HAIL TO THE CHIEF!

“The Gang’s All Here!”

The government which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of their bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

– Woodrow Wilson

Sightings from The Catbird Seat

~ o ~

From PBS Frontline:

Interview with Charles Chidiac

Charles Chidiac is a financier-developer who knew Gene and Nora Lum in Hawaii. He was also involved in Asian Pacific Advisory Council-Vote, a Los Angeles Democratic fund-raising group once headed by Nora Lum. He has a checkered past. He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the BNL financial scandal. . . .

~ ~ ~

Q: Give me an example of corruption in Hawaii in the 1980s.

Chidiac: Well, if you want to do business in Hawaii, you go and you apply for a zoning. You get a call from an attorney. And he says, “I want to see you.”

“About what?”

“Oh, I want to talk about your application.” . . .

“But I already have an attorney.”

“It’s necessary to see you anyway.” So he comes over and he says, “Listen, you applied. This attorney of yours is no good. If you don’t hire me, you’ll never get your zoning. . . .”

So, that’s how they do it. It’s called in Hawaii, “law firming,” instead of laundering.

“Law firming” is laundering money through law firms.

Q: In other words, bribery?

Chidiac: Pure, pure bribery, under the cover of being legal work.

Q: Describe Nora Lum.

Chidiac: Well, she is a Japanese woman … And she’s very smart. … Her husband is an attorney. … She knew all the tricks of raising money …

Q: You had a very close relationship with them for awhile.

Chidiac: . . . I had everything ready and this thing was dragging on and on and on. And I didn’t realize that the state of Hawaii, to extort half a million or a million dollars from a developer, would go to the extent of destroying a project that would create 3,000 to 4,000 jobs for the poorest part in the islands, where you have 30% unemployment. The sugar cane industry is collapsing, and they just didn’t care. . . . We were planning to build three hotels …

Q: Big money?

Chidiac: The project was going to cost somewhere around $800 million.

Q: Did Nora and Gene have access to Governor John Waihee?

Chidiac: All the time, any time. Any time. . . .

Q: What was her stock in trade?

Chidiac: Power pimping … and greed. She pays for power; she buys power.

Q: Did she ever have big success in Hawaii?

Chidiac: I think I was her biggest success. . . . She introduced me to late Commerce Secretary Ron H. Brown in Honolulu. … and she only boasted about her power …

Q: Did she have many businesses?

Chidiac: She had no business. She was just acting as a power peddler. And raised money for different councilmen and politicians. . . .

Q: What motivated them?

Chidiac: They told me that … their only interest was to make money.

Q: How did the Lums and Ron Brown meet?

Chidiac: I think she met him through John Waihee because … as the governor, he met Bill Clinton. . . .

Q: Was she talking to big wigs on the phone all the time?

Chidiac: Yeah, — We had calls from Hillary Clinton. . . . I heard her talking to Ron Brown. …

Q: Does it surprise you that a woman who owns a souvenir shop and her part-time lawyer-husband can go in and out of the White House 13 times and accompany the president to Jakarta . . . Does it surprise you that their daughter ends up working for Ron Brown? That Gene almost gets on Amtrak’s Board of Directors? That Nora can come and go with Bruce Lindsey, who helps them do an oil deal in Oklahoma? . . .

Chidiac: Well, I mean, if the President is corrupt, everything’s possible . . .

~ ~ ~

Looking Behind the Bushes

Great moments in a great American family

1918 – 2001

Much of this article originally appeared in the Progressive Review during the 1992 campaign. It has been updated.

~ ~ ~

1918

Prescott Bush Sr., leads a raid on a Indian tomb to secure Geronimo’s skull for Skull & Bones.

1937

Prescott Bush’s investment firm sets up deal for the Luftwaffe so it can obtain tetraethyl lead.

1942

Three firms with which Prescott Bush is associated are seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

SARASOTA HERALD-TRIBUNE: The president of the Florida Holocaust Museum said Saturday that George W. Bush’s grandfather derived a portion of his personal fortune through his affiliation with a Nazi-controlled bank. John Loftus, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi War Crimes Unit, said his research found that Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a principal in the Union Banking Corp. in Manhattan in the late 1930s and the 1940s. Leading Nazi industrialists secretly owned the bank at that time, Loftus said, and were moving money into it through a second bank in Holland even after the United States declared war on Germany. The bank was liquidated in 1951, Loftus said, and Bush’s grandfather and great-grandfather received $1.5 million from the bank as part of that dissolution . . .

Loftus pointed out that the Bush family would not be the only American political dynasty to have ties to the “wrong side of World War II.” The Rockefellers had financial connections to Nazi Germany, he said. Loftus also reminded his audience that John F. Kennedy’s father, an avowed isolationist and former ambassador to Great Britain, profited during the 1930s and ’40s from Nazi stocks that he owned. “No one today blames the Democrats because Jack Kennedy’s father bought Nazi stocks,” Loftus said. Still, he said, it is important to understand these historical connections for what they tell us about politics today. The World War II experience points out how easy it was then — and remains today — to hide money in multinational funds. . . .

1953

George Bush and the Liedtke brothers form Zapata Petroleum. Zapata’s subsidiary, Zapata Offshore, later becomes known for its close ties to the CIA.

1954

The Bush family buys out the Liedtke brothers.

1955

George Bush sets up a Mexican drilling operation, Permago, with a frontman to obscure his ownership. The frontman later is convicted of defrauding the Mexican government of $58 million.

1959

Manuel Noriega recruited as an agent by the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

1960

Some investigators believe George Bush spent part of this year and the next in Miami on behalf of the CIA, organizing rightwing exiles for an invasion of Cuba. Is said to have worked with later Iran-Contra figure Felix Rodriguez.

1961

According to the Realist, CIA official Fletcher Prouty delivers three Navy ships to agents in Guatemala to be used in the Bay of Pigs invasion. Prouty claims he delivered the ships to a CIA agent named George Bush.

Agent Bush named the ships the Barbara, Houston and Zapata.

Bay of Pigs invasion fails. Right-wingers blame Kennedy for failure to provide air cover. CIA loses 15 men, another 1100 are imprisoned.

George Bush invites Rep. TL. Ashley — a fellow Skull & Boner — down to Texas for a party in order to meet “an attractive girl.” Bush writes that “she may be accompanied by an Austrian ski instructor but I think we can probably flush him at the local dance hall.” Bush notes that he’s had to unlist his phone because “Jane Morgan keeps calling me all the time.” [From a letter in the Ashley archives uncovered by Spy magazine.]

Zapata annual report boasts that the company has paid no taxes since it was founded.

1963

John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Internal FBI memo reports that on November 22 “reputable businessman” George H. W. Bush reported hearsay that a certain Young Republican “has been talking of killing the president when he comes to Houston.” The Young Republican was nowhere near Dallas on that date.

According to a 1988 story in The Nation, a memo from J. Edgar Hoover states that “Mr. George Bush of the CIA” had been briefed on November 23rd, 1963 about the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami to the assassination of President Kennedy.

George says it ain’t him, admits he was in Texas but can’t remember where.

1964

George Bush runs as a Goldwater Republican for Congress. Campaigns against the Civil Rights Act.

1966

Bush, runs as a moderate Republican, gets elected to Congress. Robert Mosbacher chairs Oil Men for Bush.

Apache leader Ned Anderson meets with the Skull & Bones lawyer and George Bush’s brother Jonathan who attempt to return the skull Prescott Bush had looted. Anderson refuses the skull because he says it isn’t Geronimo’s.

1968

George W. Bush joins Skull & Bones at Yale

1970

Bush loses Senate race to Lloyd Bentsen, despite $112,000 in contributions from a White House slush fund. Jim Baker is campaign chair. Bush later claims to have reported correctly all but $6000 in cash –which he denies he got. A 1992 story in the New York Times says the $6000 was listed in records of Nixon’s “townhouse operation” which was designed in part to make GOP congressional candidates vulnerable to blackmail.

1971

Bush is named UN Ambassador by Nixon.

Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs finds enough evidence of Noriega’s involvement in drug dealing to indict him, but US Attorney’s office in Miami considers grabbing Noriega in Panama for trial here to be impractical. State Department also urges BNDD to back off.

1972

Bill Liedtke gathers $700,000 in anonymous contributions for the Nixon campaign, delivering the money in cash, checks and securities to the Committee to Re-Elect the President (the infamous CREEP) one day before such contributions become illegal. Bill says he did it as a favor to George.

1973

Bush is named GOP national chair. Brings into the party the Heritage Groups Council, an organization with a number of Nazi sympathizers.

Bush, according to Lowell Weicker, inquires as to whether records of the “townhouse operation” should be burned.

Robert Mosbacher wins an offshore drilling concession from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

Watergate tapes indicate concern by Nixon and aide HR Haldeman that the investigation into Watergate might expose the “Bay of Pigs thing.” Nixon also speaks of the “Texans” and the “Cubans.” and mentions “Mosbacher.”

In another tape, Nixon decides following his re-election to get signed resignations from his whole government so he can centralize his power. Says Nixon to John Erlichman: “Eliminate everyone, except George Bush. Bush will do anything for our cause.”

1974

Bush is named special envoy to China.

1975

DEA report notes Noreiga’s involvement in drug trade.

George W. Bush graduates from Harvard Business School

1976

Jerry Ford names George Bush CIA director, his fourth political patronage job in a little over five years. Bush later claims this is the first time he ever worked for the CIA. At his confirmation hearings, Bush says, “I think we should tread very carefully on governments that are constitutionally elected.”

Bush holds first known meeting with Noriega. Noriega starts receiving $110,000 a year from the CIA.

Noriega found to be working for Cubans as well, but keeps his CIA gig.

Bush sets up Team B within the CIA, a group of neo-conservative outsiders and generals who proceed to double the agency’s estimate of Soviet military spending.

Senate committee headed by Frank Church proposes revealing size of the country’s black budget — intelligence spending that, in contradiction to the Constitution, is kept secret even from the Hill. According to journalist Tim Weiner, Bush argues that the revelation would be a disaster and would compromise the agency beyond repair. By a one vote margin the matter is referred to the Senate. It never reaches the floor.

Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier is assassinated by Chilean secret police agents. CIA fails to inform FBI of pending plot and of assassins’ arrival in US. CIA claims the hit was the work of left-wingers in search of a martyr.

Bush writes internal CIA memo asking to see cable on Jack Ruby visiting Santos Trafficante in jail. In 1992, Bush will deny any interest in the JFK assassination while CIA head.

Bush claims nuclear war is winnable. (See: The Nuclear Nests)

1977

Philippine dictator Marcos buys back Robert Mosbacher’s oil concession. Mosbacher claims he was swindled. Philippine officials say they never saw any expenditures by Mosbacher on the project.

1978

Bush, Mosbacher and Jim Baker become partners in an oil deal.

