criminals.’ He goes on to say that in addition to handling drug money, they were managing Noriega’s personal finances and that the bankers who did that lived in Miami.” Noriega even carried a BCCI Visa credit card.

So Blum subpoenaed that information. He said, “There is a subplot between us and the federal government and prosecutors. We find out about coming arrests for money laundering , but the feds want to make only a limited case in Tampa; they don’t want to investigate other ramifications. Their story is they had their case and didn’t want it messed up with extraneous stuff. The notion the other stuff was extraneous boggles the mind.”

Blum began poking deeper and came across the CIA standing in the shadows. He found that during the 1980s, the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports that discussed BCCI’s criminal connections — drug trafficking, money laundering — and its control of Washington's First American Bank, part of an illegal plot to get into the U.S. banking system. He also found that this was accomplished with the help of major U.S. figures, including former Treasury Secretary Bert Lance, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington, ex-federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators.

The CIA provided its reports to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan but not to the prosecutors in Tampa. The Treasury and Customs departments also sat on evidence. Kerry tried to get the Bush Justice Department to expand the Tampa investigation or to turn its information over to the FBI or other agencies. It refused.

Blum told me, “We started with laundering drug money, but then pursued it much further and got in testimony a pretty good layout of the criminal nature of the bank. Having done that, we wrote a report and said the matter needs further investigation. But the Justice Department doesn’t pick up on any of the clues. I talked to them. I got a leading figure in the bank to turn evidence to the government, which didn’t want to listen. I taped him for three days with undercover agents in a hotel room in Miami; the government didn’t transcribe the tapes.”

The chief Customs undercover agent who handled the drug sting against BCCI was so disgusted, he quit. The Justice Department ordered key witnesses not to cooperate with Kerry, and it refused to produce documents subpoenaed by his subcommittee. The CIA also stonewalled or lied to the Kerry investigators.

As a junior senator, Kerry was further hampered because his subcommittee mandate was limited to looking into terrorism and drugs. But even that investigation was bothering too many important people, so Clayborne Pell, a Democratic senator, shut it down.

Then the Justice Department closed the Tampa case with a plea bargain that let BCCI off the hook. Kerry was furious. He thought the crooked bank should be shut down. He said the deal kept the bank alive and discouraged bank officials from telling the U.S. what they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including its ownership of First American and other U.S. banks. However, the bank relied on its friends. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) defended the plea bargain on the Senate floor, and then asked the bank to lend $10 million to a friend.

Following the plea agreement, the Justice Department stopped investigating BCCI for about 18 months. It even lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open — after being urged to do that by former Justice Department personnel working for BCCI.

Kerry tried in 1990 and 1991 to get an investigation by the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Democrat Donald Riegle. But Riegle and four of the other members of his committee had gotten money from Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who was later convicted of fraud, and they weren’t interested in drawing attention to crooked banks.

Finally, Kerry got permission to run a one-day subcommittee hearing in May 1991. Then he started holding public hearings through the banking committee, which wouldn’t staff them; he had to use his own people. “Riegle considered himself a gentlemen, because he let Kerry do that,” says Blum. “Riegle is probably the most misnamed U.S. senator.”

The bank’s friends prevented more Kerry hearings, says Blum. “They got it out of Foreign Relations,” he recalled. “We later learned that BCCI, between September 1988 and July 1991 when the bank closed, spent $26 million on lawyers and lobbyists trying to keep themselves in business. They hired people on both sides to shut down.”

But, Blum adds, “They didn’t stop me from going to the New York County DA’s office with Kerry’s blessing to assure a prosecution would ensue.” Blum went to see New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and told him about the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate BCCI's involvement in drug money laundering and other crimes. The Justice Department and the Federal Reserve, run by Paul Volcker, refused to aid the DA’s investigation.