From a Washington Post article by Bob Woodward and Walter Pincus: “According to those involved in Bush’s first political action committee, there were several occasions in 1978-79, when Bush was living in Houston and traveling the country in his first run for the presidency, that he set aside periods of up to 24 hours and told aides that he had to fly to Washington for a secret meeting of former CIA directors. Bush told his aides that he could not divulge his whereabouts, and that he would not be available.” Former CIA chief Stansfield Turner denies such meetings took place.

George W. Bush declares his candidacy for the Midland Congressional district. He wins the Republican primary and loses in the general election.

George W. Bush begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. With the help of Jonathan Bush, he assembles several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy Bush, Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker

1980

Bush becomes Reagan’s vice presidential candidate. Runs as a rightwinger again.

Mosbacher becomes chief fundraiser for Bush’s presidential campaign. Forms a millionaire’s club of 250 contributors, each of whom cough up $100,000.

William Casey forms a working group to prepare for possible Carter October political surprise. In early October, an Iranian official meets with three top Reagan campaign aides. All three deny memory of the meeting in subsequent proceedings.

On October 21, Reagan hints he has a secret plan to release the hostages. This is right around the alleged date of a Paris meeting at which the so-called “October Surprise” was settled. Some allege that at this meeting it was agreed to end the arms embargo against Iran if Iran would release its hostages after the election. While Bush’s presence at this meeting has been denied by the House committee investigating the October Surprise, Bush’s whereabouts at this critical time remain in doubt. The White House, in fact, has leaked conflicting stories.

Rep. Dan Quayle goes on a Florida golfing vacation with seven other men and Paula Parkinson — an insurance lobbyist who later posed nude for Playboy. Parkinson describes Quayle as a husband on the make, but says she turned him down because she was already having an affair with another congressman. Marilyn Quayle says, “anybody who knows Dan Quayle knows he would rather play golf than have sex.”

The Reagan-Bush campaign receives stolen copies of Carter’s briefing books.

Bush’s campaign manager, James Baker, forces the dismissal of Bush aide Jennifer Fitzgerald, described in a 1982 Time story as having “much to say about where Bush goes, what he does and whom he sees.” Bush continues to pay Fitzgerald out of his own pocket.

1981

Reagan-Bush inaugurated. Hostages released moments before. Shortly thereafter, arms shipments to Iran resume from Israel and America. In July, an Argentinean plane chartered by Israel crashes in Soviet territory. It is found to have made three deliveries of American military supplies to Iran. In a 1991 story in Esquire, Craig Unger quotes Alexander Haig as saying “I have a sneaking suspicion that someone in the White House winked.”

Says Unger: “This secret and illegal sale of military equipment continued for years afterwards.”

James Baker named Reagan’s chief of staff.

SEC filings for Zapata Oil for 1960-66 are found to have been “inadvertently destroyed.”

Reagan authorizes CIA assistance to Contras.

1982

CIA director William Casey begins Operation Black Eagle to expand US role in Central America. Urges use of “selected Latin American and European governments, organizations and individuals” in the project.

Inslaw, a computer software company, signs a $10 million contract to install a case-tracking program in 94 US Attorney’s offices. Four months later, after obtaining a copy of Inslaw’s proprietary version of the program, the government cancels the contract and begins an aggressive campaign to force the company into bankruptcy. Later sources claim that the program was installed by the CIA and sold to various foreign intelligence agencies.

After $3 million is poured into Arbusto with little oil and no profits, just tax shelter George W. Bush changes the company name to Bush Exploration Oil Co. Subsequently he is kept afloat by an investment from Philip Uzielli, a Princeton friend of James Baker III. For the sum of $1 million, Uzielli bought 10% of the company at a time in 1982 when the entire enterprise was valued at less than $400,000. Subsequently, to save the company George W. Bush merges with Spectrum 7, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. DeWitt had graduated from Yale a few years earlier than Bush and was the son of the former owner of the Cincinnati Reds. Bush becomes president of Spectrum 7. He also gets 14% of the Spectrum’s stock. Meanwhile, 50 original investors in Arbusto get paid off at about 20 cents on the dollar.

1983

Noriega meets again with George Bush.

Bush presents an autographed photo to a WWII Ukrainian leader under the Nazis, whose regime killed 100,000 Jews.

KAL 007 crashes under circumstances that remain suspicious to this day.

Bush promotes Jennifer Fitzgerald from appointments secretary to executive assistant. Seven staffers resign in protest. Fitzgerald tells the New York Post: “Everyone keeps painting me as this old ogre. I really don’t worry about it. All these bizarre things just simply aren’t true.”

Neil Bush forms his first oil company. He puts in $100, his partners contribute $160,000 and Neil is named president of the firm, JNB Exploration.

Jeb Bush’s business partner, Alberto Duque, goes bankrupt, is eventually convicted of fraud and is sentenced to 15 years in prison.

1984

Jeb Bush lobbies the Department of Health & Human Services on behalf of Cuban-American businessman Miguel Recarey, Jr., whose medical firm later collapses. Recarey, who was close to mobster Santos Trafficante, later flees the US under indictment with at least $12 million in federal funds.

George Bush takes part in meetings to plan increased “third country” aid to the Contras.

CIA mines Nicaraguan harbors.

1985

Jennifer Fitzgerald is sent to work on Capitol Hill after stories arise linking her romantically with George Bush.

Stuart Spencer’s public relation firm starts receiving over $350,000 from Panama to improve Noriega’s image.

CIA starts using BCCI as a conduit.

George Bush thanks Oliver North for “dedication and tireless work with the hostage thing, with Central America.” Bush will later deny knowing about the Contra effort until late 1986.

Neil Bush joins the board of Silverado S&L, serves until 1988. Silverado loans his partners in JNB $132 million which they never repay. Silverado will eventually collapse at a taxpayer cost of $1 billion.

408 TOW anti-tank missiles are shipped from Israel to Iran. A day later, US hostage Benjamin Weir is released.

1986

VP Bush goes to Honduras to promote support for the Contras. Takes along baseball players Nolan Ryan and Gary Carter.

Contra figure Felix Rodriguez meets with Donald Gregg, Bush’s national security advisor, to complain about Iran-Contra operatives skimming funds from the Contras.

Bush may have made several secret visits to Damascus between 1986-88 according to a 1992 report in Time, which said two senior GOP senators were pressing for a probe. The allegation is that Bush went to negotiate the release of hostages in Lebanon but in fact stonewalled Syria, “playing for campaign timing. Republicans want to get to the bottom of intelligence-community suspicions that the US somehow blew a chance to free Terry Anderson and his fellow captives.”

Iranian arms runner Manucher Ghorbanifar proposes “diversion” of profits from Iran arms sales to Contras.

George W. Bush and partners receive more than $2 million of Harken Energy stock in exchange for a failing oil well operation, which had lost $400,000 in the prior six months. After Bush joined Harken, the largest stock position and a seat on its board were acquired by Harvard Management Company. The Harken board gave Bush $600,000 worth of the company’s publicly traded stock, plus a seat on the board plus a consultancy that paid him up to $120,000 a year. When Harken runs short of cash it hooks up with investment banker Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas, who arranges a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland. Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, who joins the board as a part of the deal, is connected to the infamous BCCI.

1987

Bush’s former chief of staff, Daniel Murphy, flies to Panama with South Korean influence peddler Tongsun Park on a private plane owned by arms dealer Sargis Soghnalian to meet with Noriega. Murphy later tells a Senate subcommittee that he informed Noriega that he need not resign before the 1988 election despite the Reagan administration public pressure to the contrary.

Bill Casey dies.

Lee Atwater accuses Robert Dole of spreading stories about Bush and Jennifer Fitzgerald. An agreement is worked out, as reported by Sidney Blumenthal in the Washington Post: “The Dole people didn’t spread any rumors and promised not to do it again. And the Bush people haven’t spread rumors about the Dole people spreading rumors and won’t do it again. “

Harken Energy project gets rescued by aid from the BCCI-connected Union Bank of Switzerland in a deal brokered by Jackson Stephens, later to show up as a key supporter of Bill Clinton.

1988

Jeb Bush and a partner default on a $4.5 million loan from a Florida S&L. The default will cost taxpayers’ millions. Bush and his partners will repay only ten percent of the loan but will keep all real estate collateralized by it.

Silverado S&L goes under after receiving 126 cease & desist orders in past four years from the Topeka office of the Office of Thrift Supervision. These orders found conflict of interests, insider abuse and other violations.

Dwight Chapin, ex-Nixon dirty trickster, gets job in Bush campaign.

Rudi Slavoff becomes head of Bulgarians for Bush. In 1983, Slavoff organized an event honoring Austin App, promoter of the theory that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Slavoff joins other GOP ethnic leaders in the Coalition of American Nationalities co-chaired by Edward Derwinski. Among them is a former member of an Hungarian pro-Nazi party. After press revelations, eight of the leaders accused of anti-semitism resign from the campaign. Bush says: “Nobody’s giving in… These people left of their own account.”

GOP flier warns that “all the murderers, rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis.”

Bush establishes Team 100, which will eventually grow to 249 individuals who contribute nearly $25 million in soft money to help the GOP cause. The contributions also apparently help the contributors, various of whom get ambassadorial appointments, legislative favors, and intervention on regulatory and criminal matters.

Bush denies knowledge of Noriega’s involvement in drug dealing.

The Willie Horton ad is aired. Credit for similar tactics is given to campaign guru Lee Atwater, whose PR firm had represented drug-connected Bahamian prime minister Oscar Pinding and the Philippines’ Marcos. Atwater himself had represented UNITA, the CIA-backed Africa rebel group.

Fred Malek, ex-Nixon aide, resigns from the Bush campaign after it’s revealed that he compiled a list of Jews in the Labor Dept. as part of a Nixon investigation of a “Jewish cabal.”

A few days before the supposedly surprise arrest of five BCCI officials, some of the world’s most powerful drug dealers quietly withdraw millions of dollars from the bank. Some government investigators believe the dealers were tipped off by sources within the Bush administration.

Although Felix Rodriguez, former leading cop under Batista, claims he left the CIA in 1976, Rolling Stone reports that he is still going to CIA headquarters monthly to receive assignments and get his bulletproof Cadillac serviced.

Bankruptcy judge George Bason Jr. concludes that the government stole Inslaw’s software through “trickery, fraud and deceit.”

Stock market drops 43 points on false rumor that Washington Post was about the publish the Bush-Fitzgerald story.

1989

Bush inaugurated. Aides tell the press that the new administration would rather “stay one step behind than be one step ahead.”

Bush authorizes CIA support to Noriega’s opposition, giving Noriega an excuse to annul Panama’s elections.

Bush claims executive privilege to avoid testifying in the Oliver North trial, thus becoming first president to use this power to keep his acts as vice president under wraps.

Dan Quayle declares changes in Soviet Union “just a public relations extravaganza.”

Bush brother Prescott flies to Shanghai after the Tiananmen Square massacre to close a deal for an $18 million resort there, despite his brother’s ban on high-level Chinese contacts. Prescott says, “We aren’t a bunch of carrion birds coming in to pick the carcass. But there are big opportunities in China, and America can’t afford to be shut out.”