However, Morgenthau got a grand jury indictment of BCCI in July 1991. It said the bank and its founders had defrauded depositors, falsified bank records to hide illegal money laundering, committed millions of dollars in larcenies and paid off public officials. It charged that BCCI had been a criminal enterprise since 1972 and had paid millions of dollars in bribes to central bankers or other financial officials in a dozen developing countries. Morgenthau named Ghaith Pharaon as a front man for BCCI who had gotten a secret loan from the bank to invest in three U.S. banks.


Snip...

The Kerry Committee report issued in 1992 was damning. It said that the White House knew about BCCI’s criminal activities, that the U.S. intelligence agencies used it for secret banking and that BCCI routinely paid off American public officials. Among the Kerry Report’s major findings:

• Federal prosecutors handling the Tampa drug money laundering indictment of BCCI did not use the information they collected to focus on — or report to federal agencies — BCCI’s other crimes, including its secret, illegal ownership of First American Bank.

• The Justice, Treasury and Customs departments failed to support or aid investigators and prosecutors.

• Following lobbying by former Justice officials working for BCCI, the U.S. attorney in Tampa accepted a plea agreement that kept BCCI alive and discouraged bank officials from revealing other crimes.

• CIA chief Casey and the agency knew, by early 1985, a lot about what BCCI was up to and didn’t inform the Justice Department or the Federal Reserve.

• “After the CIA knew that BCCI was, as an institution, a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations.”

• The Federal Reserve approved the first hidden BCCI takeover despite evidence the bank was behind it because it was swayed by influence-peddlers such as Clifford and because the CIA and Treasury failed to raise warnings about what they knew.

• There’s a lot about BCCI that outsiders will never know. Once the investigations started, there were seven fires in the fireproof London warehouses where BCCI stored records. In one of them, four firemen were killed.


Snip...

So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected President? He would be not only the nation’s president but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who knows how to — and is willing to — overcome obstacles, whether they be international criminals or U.S. power brokers, to “follow the money” and bring about justice.

Jack Blum, who is not involved in the Kerry campaign, says: “There has never been a guy who has run for president who has, hands-on, known the kinds of substantive things he knows about the world of international crime, about banking and international bank regulation and finance, about the interconnectedness of the world finance system and how various intelligence agencies play into it. He is uniquely qualified.”

Kerry’s experience fighting the Washington establishment over BCCI also gave him a profound education in the workings of the insider Washington power and corruption that support corporate and organized crime and weaken the country’s ability to counter terrorism. He showed that he has what it takes to stand up to the big-money special interests that don’t want the system to change.

[TayTay]

16. This is what is so interesting going forward.

The corruption of the Republican Party and the entrenched establishment in DC (including some 'get along to go along' Democrats, btw) screams out for reform. We have had other periods in American history when the corruption just got so bad that massive reform movements swept the country and resulted in change. (Doesn't JK mention this in his story of what happened to the 'Dirty Dozen' of Congressmen who were blocking pollution control and clean-up efforts in the '70's. 7 of those 12 lost, which is an amazing result.)

We will need someone who knows, flat out cold knows, where the bodies are buried so to speak. Any run in '08 (if it happens) will focus on different issues than in '04. Corruption will be a very big one and the idea that you can't trust the people in government not to lie to you. (It's a natural fit for JK anyway.)

Love this quote: Jack Blum, who is not involved in the Kerry campaign, says: “There has never been a guy who has run for president who has, hands-on, known the kinds of substantive things he knows about the world of international crime, about banking and international bank regulation and finance, about the interconnectedness of the world finance system and how various intelligence agencies play into it. He is uniquely qualified.

[ProSense]

17. Exactly!

It's an ongoing effort---from the 1970s to today and beyond, but it's not one for the inexperienced. In fact, as you say, the bank of past knowledge has to be part of the package.

[TayTay]

18. Jack Blum interview on Fontline

Jack Blum
Former special counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations.

…So, how does John Kerry, as you observe him, deal with the Iran-Contra investigation?

He wanted to figure out what was going on. But he also didn't wan to wind up, I think, dealing with the tin foil hat kind of crowd. He wanted to get to the substance and find out what was really happening. It doesn't get you very far to tell tales about the strange people and funny dealings in Miami.

At that time, if you were someone who came back with tales of exotic stuff from Central America or even from Miami, people said, "Oh, he's been in the sun too long." He wanted to get to the substance. What was the US government doing? What was our role? Were we paying for it? Were we sponsoring it? And he wanted it to come from people who were reliable witnesses who could at least tell us what was really going on.


It's a risky position for him politically.

Yes. But, again, he came to the Senate and he came to the Foreign Relations Committee specifically interested in that risk -- to be involved in that kind of issue.


Where did this come from?

It came out of Vietnam. I mean, his experience was to come back and to tell the Foreign Relations Committee that Vietnam was a losing cause which was costing us very dearly. And that it was a mistake. And he saw the Foreign Relations Committee as a place where, if something like this happened again, he could stand up and do something. He could be a member of that committee which had so changed the course of America's perceptions of Vietnam.

So, here he was in exactly that situation. A member of the committee seeing this kind of thing going on and saying, "Wait a minute, this is why I'm here." ...


And where did he go with it?

The problem here was getting support. Getting other members of Congress to work with him. And he worked very hard at that. And, in fact, most of his support in this enterprise came from Republicans. He worked very closely with Helms, with Al D'Amato, and got the issue on the table in a way in which forced changes at state, at DEA and got a different public perception. The problem was that there was a systematic trashing that went on of everything we did. Every time we held a hearing, the spin-meisters from the White House would say, "Oh, this is crack pots. The witnesses are crazy."

The Republicans accused us of spending and wasting taxpayer money. And the attack was so powerful and so effective that there were times when the press coverage of the hearings was minimized. We'd be shodded off to back pages and the spin on it was always, "Well, this is fruitcake stuff." Of course, later, when the report is issued and we make the statement about it, there's still a certain amount of skepticism of press. But then when it is 10 years later repeated in the San Jose Mercury and the CIA and the Justice Department go out and do Inspector General reports, they have, in effect, validated everything we had done in the earlier period. ...


Perhaps you can put him in historical context. I mean, you don't often get investigators of his type in Congress...

Well, there are very few people who come to the Senate with a beginning as prosecutors who are also war veterans, who have a burning interest in foreign policy because they've come out of a war that was fought on dubious grounds for dubious reasons. And are motivated to try to make an issue of that. To try to follow their own instincts.

This guy had a certain set of skills and a capacity to do things that very few members of the Senate have. Most people who come to the Senate get there by a kind of chair-sitting which is in the state legislature or they come up through the ranks -- maybe they've been a governor of a state. But they haven't been the prosecutor or the investigator, the person who picks the case apart. And he did have that background. …

[ProSense]

20. It must be consistency.

So much of Kerry's experience and statements can be applied to today's situations:

(Election fraud)

He wanted to figure out what was going on. But he also didn't wan to wind up, I think, dealing with the tin foil hat kind of crowd. He wanted to get to the substance and find out what was really happening. It doesn't get you very far to tell tales about the strange people and funny dealings in Miami.


(Experience counts for the presidency too)

This guy had a certain set of skills and a capacity to do things that very few members of the Senate have. Most people who come to the Senate get there by a kind of chair-sitting which is in the state legislature or they come up through the ranks -- maybe they've been a governor of a state. But they haven't been the prosecutor or the investigator, the person who picks the case apart. And he did have that background. …

[karynnj]

21. It can be used verbatim for now! (as you suggest)

[karynnj]

19. This is a great article

It's stunning how many Senators were corrupted. Many of the names (such as Hatch) I never read before as involved. That must have been a tough time for Kerry to be a Senator - I assme there were some who weren't too nice to him.