Prescott Bush also visits Japan, searching for consulting contracts just ten days before his brother arrives on a presidential tour. The Japanese firm that paid Prescott a quarter-million dollar consulting fee comes under investigation for exchange law violations and links to the Japanese mob. (See: “Bush calls for reforms in Japan“)

C. Boyden Gray, the president’s top ethics official, corrects his 1985 and 1986 financial disclosure forms. He forgot to include $98,000 in income.

George Bush signs the S&L bailout bill promising that “these problems will never happen again.”

The Chicago Tribune reports: “After 14 fishing outings, the President has failed to catch a single fish.”

At White House behest, the DEA lures drug dealer to Lafayette Park to make arrest in front of presidential home for the benefit of Bush’s upcoming drug speech. At first, drug dealer is dubious, asks DEA agent, “Where the fuck is the White House?”

Defense secretary nominee John Tower runs into confirmation troubles when it is revealed that he has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from defense contractors. Runs into more trouble with revelations of womanizing and drinking. His nomination is rejected.

The sale of three communications satellites to China is announced. Prescott Bush is a $250,000 consultant in the deal.

GOP memo is leaked implying that House Speaker Tom Foley is a homosexual.

President Bush signs a top-secret directive ordering closer ties with Iraq, which opens the way for $1 billion in new aid just a little more than a year before Bush goes to war against that country. The agricultural credit allows Saddam Hussein to use his hard currency for a massive military buildup.

A second judge concurs that the government stole Inslaw’s software.

The Statistical Abstract of the United States, published by the US government, reports that the GNP of East Germany during the 1980s was greater than that of West Germany. The figures come from the CIA.

Bahrain officials suddenly break off offshore drilling negotiations with Amoco and decide to deal with Harken Energy, George Bush Jr.’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.

Neil Bush bails out of JNB Exploration, the firm where he became president with a $100 ante, leaving his partners to worry about its debt. Days earlier he forms Apex Energy with a personal investment of $3000. The rest of the money — $2.7 million — comes from an SBA program designed to help “high risk start-up companies.” Like JNB, it proves to be just that. Apex will later go belly-up with no assets.

Two months after his father’s inauguration, George W. Bush announces that he and a syndicate of investors have purchased the Texas Rangers. The investors are Edward “Rusty” Rose, Richard Rainwater, Bill DeWitt, Roland Betts (a former Yale frat brother) and Tom Bernstein (Bett’s partner in a film investment concern). While Bush appears to lead the group, Rainwater makes clear that Rose is to control how the business is run. Bush’s stake in the $86 million deal is 2%, financed with a $500,000 loan from a Midland Bank of which he had been a director and $106,000 from other sources. Rainwater and Rose put up 14.2 million, Betts and Bernstein invested about $6 million and the balance comes from smaller investors and loans. Bush will eventually sell his share for $15 million.

1990

Federal regulators give Bush son Neil the mildest possible penalty in the $1 billion failure of the Silverado S&L. The deal is so good that Bush drops his appeal. Among other things, Neil, as a Silverado director, voted to approve over $100 million in loans to his business partners.

January: Bahrain awards exclusive offshore drilling rights to Harken Oil. This is a surprise as Harken is in very shaky financial condition, has never drilled outside of Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma and had never drilled undersea at all. The Bass brothers are brought in by Harken for sufficient equity to proceed with the effort. Harken’s stock price increases from $4.50 to $5.50.

George W. Bush sells two-thirds of his Harken Energy stock at the top of the market for $850,000, a 200% profit, but makes no report to the SEC until March 1991. Bush Jr. says later the SEC misplaced the report. An SEC representative responds: “nobody ever found the ‘lost’ filing.” One week after Bush’s sale, Harken reports an earnings plunge. Harken stock falls more than 60%. Bush uses most of the proceeds to pay off the bank loan he had taken a year earlier to finance his portion of the Texas Rangers deal.

August: Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Harken’s stock price drops substantially. Two months after Bush sells his stock, Harken posts losses for the 2nd quarter of well over $20 million and is shares fall another 24 %, by year end Harken is trading at $1.25. Bush has insisted that he did not know about the firm’s mounting losses and that his stock sell-off was approved by Harken’s general counsel.

George W. Bush is asked by Carlyle Group to serve on the board of directors of Caterair, one of the nation’s largest airline catering services which it had acquired in 1989. The offer is arranged by Fred Malek, long time Bush associate who is then an advisor to Carlyle.

October: Arlington, Texas Mayor Richard Greene signs a contract that guarantees $135 million toward the new Texas Ranger Stadium’s estimate price of $190 million. The Rangers put up no cash but finance their share through a ticket surcharge. From the team’s operating revenues, the city will earn a maximum of $5 million annually in rent, no matter how much the Rangers reap from ticket sales and television (a sum that will rise to $100 million a year). Another provision permits the franchise to buy the stadium after the accumulated rental payments reached a mere $ 60 million. The property acquired so cheaply by the Rangers includes not just a fancy new stadium with a seating capacity of 49,000 but an additional 270 acres of newly valuable land. Legislation is passed and signed that authorizes the Arlington Sports Facilities Development Authority with power to issue bonds and exercise eminent domain over any obstinate landowners. Never before had a Texas municipal authority been given the license to seize the property of a private citizen for the benefit of other private citizens. A recalcitrant Arlington family refuses to sell a 13 acre parcel near the stadium site for half its appraised value. The jury awards more than $4 million to the family.

Fred Malek returns to power with ambassador status to head up planning for the economic summit.

S&L industry is losing money at the rate of $3 million a minute. Bailout chief estimates total cost at $325-500 billion.

Some 200 young soccer players have their games canceled for security reasons because Bush wants to go fishing on the Potomac nearby. Says one seven-year-old player: “We had a tough soccer game and he’s just going fishing. He could play somewhere else.”

Bush brother Jonathan’s east coast brokerage fined in two states for violating laws and Jonathan is barred from public trading in Massachusetts.

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

Federal court of appeals throws out the Inslaw case on the grounds that it did not belong in bankruptcy court.

Bush says, “The economy is headed in the right direction.”

1991

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 Bancshares.

The Miami acting US Attorney is allegedly 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.

Danny Casolaro, a reporter investigating the Inslaw story, is found dead in a motel room bathtub, the day after he met a key source. The death was ruled a suicide. Perhaps he is despondent over the loss of his briefcase, which is missing from the room.

George Bush spends three nights in a Houston hotel so he can claim Texas residency. Texas has no income tax.

Neil Bush bails out of Apex Energy after collecting $320,000 in salary plus expenses. Bill Daniels, cable-TV magnate who has been lobbying against regulation of the cable industry, offers Neil a job. According to a representative, he “thought Neil deserved a second chance.”

1992

New York Times reports that three of Bush’s top fundraisers are being sued in connection with bank failures and another pleaded guilty to mail fraud in connection with an S&L. These men include the GOP national finance chair, vice chair and two co-chairs of the President’s Dinner, which raised $9 million for Republican causes.

Former US Attorney General Elliot Richardson, representing the owners of Inslaw, tells Mother Jones, “I don’t know any case where the government has stonewalled like this.”

First of Harken Energy’s wells off Bahrain comes up dry. George W. Bush takes a leave of absence from the firm to work in his father’s campaign, saying “I don’t want to involve this company in any kind of allegations of conflicts or whatever may arise.”

Village Voice reports that President Bush has taken at least 76 partisan flights during his term, at a cost to the taxpayers of over $6 million.

Nixon’s Jew hunter Fred Malek is back as Bush’s campaign manager.

Campaign sells photo opportunities with the president at a fundraiser for $92,000 each.

Washington, DC, loses $52,000 in taxes because Bush claims to be a Texas resident.

Donald H. Alexander contributes $100,000 to Team 100; shortly thereafter he’s named ambassador to the Netherlands.

Bush says: “I will do what I have to do to be reelected.”

JERRY URBAN, HOUSTON CHRONICLE, JUNE 4, 1992: The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — known as FinCEN — and the FBI are reviewing accusations that entrepreneur James R. Bath guided money to Houston from Saudi investors who wanted to influence US policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations, sources close to the investigations say….

The federal review stems in part from court documents obtained through litigation by Bill White, a former real estate business associate of Bath . . . White became entangled in a series of lawsuits and countersuits with Bath, who for some six years has prevailed in the courts. . . .

In sworn depositions, Bath said he represented four prominent Saudis as a trustee and that he would use his name on their investments. In return, he said, he would receive a 5 percent interest in their deals.

Tax documents and personal financial records show that Bath personally had a 5 percent interest in Arbusto ’79 Ltd., and Arbusto ’80 Ltd., limited partnerships controlled by George W. Bush, President Bush’s eldest son.

Arbusto means ‘bush’ in Spanish. Bath invested $ 50,000 in the limited partnerships, according to the documents. There is no available evidence to show whether the money came from Saudi interests.

George W. Bush’s company, Bush Exploration Co., general partner in the limited partnerships, went through several mergers, eventually evolving into Harken Energy Corp., a suburban Dallas-based company . . .

Bush said that to his knowledge, Bath’s investment was from personal funds, and no Saudi money was invested in Arbusto. Bath, 55, a former U.S. Air Force pilot, declined to comment for the record. Spokesmen for FinCEN and the FBI also declined to comment. According to a 1976 trust agreement, drawn shortly after Bush was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Sheik Salem M. Binladen appointed Bath as his business representative in Houston.

Binladen, along with his brothers, owns Binladen Brothers Construction, one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East. According to White, Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role with Saudi Arabia since 1976. Bath has previously denied having worked for the CIA . . .

Bath received a 5 percent interest in the companies that own and operate Houston Gulf Airport after purchasing it on behalf of Binladen in 1977.

1993

With the new Ranger stadium being readied to open the following spring, George W. Bush announces that he would be running for governor. He is says his campaign theme will be self-reliance and personal responsibility rather than dependence on government.

PBS FRONTLINE: [From a French source] The Saudi authorities’ decision to issue an arrest warrant for Osama bin Laden on 16 May 1993 does not threaten to affect the relationship between the bin Ladens and the royal family. Osama, one of Mohammed’s youngest son, has been known for years for his fundamentalist activities . . .

King Fahd’s two closest friends were: Prince Mohammed Ben Abdullah (son of Abdul Aziz’ youngest brother), who died in the early ’80s and whose brother, Khaled Ben Abdullah (an associate of Suleiman Olayan), still has free access to the king; and Salem bin Laden, who died in 1988 . . .

Like his father in 1968, Salem died in a 1988 air crash … in Texas.

He was flying a BAC 1-11 which had been bought in July 1977 by Prince Mohammed Ben Fahd. The plane’s flight plans had long been at the center of a number of investigations. According to one of the plane’s American pilots, it had been used in October 1980 during secret Paris meetings between US and Iranian emissaries.

Nothing was ever proven, but Salem bin Laden’s accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been “eliminated” as an embarrassing witness. In fact, an inquiry was held to determine the exact circumstances of the accident. The conclusions were never divulged . . .

There was also a political aspect to Salem bin Laden’s financial activities . . .

Salem bin Laden played a role in the US operations in the Middle East and Central America during the ’80s. On his death in 1968, Sheik Mohammed left behind not only an industrial and financial estate but also a progeny made up of no less than 54 sons and daughters, the fruit of a number of marriages . . .

Upon Sheik Salem’s death, the leadership of the group passed to his eldest son, Bakr, along with thirteen other brothers who make up the board of the bin Laden group. The most important of these are Hassan, Yeslam and Yehia.

Most of these brothers have different mothers and different nationalities as well. Each has his own set of affinities, thus contributing to the group’s international scope.

Bakr and Yehia are seen as representatives of the “Syrian group”; Yeslam, of the “Lebanese group”. There is also a “Jordanian group.” Abdul Aziz, one of the youngest brothers, represents the “Egyptian group” and is also manager of the bin Laden group’s Egyptian branch, which employs over 40,000 people.

Osama bin Laden is, incidentally, the only brother with a Saudi mother.

1994

George W. Bush is elected Governor of Texas, defeating Ann Richards 53 to 46 %. . . .

1999

George W. Bush executes his 99th prisoner.

George W. Bush celebrates the Martin Luther King holiday by staying inside the Governor’s Mansion with the windows closed so he wouldn’t hear the thousands of Martin Luther King celebrants listening to speeches right outside his window on the Texas capitol grounds, less than a football field away . .

Bush claims to be reading four serious books while campaigning for president. Total pages of the four books: 1,762

2000

“Jeb’s the smart one” — George Bush Sr. to dinner partner

Former President George Bush tries to block Gen. Manuel Noriega’s release from a US prison because he fears the Panamanian strongman wants to kill him. Noriega attorney Frank Rubino says the assertion was made by Assistant US Attorney Pat Sullivan, who represented the government at a parole hearing for Noriega.

2001

George W. Bush begins his term as the 43^rd President of the United States of America. . . .

BEHIND THE BUSHES

Campaign for America’s Future: Privatizing Social Security

On May 2, 2001 President Bush appointed a Commission that will recommend details to privatize Social Security.

The White House handpicked the members of the Commission. In the words of Ari Fleischer, White House Press Secretary, they all “share the President’s view that personal retirement accounts are the way to save Social Security.”

Following is a brief profile of each Commission member:

Co-Chair: Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner

Co-Chief Operating Officer Richard Parsons has a proven track record as a corporate executive willing to undermine the retirement security of his employees. Parsons managed a “permatemps” system at Time Warner where many employees were falsely classified as temporary workers or independent contractors. These workers did not get the same benefits – including pensions and employer contributions to Social Security – as other Time Warner employees. In 1998, the Department of Labor sued Time Warner on behalf of these employees, forcing them to pay $5.5 million in back-compensation through a settlement reached in 2000.

Co-Chair: Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Former Senator Moynihan once was a defender of Social Security; he now advocates a position that combines a return to pay-as-you-go with substantial benefit cuts and partial privatization.

Carolyn Weaver, American Enterprise Institute

Carolyn Weaver served on the 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security, and was the prime architect of the most radical of its two personal account privatization plans. Her plan would have diverted forty percent of Social Security revenues into investment accounts.

John Cogan, Hoover Institution

John Cogan served in the Reagan Administration Office of Management and Budget. Earlier this year, Cogan was quoted as saying that the money to pay for the privatized accounts could come out of the Social Security surplus that is building up for the baby boom generation: “Right now, if you look at the next 10 years, one could allow individuals to invest 25% of their payroll taxes into PRAs without jeopardizing benefits paid to current retirees”

Thomas Saving, Texas A&M.

Thomas Saving is a public trustee of Social Security and Medicare. He has acknowledged that moving to a system of privatized accounts will impose a harsh penalty on many people. “It’s good in the end, but during the transition to the new, better world, somebody is going to be worse off. Who that somebody is makes a big difference” In 1995, when Saving was director of the Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University, he wrote in an article advocating complete privatization, “Strange as it sounds, we must destroy the social security system, as we know it, to save it”

Fidel Vargas, Reliant Equity Investors.

Fidel Vargas was once the mayor of Baldwin Park, CA, but now works for an investment firm. He also was a member of the 1994-1996 Advisory Council on Social Security, and supported the most radical of its two personal account privatization plans. That plan would have diverted forty percent of Social Security revenues into investment accounts.

Robert Pozen, Fidelity Investments.

Robert Pozen runs a $450 billion financial services company that could make billions in profits annually from the privatization system that Pozen will recommend through his service on this commission. Along with Estelle James, he served on a conservative commission that recommended partial privatization – financed by raising the retirement age, reducing spousal benefits, and severely lowering the benefit payments to middle-income retirees.

Robert De Posada, Hispanic Business Roundtable.

Robert De Posada and HBR have proposed a privatization plan that is fairly specific about the size and nature of the investment accounts – but fails to grapple with the question of financing the investment accounts, saying only that “transition costs must be spread evenly and fairly across generations.”

Olivia Mitchell, Wharton School.

Olivia Mitchell is perhaps the only independent expert on the panel, although she supports privatization and raising the retirement age. Mitchell co-authored a 1998 paper directly refuting the most prominent claim put forward by the Bush White House, that Social Security provides a poor rate of return and that private accounts could do better: “A popular argument suggests that if Social Security were privatized, everyone could earn higher returns. We show that this is false…the net advantages of privatization and diversification are substantially less than popularly perceived.”

Gerald Parsky, Aurora Capital Partners.

In addition to being Chairman of a large financial firm, Parsky was chairman of the Bush California presidential campaign. He was Assistant Treasury Secretary under Ford, and his name was floated as a candidate for G.W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary.

Robert Johnson, Black Entertainment Television.

Robert Johnson has a limited record around retirement security issues – although he has been involved in a protracted dispute with entertainment artist unions over his refusal to pay fair wages or contribute towards benefits – including pensions – for the comics on BET’s show “Comic View.” He is also involved in a significant effort to create a new airline, DC Air, which requires regulatory approval from the Bush Administration.

Gwendolyn King, Marsh and McLennan (parent of Putnam Investments).

Gwendolyn King, a former Commissioner of Social Security under the first President Bush, serves on the board of Marsh and McLennan, a financial services firm.

Bill Frenzel, former U.S. Representative.

Bill Frenzel is a former Republican representative from Minnesota. He is co-chair of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (with Tim Penny).

http://www.ourfuture.org/readarticle.asp?ID=807

BUSH CALLS FOR REFORMS IN JAPAN

URGES WRITING OFF OVER $100 BILLION IN BAD BANK LOANS

By Bob Deans, Cox News Service

TOKYO – Paying tribute to Japan’s past while voicing concern for its future, President Bush visited a shrine to the 19^th century Meiji emperor today and urged modern leader Junichiro Koizumi to take tough steps to get his country’s stagnant economy moving again.

Bush and his wife, Laura, began their day with a stroll through the wooded grounds of the Meiji shrine, a tranquil oasis amid the bustle of Tokyo.

Meeting later with Prime Minister Koizumi, Bush stressed the need for Japan to swallow a bitter pill and write off more than $100 billion in bad bank loans that have become a drag on the economy.

Japan’s economy, the world’s second largest, is idling through its third recession in a decade, threatening regional and U.S. growth. Bush’s own Economic Report, released earlier this month, labeled Japan’s economy “moribund” and said Koizumi’s government was not aggressive enough in dealing with the problem.

With a sluggish economy, Japanese spend less on U.S. and other imports and are also less likely to invest abroad. Experts worry that trend will threaten the U.S. recovery….

The Japan visit, Bush’s first as president, is the first stop in a tour that takes him to Seoul tomorrow and Beijing on Thursday.

Bush hopes to use the trip to shore up regional support for his anti-terror campaign as it moves beyond Afghanistan toward a second and broader phase.

SKULL AND BONES

Skull and Bones, a highly secret fraternal order apparently only found at Yale University, has been the source of an unprecedented number of government officials who have furthered the globalist aims of their brethren in other covert groups, according to researchers.

“Members of the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) when accused of being involved in a conspiracy, have protested to the contrary. And by and large they are right,” wrote conspiracy researcher and author Anthony C. Sutton.

“Most CFR members are not involved in a conspiracy and have no knowledge of any conspiracy. . . . However, there is a group WITHIN the Council on Foreign Relations which belongs to a secret society, sworn to secrecy, and which more or less controls the CFR”

Members have included extremely powerful men such as Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and described as “a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class”; U.S. Ambassador to Russia Averell Harriman; publisher Henry Luce, and J. Richardson Dilworth, longtime manager of the Rockefeller fortune.

According to Sutton and others, this secret society is the American chapter of an earlier German secret organization. Known variously as Chapter 322, the “Brotherhood of Death,” or “The Order,” this group is most popularly known as “Skull and Bones” or simply “Bones.”

The American chapter of The Order was founded at Yale University in 1832 by General William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft.

Taft, who would become Secretary of War in 1876 and U.S. Attorney General and an ambassador to Russia, was the father of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both president and chief justice of the United States.

Russell would go on to become a member of the Connecticut Legislature. His family was at the center of Russell and Company, a firm controlled by some of Boston’s finest “blue blood” families that were enriched first by the slave trade and then by opium smuggling in the early 19^th century. Some researchers believed this unsavory background explained the pirate symbol of skull and crossed bones adopted as The Order’s insignia, an emblem originally used as a flag of the old Knights Templar.

According to Sutton, The Order was brought from Germany to Yale by Russell, whose cousin, Samuel Russel, was an integral part of the British-inspired Opium Wars in China. . . .

The secret German society may have been none other than the mysterious and infamous Illuminati. . . .

Author Ecke agreed, writing that The Order was merely the “Illuminati in disguise . . .”

Considering the nefarious background of its founders and their families, authors Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chairkin warned, “The background to Skull and Bones is a story of opium and Empire, and a bitter struggle for political control over the new U.S. republic.”

Whatever its inception, Skull and Bones was officially incorporated as the Russell Trust in 1856. The Order conducts annual meetings at a club site on New York’s Saint Lawrence River named Deer Iland (sic). The misspelling was at the request of its donor, Bones member George D. Miller. . . .

Author Sutton noted that active membership in Skull and Bones comes from a “core group of perhaps 20-30 families … First we find old line American families who arrived on the East coast in the 17^th century, e.g. Whitney, Lord, Phelps, Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams and so on,” he wrote. “Second, we find families who acquired wealth in the last 100 years, sent their sons to Yale and in time became almost old line families, e.g. Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davidson.”

Ecke wrote that these families exhibited an Old World concern over their heritage and bloodlines. He said they utilize arranged marriages “to protect or ‘advance’ the genetic lines of the pseudo-blue bloods who owe the origins of their inherited wealth and influence to drug running, slavery and carefully chosen marriage partners. These intermingled families help and support each other in their quest for financial, political and genetic dominance.” . . .

Nepotism runs deep in The Order as seen in the fact that modern finances of the Russell Trust were handled by John B. Madden Jr., a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, formed by the merger of Brown Bros. & Company and W.A. Harriman & Company in 1933.

Madden started there in the 1940s working under Senior Partner Prescott Bush, father of former president George Bush, all of them members of Skull and Bones.

A more recent example of members’ fierce loyalty was shown in the 1980s scandal of President Bush’s connection with the criminal activity in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

As the bank’s illegal activities came to light involving many prominent names – attempts were made by the Bush administration to block or blunt any meaningful investigation. Finally a formal investigation of the BCCI was launched by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations headed by Massachusetts senator John Kerry.

Kerry was chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which had received significant BCCI contributions, and he was also a member of Skull and Bones.

The Kerry investigation foundered. Jack Blum, a special counsel to Kerry’s subcommittee, stated, “I proposed a serious investigation of BCCI and was brushed aside. … A high-level cover-up of everything concerning BCCI was set into place after Customs stumbled across their money-laundering operation in Miami, and it’s still in place.”

The interests of both the Morgans and Rockefellers were well represented in The Order. Member Percy Rockefeller tied The Order to Standard Oil properties, while a number of Morgan men show up on the rolls of Skull and Bones. . . .

McGeorge Bundy (The Order, 1940) was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979. During the early to mid-1960s, Bundy served as a national security adviser to both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, his brother William Bundy (The Order, 1939) who had been with the CIA, served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

Many other illustrious names can be connected to Skull and Bones, such as Low, Forbes, Coolidge, Delano, Taft, Stimson, and others. Prominent recent Bonesmen include President George Bush (The Order, 1949); William Bissell (The Order, 1925) whose brother, Richard Bissell, became Deputy Director of Plans for the CIA; Amory Howe Bradford (The Order, 1943), who married Carol Warburg Rothschind in 1941 and soon became general manager of the New York Times; Henry Luce (The Order, 1919) who became head of the powerful and influential Luce publishing empire which included Time and Life magazines; and William F. Buckley (The Order 1950) a nationally syndicated conservative columnist. . . .

Other researchers see Skull and Bones as the epicenter of New World Order control. The Order has been called a “stepping stone” to the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission.

After examining The Order’s influence and control in the areas of foreign policy, finance, education, and religion, Christian author and publisher Texe Marrs urged, “The Order of Skull and Bones must be unmasked for what it is – a great and present danger to our freedoms and to our constitutional rights.” . . .

“The Order has either set up or penetrated just about every significant research, policy, and opinion-making organization in the United States,” declared Sutton. . . .

One of the most thorough investigations of institutional stockholders ever conducted was a 1980 study by the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs entitled Structure of Corporate Concentration. Its conclusion, as reported by author Donald Gibson, was to the point: “Financial institutions, part of or extensively interrelated with the Morgan-Rockefeller complex, are the dominant force in the economy.”

After studying this report, Gibson wrote, “The board of directors of Morgan included individuals serving on the boards of 31 of the top 100 firms. Citicorp was tied to 49 top companies, and Chase Manhattan, Chemical Bank, and Metropolitan Life each had 24 other top companies represented on their boards.

These and a multitude of other overlaps among the top 100 firms provide a dense network of relationships reinforced by frequent ties through private clubs, educational background, marriages, and membership in organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Skull and Bones, The Trilateral Commission, and the Business Council.“

Gibson also noted that at least two Morgan-Rockefeller institutions were among the top six stockholders in AT&T, General Motors, Du Pont, Exxon, General Electric, IBM, United Technologies, and Union Pacific….

Yale has influenced the Central Intelligence Agency more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion,” stated Yale history professor Gaddis Smith.

Rosenbaum made a point of mentioning that Yale slang for a secret society member is “spook,” the same term used in the CIA for an undercover operative….

The BCCI affair

CARTER, REAGAN, BUSH, CLINTON, BUSH, AND BCCI

THE GREATEST FINANCIAL scandal in history — the BCCI affair — left American participants virtually untouched. The media covered the scandal poorly even though, according to one investigative journalist, up to a hundred Washington politicians and lawyers might have been criminally liable.

As a result — much like Clinton and the Dixie Mafia — Americans have but the vaguest notion of what happened. In fact, the two stories overlap. And like many contemporary sagas of corruption, the two stories reached deep into both the major parties. In fact, if George W. Bush is elected, we will be entering our fifth consecutive presidential administration (two Democratic and three Republican) with direct ties to leading figures in the biggest financial scandal of all time.

This time line suggests some of the interplay of individuals and parties:

1975
National Bank of Georgia president Bert Lance, whom former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter described as being like a brother and was Carter’s chosen but defeated successor, meets with Jackson Stephens, a Naval Academy classmate of Carter. Stephens Inc. arranges public offering of NBG stock. Stephens would later be described by the New York Post as the man who was to “Clinton what Bert Lance was to candidate Jimmy Carter.”

1976
Both Stephens and Lance help Carter in his race for the White House. Carter uses the NBG corporate plane without disclosing it. Campaign is later fined.

Two Indonesian billionaires come to Arkansas. Mochtar Riady and Liem Sioe Liong are close to Suharto. Riady is looking for an American bank to buy. Riady’s agent is Jackson Stephens.

1977
Lance comes to Washington as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He quickly comes under investigation for his past financial dealings and in September resigns. His lawyer is Clark Clifford, later embroiled in the BCCI case.

1978
Hillary Clinton, the Arkansas governor’s wife, is getting considerable business from Stephens Inc.

George W. Bush begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. He assembles several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy Bush (a friend of BCCI figure Robert Altman), Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who bought several planes from Air America, a CIA front. Bath’s firm appears to be owned by Saudi investors. He also was a part-owner of a Houston’s Main Bank, along with a couple of BCCI figures.

Stephens brokers the arrival of BCCI to this country, and steers BCCI’s founder, Hassan Abedi to Bert Lance.

Stephens Inc tries to sell Riady stock in the National Bank of Georgia. The Washington Post quotes a US banker suggesting that Riady is working for Suharto, who is trying to butter up Carter: “They think of this country like a ‘regime’ similar to their own and they just don’t realize that such a ploy wouldn’t work.” There’s no deal. Lance’s bank will eventually be taken over by a BCCI front man — Ghaith Pharaon. Pharaon later sells his bank to First American. Pharaon will be fined $37 million by the Federal Reserve Board and become a fugitive.

Abedi moves to secretly take over First American Bankshares — later the subject of the only BCCI-connected scandal to be prosecuted in the US.

1979
Mochtar Riady and Stephens Inc set up Stephens Finance Ltd. In Hong Kong.

Lance is indicted on charges of violating federal banking laws. Clifford’s partner, Robert Altman, represents Lance who eventually achieves a hung jury.

During this same period, Stephens is, according to Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in “False Profits,” playing “a crucial role in BCCI’s penetration of the US market.”

1984
Mochtar Riady buys a stake in the Worthen holding company whose assets include the Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank. Price: $16 million. Other Worthen co-owners will eventually include BCCI investor Abdullah Taha Bakhish. Deal handled by C. Joseph Giroir II. Giroir is the Rose law firm chair who hired Hillary Clinton. Giroir will continue to be a deal-maker for the Riadys.

1985
Arkansas state pension funds — deposited in Worthen by Governor Bill Clinton — suddenly lose 15% of their value because of the failure of high risk, short-term investments and the brokerage firm that bought them. The $52 million loss is covered by a Worthen check written by Jack Stephens in the middle of the night, an insurance policy, and the subsequent purchase over the next few months of 40% of the bank by Mochtar Riady. Clinton and Worthen escape a major scandal. Mochtar’s son James comes back to Arkansas to manage Worthen as president.

Worthen is investigated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for improper loans to companies owned by the Riadys and Stephenses.

1986
George W. Bush and partners receive more than $2 million of Harken Energy stock in exchange for a failing oil well operation, which has lost $400,000 in the prior six months. After Bush joins Harken, the largest stock position and a seat on its board is acquired by Harvard Management Company. The Harken board gives Bush $600,000 worth of the company’s publicly traded stock, plus a seat on the board plus a consultancy that pays him up to $120,000 a year. When Harken runs short of cash it hooks up with Jackson Stephens, who arranges a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland. Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, who joins the board as a part of the deal, is connected to BCCI.

1988
Stephens’ wife Mary Ann runs George Bush’s campaign in Arkansas. He is a member of Team 100 — individuals who have given $100,000 to the Republican party.

A few days before the supposedly surprise arrest of five BCCI officials, some of the world’s most powerful drug dealers quietly withdraw millions of dollars from the bank. Some government investigators believe the dealers were tipped off by sources within the Reagan administration.

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 Rock Worldwide 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.

1995
Webster Hubbell, a former Rose law firm partner — although not known for skill in Asian trade matters — goes to work for a Lippo Group affiliate after being forced out of the Clinton administration and before going to jail. Hubbell represented both Worthen and James Riady during the 1980s.

1998
With the settlement of civil fraud charges against Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, the puny and often diverted investigation into the American branch of the BCCI scandal effectively comes to an end. Under the deal, the pair will have to surrender $5 million in stock in First American Bankshares, which had been illegally controlled by BCCI. They will, however, get to keep $10-15 million in proceeds obtained during their tenure as First American attorneys.

*****

The BCCI scandal cheated depositors out of over $10 billion worldwide. Many of these were lower income people now being paid off at 15 and 25 cents on the dollar for damage done by a illegal operation willingly used not only by hundreds of drug dealers and other criminals from various countries but by the intelligence services of five nations (including the CIA) and at least one government, Pakistan, seeking to finance its nuclear weapons development.

Things always moved a little too smoothly in the BCCI investigation, leaving scores of unanswered questions and, so far as can be determined, hardly anyone to blame. One exception, Swaleh Naqvi, BCCI’s number two man, was given a mild sentence — over the objections of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. He later told prosecutors that he had never explained to Altman and Clifford who really owned First American.

Naqvi’s plea bargain with Justice appeared to have been what the Wall Street Journal called “sweetheart justice.”

Said the Journal: “When drugs and money laundering arrive, political corruption cannot be far behind. If we had an explanation of how BCCI got away with its illegal purchase of First American, we could afford to dismiss such ambiguous connections as lawyer-client relationships. But we have no such answer, and are left to speculate why, in the Naqvi plea-bargain, the Justice Department does not seem to be pressing for one.”

The American media has studiously downplayed the story to the end. The New York Times, for example, put the Altman-Clifford settlement on its business page.

But while the story has disappeared not all the characters connected to this saga have.

One, for example, is still president and another is ahead in the polls….

For more, GO TO > > > The Strange Saga of BCCI

The Secret Financial Network Behind ‘Wizard’ George Soros

This is another post in the series along the theme that: “Corrupt elites prosper at the people’s expense of the IMF, World Bank and ‘shock therapy’ policies of Western advisors under the guise of free-trade or democratic or market-reforms.” . . .

In his article, “Communique of American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee,” … Eugene M. Iwanciw wrote: “The American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee met in New York on Nov 17-18, 1995 and reiterated its strong conviction that a resilient Ukraine is in the interest of European stability and thus also American security.” . . .

The American participants of the AUAC sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) included:

Zbigniew Brzezinski (CSIS counselor); Richard Burt (chairman, International Equity Partners); Frank Carlucci (chairman, Carlyle Group); Gen. John Galvin (dean, Fletcher School of International Law and Diplomacy); Michael Jordan (chairman and CEO, Westinghouse Electric Corp); Henry Kissinger (chairman, Kissinger Associates) and George Soros (chairman, Soros Foundation).

Previous American advisers of AUAC included Malcolm Steve Forbes, Jr. (editor-in-chief, Forbes magazine) … and Dwayne Orville Andreas (chairman and CEO, Archer Daniels Midland Co.), whose company pleaded guilty last month for anti-trust and price-fixing violations and agreed to pay a $100 million fine- the largest fine on its kind ever.

Also in a previous post it was indicated that at least six of the current seven American members of AUAC are also members of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), including George Soros. . . .

George Soros is part of a tightly knit financial mafia- “mafia,” in the sense of a closed masonic-like fraternity of families pursuing common aims. Anyone who dares to criticize Soros or any of his associates, is immediately hit with the charge of being “anti-Semitic”- a criticism which often silences or intimidates genuine critics of Soros’s unscrupulous operations. . . .

According to knowledgeable U.S. and European investigators, Soros’s circle includes indicted metals and commodity speculator and fugitive Marc Rich of Zug, Switzerland and Tel Aviv; secretive Israeli arms and commodity dealer Shaul Eisenberg, and “Dirty Rafi” Eytan, both linked to the financial side of the Israeli Mossad; and the family of Jacob Lord Rothschild. . . .

Rich, Reichmann, and Soros’s Israeli Links.

According to reports of former U.S. State Dept intelligence officers familiar with the Soros case, Soros’s Quantum Fund amassed a war chest of well over $10 billion, with the help of a powerful group of “silent” investors who let Soros deploy the capital to demolish European monetary stability in September 1992.

Among Soros’s silent investors, these sources say, are the fugitive metals and oil trader Marc Rich, based in Zug, Switzerland; and Shaul Eisenberg, a decades-long member of Israeli Mossad intelligence, who functions as a major arms merchant throughout Asia and the Near East. Eisenberg was recently banned from doing business in Uzbekistan, where he had been accused by the government of massive fraud and corruption. A third Soros partner is Israel’s “Dirty Rafi” Eytan, who served in London previously as Mossad liaison to British intelligence.

Rich was one of the most active western traders in oil, aluminum, and other commodities in the Soviet Union and Russia between 1989 and 1993. This, not coincidentally, is just the period when Grigori Luchansky’s Nordex Group became a multibillion-dollar company selling Russian oil, aluminum, and other commodities. . . .

THE ELECTIONS IN ISRAEL

by John S. Torrell

Most Gentiles living today do not know a whole lot about Israel and its people. Some people might remember that Israel became a state in 1948, but why and how it happened is not well known today. Evangelical Christians are told by their leaders that, as Christians, they must support Israel at any cost or God will curse them. That this is not in the Bible, it is nowhere to be found, does not bother the Christian leadership. It’s the official doctrine, right or wrong.

Neither are Christians told by their leaders, that most Jewish people in Israel do not believe in God but are atheists embracing a culture called Judaism. The few Jews who do believe in God and live in Israel are called “Ultra Nationalists,” and are portrayed in a negative light on newscasts where they are shown either praying at the Wailing Wall, throwing stones at other Jews, or blocking streets in protest.

Most of the Jewish political leaders, including bankers, business men, military officers and industrial leaders, have embraced Zionism which is a Cabalistic system working to bring their messiah into power. These people have rejected the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and have embraced the Luciferian teaching of the Cabala.

What happens in Israel will affect the entire world. A war in the Middle East could easily escalate into a World War. I also want to educate my readers to understand, that the World Government leaders do not reside in Israel but in New York, London and Paris.

The local Jewish leaders in Israel are well aware that the State of Israel is just another province to the World Government and that local issues in Israel are not necessarily embraced by the Jewish World Leaders. Anyone reading the Jewish media knows the infighting that is constantly taking place between Israeli Jews and Jews living in other nations.

Knowing this, you will be able to understand why local Israeli members of the Knesset (parliament) in Jerusalem voted for a campaign finance law in 1994, which prohibits foreign (Jewish) contributions to Israeli parties and partisan political campaigns. In other words, the Jews living in Israel do not want to be run as colonists by Jews living in other nations. There are a total of 14 million Jews living in the world today, and of these only four million reside in the State of Israel.

In the 1988 Israeli election, Shimon Peres received $1.6 million from Canadian Jewish Whiskey distiller, Charles Bronfman and the French Jewish tycoon Jean Friedman. (The Bronfman family is one of the most powerful Jewish families today. Charles’ brother Edgar Bronfman is the current president of the World Jewish Congress, and his son, Edgar “Effer” Bronfman Jr. is in charge of Seagrams [an American alcohol distiller giant], MCA Universal studios in Hollywood, ABC news, and a number of other huge businesses).

In the 1992 election, a total of $4 million dollars flowed into Israel in order to sway the election according to the World Government scheme. In the 1996 election, despite the ban of foreign money, $8 million dollars flowed into Israel from American Jews. Since the money cannot be given directly to a candidate, it is used in the same way as elections are done in America and it is called “soft money”. Advertisement is purchased to promote the platform of a candidate, without mentioning his name. It is also used to register new voters (especially the large number of Russian Jews who have been arriving in Israel), furnish transportation for them, organize rallies and bring in busloads of protesters. The most costly of them all, flying in Jews from other nations to register them as voters.

The worst meddling came in the 1999 election when Benjamin Netanyahu was running against Ehud Barak. The latter was the choice of Edgar Bronfman, and to make sure that Barak would win, former President Bill Clinton dispatched his worst “attack dog,” James Carville, and a group of democratic election specialists who managed to get Barak elected through their smear, slash and burn campaign. Inside sources place the money which flowed into Israel on this project to at least $10 million.

But in the early part of 2000, Israel’s state comptroller fined Barak’s “One Israel Party” $3 million for having illegally taken money from foreign sources. This was the beginning of the erosion of power for prime minister Barak.

SOME MAJOR MONEY SOURCES

The World Government is relying on some of the super rich American Jews to funnel money into Israel. The American Jew, S. Daniel Abraham, the owner of “Slim Fast” and a major investor in the dieting aides market, has been a major donor to dovish candidates, and it has been reported that he arranged a dinner meeting between Barak and Yasser Arafat toward the end of year 2000.

Another donor is the American Jew, Haim Saban, chairman of “Fox Kids Worldwide,” and known as one of the most powerful Jews in Hollywood. Two of his best known productions are, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.” Saban hosted a reception for Barak during the 1999 elections, that netted Barak $600,000.

The American Jew, Ron Lauder, the son of Estee Lauder and heir to her $8.2 billion cosmetic company has been in opposition to Edgar Bronfman and supported the right-wing party, Likud.

The American Jew, Irving Moskowitz, a retired obstetrician and owner of gaming businesses close to Los Angeles, has also been in opposition against Bronfman. This retired medical doctor has given his money to buy homes in Palestinian areas, and has settled Jewish families there, particularly in Jerusalem. These are just a few of the wealthy American Jews who do not live in Israel but are eager to dictate policies for the people living there.

In a small nation like Israel, with a total of some six million people (2 million Israeli Arabs) a few million dollars will make a big difference during elections.

In the elections just held in Israel, only 58 % of the voters went to the polls. Many people in Israel did not like either candidate, and just stayed home. With Ariel Sharon winning 62.1 % of the votes, he will take this as a mandate to implement his policies.

The danger with Sharon is that he is known as a ruthless man who is responsible for terrible war crimes, both in Lebanon and in previous wars. Being old, he has nothing to lose, and he might just start a war to prove a point and try to make a name for himself. He will be opposed by the World Government and I would not be surprised if he was taken out by assassination.

Those people who have knowledge of Jewish history, will remember prime minister Yitzak Rabin, who was murdered in public in November, 1995. Just as in the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme (Jewish) in Stockholm, Sweden in 1986, the Swedish intelligence service “SAPO,” was implicated along with the Israeli intelligence service, “the Mossad,” in the murder of Rabin.

It is not in the World Government’s interest at this time to have a major war on its hands in the Middle East. They are not going to be able to do what they did in 1948, when huge numbers of Palestinians were eliminated. With global television, the world population would not accept the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Arabs.

You can rest assured that Bronfman and his staff are now working overtime to control Sharon and make sure he does not start a war.

Remember this, it was Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Arab controlled Temple Area that sparked the current cycle of violence in Israel.

This was a very well planned visit. This is how he began his campaign to become prime minister and the road is paved by dead bodies from both sides who had to die for Sharon to have his way.

THE PRESIDENTIAL PARDON OF MARC RICH

When Bill Clinton gave a presidential pardon to Marc Rich on the last day of his presidency, just hours before George W. Bush was sworn in as the new president, most Americans did not know who this man was and what he has done. As the facts are now coming out, it again shows the corruption of Bill Clinton and his total lack of integrity. . . .

Let me give you the facts and then you can make your own judgment.

Here is what the media told you: Marc Rich has an ex-wife, night club singer and song writer, Denise, who lives in New York. She raised one million dollars for the Democratic Party and gave Bill and Hillary furniture worth $7,000.00 for their new home in New York. She also asked Bill to pardon her ex-husband. At official parties in New York she was caught on video tapes, giving Bill warm and snug embraces, more passionate than what Monica Lewinsky was seen to do. Some of these video tapes were aired on national news coverage.

When the Al Gore campaign demanded a recount in Florida, Denise Rich gave $25,000.00 to Al Gore to help pay for the recount. At a dinner party in New York on November 30,2000, Denise gave Bill Clinton an expensive saxophone, which was recorded on a picture where Hillary Clinton is standing on one side applauding, Bill is in the middle holding up the saxophone and Denise is standing on the other side.

This is all the media (World Government) wanted you to know. Now, here is the rest of the story.

Marc David Rich was born in Antwerp, Belgium on December 18, 1934, to Jewish parents. His parents fled from Europe to escape the Nazis and came to the United States. As a young man Marc was recruited by the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad. A number of brilliant and talented young Jewish men were recruited in the years after World War II, the most well known of them was Robert Maxwell. Here is a brief rundown on Maxwell so that my readers will understand the vastness of this spy network.

Maxwell’s original name was Jan Ludvik Hoch, who was born to Jewish parents in Slatina-Selo, Czechoslovakia, 1923. Most of Hoch’s family died in Hitler’s concentration camps, but Jan was able to flee, first to France and then to England, where he joined the British army and became and officer. At that time he changed his name to Robert Maxwell. His Mossad handlers placed Robert in Germany after the war where he was given access to highly classified German academic and scientific papers, which he sold for a high profit in England. The money was used to purchase a publishing house in England which, in 1951, he named Pergamon Press Ltd. Money was pumped in by the Mossad and Maxwell purchased a number of other businesses in the publishing industry. He ran for the British Parliament on a Labor ticket, and served between 1964-70.

Robert Maxwell became morally corrupted, as do most intelligence agents. He had a great appetite for women and luxury. In his many wheelings and dealings he spent more than he had, so he began to borrow from pension funds and floating loans.

He mishandled his business and siphoned off $1.2 million dollars from his two major corporations, but his financial empire continued to sink. If he had become an embarrassment to the Mossad or if he had made some major blunders is not known, but the Mossad decided to take him out. While he was sailing on his luxury yacht (with a large crew) outside the Canary Islands, Mossad agents on the ship stripped him of his clothes, injected him with a lethal dose of poison and dumped his naked body into the water. Instead of drifting out into the South Atlantic, his body floated the other way and washed up on a beach on the Canary Islands, on November 5, 1991.

After the Spanish police had identified the body and done an autopsy, the Government of Israel requested that the body be given to them and Robert Maxwell was buried in a cemetery for Jewish heroes in Israel.

There are two other Jewish men, who cannot be confirmed to have been Mossad agents, but who have greatly affected political events in the world, and that is the German born Jew, Henry Alfred Kissinger (born May 27, 1923 in Furth, Germany, whose parents moved to the United States in 1938 to escape the Nazis) and the Hungarian born Jew, George Soros (born in Budapest, August 12, 1930, surviving the Nazi years and as a family moved to London in 1947). Most people are aware that Kissinger has been and is a major player in world politics, and Soros runs a financial business known as the Quantum Fund. Soros is feared by all national governments. Wherever he is investing and dealing, the local currency will plummet, and when he is done with a nation, he walks away with billions in profits.

According to the FBI, Marc Rich speaks French, German and English. He used to have citizenship in the United States, Spain and Israel. Since he fled from the United States in 1983 together with one of his partners, the American Jew, Pincus Green, both he and Green have renounced their American citizenship. He has been living in Switzerland since his flight, and also has his business headquarters there. He has personal wealth in billions of dollars.

Rich was indicted on September 19, 1983, by a U.S. Federal Grand Jury on more than fifty counts of wire fraud, racketeering, trading with the enemy and evading more than $48 million in income taxes.

When the American embassy was stormed in Tehran ,Iran on November 4, 1979, they held the entire American staff hostage for 14 months. The United States was able to organize a total embargo on trade with Iran during the stand off. In April, 1980, Marc Rich conspired with the Iranian Government to purchase six million barrels of oil and sell it on the world market. Payments were made fraudulently through American banks and illegal use of American telecommunications facilities (profit: $200 million). . . .

WHO REQUESTED THE PARDON FOR MARC RICH?

The most vocal person requesting a pardon for Marc Rich was Mrs. Denise Rich, who not only had become “a friend” of the Clintons, but gave huge amounts of money and personal gifts to them. Secondly, the sitting prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, repeatedly cited Rich”s contributions to Israel”s “national security” in phone calls to Bill Clinton during his last month in office. Former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit (1989-1996) wrote a letter to Clinton confirming that Rich provided “assistance” to the Israeli spy agency (the Mossad) that produced results “beyond the expected.”

The lead attorney for Marc Rich in the United States is Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel for Bill Clinton. When defending his pardon of Marc Rich, Clinton states that he based his decision on “critical information” provided by Jack Quinn. The latter based his “critical information” on an analysis done a decade ago by Georgetown University Jewish law professor, Martin Ginsburg. He is the husband of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (also Jewish), who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton did not consult with the Justice Department, nor with the FBI or any other federal law agency.

SOME OTHER LAST MINUTE PARDONS BY BILL CLINTON

Former CIA director John M. Deutch (born in Brussels, Belgium, July 27, 1938, the son of a German Jewish couple who had fled from Germany and then moved to the United States in 1940) had previously been indicted for having taken home classified information and kept it on his home computer. As he was trying to work out a plea bargain and plead guilty to a misdemeanor, he was given a presidential pardon the last hours before Bill Clinton ceased to be president.

There were also four Hasidic Jews from New York, Benjamin Berger, Jacob Elbaum, David Goldstein and Kalmen Stern who had been sentenced to prison for having swindled the government of tens of million of dollars with various fraudulent schemes. They had set up a fictitious Jewish school, a yeshiva, and then collected tens of millions of dollars from various Federal programs to support the nonexistent school and its imaginary students.

Of the 140 felons receiving a last minute pardon from Clinton, 17 are Jewish.

Some more facts as we close this newsletter: When former president, Bill Clinton, took office after his election in 1992, he appointed 37 American Jews to his administration, which consisted of 67 openings. Six American Jews held a cabinet post and he appointed two American Jews to the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Both paid their dues back to Clinton when the Supreme Court made a final decision of the presidential election in the State of Florida.

The prestigious Jewish magazine, The Jerusalem Report, makes the following statements in its January 15, 2001 issue in an article titled “Unchartered Waters.”

“The Jews are not at the table. Once again, for American Jews, the sky is falling. At noon on January 20, George W. Bush takes office as president, unbeholden to a community that voted overwhelmingly for his opponent, Al Gore…. The most obvious manifestation of the Jews’ diminished influence in the new administration is their small numbers within Bush’s inner circle. His initial cabinet appointments included not one Jew. After the Clinton years, when Jews held a high number of senior posts, that’s a painful comedown.” . . .

Inside Traders

(CGI-BIN) MORE THAN 80 HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS of the U.S. government have left federal service since 1986 to represent or lobby for foreign trade or security interests, according to a March 1992 General Accounting Office (GAO) report.

The report, “Foreign Agent Registration: Former Officials Representing Foreign Interests Before the U.S. Government,” identifies two senators, one congressperson, seven White House officials, 33 senior congressional staff and 39 executive agency officials who have gone on to represent public or private interests from 43 countries.

“These people are using their training and access to privileged and sensitive economic information … to sell out to the highest bidder at a later date,” said Representative Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, in releasing the GAO report.

Officials who have left through the revolving door include: William E. Brock, former Secretary of Labor and United States Trade Representative from 1981 to 1985, who has represented the governments of Taiwan and Panama, as well as the Mexican Ministry of Commerce during the debate over “fast-track authority” for trade agreements; former Senator Mark Andrews, who has represented over 17 Japanese businesses since he left the Senate in 1986; and Michael Smith, former deputy trade representative at the State Department, who is currently serving as a consultant to the governments of Mexico and Canada , and to the Canadian Sugar Institute.

The revolving door is a two-way problem, with individuals who previously represented foreign interests occupying top positions in the U.S. trade bureaucracy, according to a recent report from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity. Current U.S. Trade Representative Carla Hills, for example, was registered in 1985 as a representative for Daewoo Industrial Co., Ltd., a Korean conglomerate, and has also worked for the foreign companies Panasonic Industries and Reuter.

Several House members have proposed legislation to curtail government officials’ revolving door activities. Kaptur and other legislators are proposing legislation that would restrict trade officials and senior members of the executive and legislative branches from lobbying after leaving government service. The bill will probably be introduced in May, according to Kaptur’s office. . . .

– CGI-BIN

NOW TO TAKE A CLOSER LOOK AT SOME OF THE GANG POLITIC

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From Stupid White Men (Copyright 2001), by Michael Moore:

Card was General Motors’ chief lobbyist before leaving to work in the Bush administration. He was also CEO of the now-defunct American Automobile Manufacturers Association, which lobbied against stricter fuel emissions standards and fought over trade issues with Japan.

Card testified before Congress on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Lobbying Group against the “Passenger’s Bill of Rights.” He personally contributed $1,000 each to the losing campaigns of John Ashcroft and Spencer Abraham.

From Stupid White Men (Copyright 2001), by Michael Moore:

Like may in the Bush cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman has a long career within Republican administrations. She worked for both Ronald Reagan and Poppy Bush and then served as director of California’s Food and Agriculture Department under Governor Pete Wilson.

In California she encouraged policies that have helped giant corporate farms squeeze out family-owned farms – so that now, for example, a mere four companies process 80 percent of American-produced beef.

One of the least wealthy of the cabinet members (worth a mere $680,000), Veneman supplemented her income by serving on the board of Calgene – the first company to market genetically engineered foods to stores.

Calgene was bought out by Monsanto, the nation’s leading biotech company. Monsanto was then bought by Pharmacia.

Monsanto, which gave $12,000 to Bush’s presidential campaign, is trying to block legislation that would require food labels to identify biotech ingredients.

Veneman has also served on the International Policy Council on Agriculture, Food and Trade, a group funded by major food manufacturers such as Nestlé and Archer Daniels Midland.

For more on Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland, GO TO > > > The Biotech Birds

Hills currently serves as a Member of the Board of Directors for American International Group, Chevron, Lucent Technologies Inc., and Time Warner. She is a Co-Chair of the International Advisory board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a Vice Chair of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and U.S. China Business Council; a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Asia Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Institute for International Economics, and the America-China Society; and a Member of the Trilateral Commission and the Inter-American Dialogue.

Hills served as United States Trade Representative from 1989-1993. As a member of President Bush’s Cabinet, Hills was the President’s principal advisor on international trade policy. She was also the nation’s chief trade negotiator, representing American interests in multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations throughout the world.

Hills was chairman of the Urban Institute from 1983 through 1988, and was a member of the Executive Committee of the American Agenda, co-chaired by Presidents Ford and Carter. In 1981-1982, she served as Vice-Chairman of President Reagan’s Commission on Housing and in 1985-1986 as a member of the President’s Commission on Defense Management. Hills has been active in the American Bar Association, serving as Chairman of the Antitrust Section 1982-1983, and as Chairman of the Conference of Section Chairmen in 1983-1984.

From 1974 to 1975, she was Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division, United States Department of Justice.

In 1975, Carla Hills, already serving as an assistant attorney general, was named by Republican President Gerald Ford as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, becoming the third woman in the US to hold a cabinet-level position. Her lack of relevant experience was somewhat controversial during the appointment hearings. She was succeeded, when Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office, by Patricia Robert Harris, in 1977.

In 1989, President George Bush appointed her to another cabinet level position, this time as US Trade Representative. (At the same time, Bush appointed Elizabeth Dole, the former Secretary of Transportation, as Secretary of Labor.)

A free trade advocate, Hills was the primary US negotiator of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

She was first offered an appointment as assistant US Attorney by Elliot L. Richardson in 1973, but he resigned shortly thereafter during the Watergate scandal. The offer was renewed by his successor, William B. Saxbe, in 1974.

From 1978 through 1989 she was active again in her profession of law; after 1993 she has worked as a consultant and public speaker. She was one of the founders of the Forum for International Policy.

Hills co-founded the Los Angeles law firm of Munger, Tolles & Hills, where she was a partner from 1962-1974. She was an Adjunct Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School, teaching antitrust law, and co-authored the Antitrust Adviser, which was published by McGraw-Hill.

* * *

THE JAPANESE WURLITZER

From “Agents of Influence: How Japan Manipulates America’s Political and Economic System,” (copyright 1990)

by Pat Choate

JAPAN’S ECONOMIC PROPAGANDA techniques are remarkably similar to America’s political propaganda techniques. A quick way to understand how Japan spreads its propaganda in America is to look at how America spreads its own propaganda elsewhere.

America operates two propaganda program – one is overt, the other is covert. The overt program is operated by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), which diffuses information about American culture, history, and political positions. USIA employs all the standard public relations techniques – hosting lunches, arranging interviews, distributing literature, providing American guest speakers, stocking libraries, arranging cultural exchanges, sponsoring conferences, and financing trips to America for students, academics, and foreign opinion leaders.

America’s covert propaganda program is directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. By any measure, this is a massive undertaking. Loch Johnson estimates that fully 40 percent of CIA secret operations are propaganda programs….

In addition to advancing specific U.S. themes, the CIA also uses its media assets to boost politicians and opinion leaders in other countries whose positions are favorable to the United States and to tarnish those whose positions are not. Other nations do the same, including Japan….

Japan’s propaganda techniques are similar to those used by America. Much like an enormous Wurlitzer organ, Japan pumps out a steady flow of propaganda through thousands of outlets – books, speeches, reports, conferences, television, editorials, articles, and whisper campaigns….

It’s not surprising, Japanese investors provide much of the new money on which Wall Street depends. And Japanese investors now own an extensive financial stake in may of American’s leading investment firms. Nomura Securities, for instance, owns 20 percent of Wassertein, Perella, the prominent merger and acq1uisition (M&A) specialists. Yamaichi Securities holds 20 percent of the Lodestar Group, which is led by the ex-vice chairman of Merrill Lynch & Company and former chairman of Morgan Stanley & Company.

Sumitomo Bank bought a 12.5 percent share in Goldman, Sachs for $500 million in 1986. Former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker works for Fuji-Wolfensohn, a joint venture to which Fuji Bank contributed $52.5 of the $55 million start-up capital….

Japan’s Political Mind-set

… In late 1988, there was much speculation about who would be named to the position of U.S. Trade Representative. Although Carla Hills’s name was never mentioned in the American press during this period, the Japanese knew she was the leading candidate weeks before she was appointed.

One week prior to her appointment, a Japanese official bragged to an American friend that “the lady” who would be USTR was “most acceptable” to Japan. Two days before President Bush announced Hills’s appointment, a Japanese newspaper broke the story in Tokyo.

What these examples illustrate is that Japan may now have the best political intelligence system in America. Certainly it rivals the information-gathering efforts of the Soviet KGB. It is comprehensive and systematic. It employs thousands of Americans, may of whom have direct access to the most intimate political information of virtually ever important organization or network in this country….

Washington’s Revolving Door

In theory, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) is responsible for developing and coordinating U.S. trade policy and for leading trade negotiations. It sits in the Executive Office of the President, where its staff can coordinate the trade activities of the other departments of the federal government.

Though the office is staffed by career trade specialists, it is headed by political appointees – the USTR, three deputies, and a general counsel. Since the inception of this office in the early 1960s, its top tier has been regularly depleted by the revolving door.

Between 1973 and 1990, one-third of the USTR officials who held principal trade positions left to become registered foreign agents. Of these, most did work for Japan. Half (four of eight) of those who served as the USTR later became lobbyists for foreign concerns. Of these, three went to work for Japan. All but two of those who served as the Office’s general counsel – America’s top trade lawyer – hired out as foreign agents when they left. Again, most worked for Japan.

In 1989, the top three American trade positions – the USTR and the two senior deputy USTRs – went to people who were working for Japanese and other foreign interests. Each was once a high-ranking federal official. Each represented overseas concerns after leaving government. Each spun the revolving door full circle by reentering public office. If history is a guide, moreover, one or more of the three will again represent foreign interests when they leave public office.

Carla Hills, the President’s choice to be America’s top trade negotiator, had been an Assistant Attorney General in the Nixon Administration and was HUD Secretary under Gerald Ford.

In the mid-198s, she worked as a registered foreign agent for Daewoo, a Korean conglomerate that makes autos, steel, ships, electronics, and heavy machinery and operates a major bank and construction company.

In the late 1980s, Hills also lobbied for two Canadian timber companies. Just prior to entering office as the USTR, she was providing business and legal advice to Japan’s Matsushita Corporation.

Her husband is Roderick Hills, who represented C. Itoh, one of Japan’s largest trading companies, when it was caught up in the Toshiba affair.

President Bush chose Julius Katz to be one of two senior Deputy USTRs. Prior to being named Hill’s deputy, Katz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs in the Nixon Administration, was head of the well-connected Government Research Corporation (GRC), a Washington-based public affairs firm, whose clients included the Japanese government, Hitachi, and Toyota.

As the other Washington Deputy USTR, Bush chose S. Linn Williams, a former general counsel at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), to focus on U.S.-Japan trade. His immediate prior position was representing Japanese clients as the partner who opened the Tokyo office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, one of Los Angeles’ largest law firms and a major firm representing Japanese interests….

For more, GO TO > > >: BiotechBirds; HUD; The Sinking of the Ehime Maru; The Secret Nests; The Story of Enron

From Stupid White Men (Copyright 2001), by Michael Moore:

When not fighting wars, Powell sat on the boards of Gulfstream Aerospace and AOL. Gulfstream makes jets for both Hollywood honchos and foreign governments like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

During his time at AOL, the company merged with Time Warner, and Powell’s stock rose in value by $4 million. At the time, Colin’s son, Michael Powell, had been the only Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member who advocated that the AOL/Time Warner merger go through without question.

Powell’s son has since been named chairman of the FCC by George W. Bush; part of his job is to oversee the activities of AOL/Time Warner.

He will also oversee any regulation of AOL’s monopolistic “instant messaging” technology.

For more, GO TO > > > Nests in the Pentagon

From Stupid White Men (copyright 2001) by Michael Moore:

National Security Adviser – Condoleezza Rice

For her service on Chevron’s board of directors, Rice had a 130,000-ton oil tanker named after her.

She was also a director at Charles Schwab and Transamerica, and has served as an adviser for J.P. Morgan; she also served on Bush the Elder’s National Security team.

For much more, GO TO > > > Condoleeza and the Chicken Hawks

From nancymarkle.com (www.nancymarkle.com/nutrapoison/believers.html):

Granitic Believers

G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical firm that introduced NutraSweet, worked symbiotically with federal and congressional officials, bribed investigators when violations of law were exposed, “anything” to move aspartame to market.

As far back as 1969, an internal Searle “strategy memo” concluded the company must obtain FDA approval to outpace firms competing for the artificial sweetener market. Another memo in December 1970 urged that FDA officials were to be “brought into a subconscious spirit of participation” with Searle.

To that end, with enormous profits at stake, the pharmaceutical house set out on a long struggle to transform the Pentagon’s biochemical warfare agent into “the taste Mother Nature intended”….

Aspartame found early opposition in consumer attorney James Turner, author of The Chemical Feast and a former Nader’s Raider. At his own expense, Turner fought approval for ten years, basing his argument on aspartame’s potential side effects, particularly on children.

His concern was shared by Dr. John Olney, Professor of neuropathology and psychiatry at Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis. Dr. Olney found that aspartame, combined with MSG seasoning, increased the odds of brain damage in children….

Internally, aspartame breaks down into its constituent amino acids and methanol, which degrades into formaldehyde. The FDA announced in 1984 that “no evidence” has been found to establish that the methanol byproduct reaches toxic levels, claiming that “many fruit juices contain higher levels of the natural compound.”

But the Medical World News had already reported in 1978 that the methanol content of aspartame is 1,000 times greater than most foods under FDA control….

Senator Orrin Hatch, a hidebound archconservative and NutraSweet advocate, downplayed criticism of the sugar substitute.

“Some people have lost their memory after drinking a variety of things,” he argued. ”The bottom line is this: The studies supporting aspartame’s approval have been examined and reexamined. More than enough sound, valid studies exist to demonstrate aspartame’s safety.”

Hatch of Utah, reports the Wall Street Journal, has “given his strong support of the pharmaceutical industries.”

So have the “Hatchlings.”

David Kessler, FDA Commissioner under presidents Bush and Clinton, was once an aide to Orrin Hatch.

Hatch’s former campaign manager and aide, C. McClain Haddow, was sentenced to prison for conflict-of-interest charges arising from his work as a Reagan administration health official.

And Thomas Parry, Hatch’s former chief of staff, has carved a sumptuous life for himself as a Republican fund-raiser and lobbyist with clients in the pharmaceutical industry. All told, Parry represents 30 clients, including Eli Lilly, Warner-Lambert, and Johnson & Johnson, not to mention ranking defense firms and the Bahamas government.

Parry’s pharmaceutical clients have enriched Senator Hatch’s campaign coffers, and in turn Hatch lavishes his attentions on them.

By the time Orrin Hatch was stumping for NutraSweet in the U.S. Senate, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta had received 600 letters complaining of NutraSweet’s adverse effects. The National Soft Drink Association (NSDA) had them too. . . .

Also at the center of the effort to land FDA approval of NutraSweet stood Donald Rumsfeld – “Rummy” to his friends – chairman of G.D. Searle upon leaving the Ford administration in 1977.

Rumsfeld, the product of a wealthy Chicago suburb, was a Princeton graduate and a Navy pilot during the Korean conflict. He entered politics as a Congressional House aide attending night classes at Georgetown University Law School, which is closely aligned with the CIA.

Rumsfeld campaigned ambitiously for Richard Nixon, who drafted him to direct the Office of Equal Opportunity on May 26,1969. He quickly established an office to spy on his employees in a holy crusade to flush out “revolutionaries” said to be granting federal funds to politically subversive organizations-a throwback to McCarthy’s tantrums.

Rumsfeld also figured in Nixon’s notorious Power Control Group, spearheaded by Charles Colson and John Ehrlichman.

Gerald Ford named Rumsfeld executive chief of staff upon the resignation of Al Haig.

In 1986 he was named chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Studies, a neoconservative “think tank” (read: propaganda mill) established in 1972 by Edwin Meese and Caspar Weinberger.

ICS has sponsored such opinion-shaping projects as a study of expansions in “entitlement programs” and their erosive effects on the economy, and a book on the uses of coercion by Communist regimes.

Rumsfeld, at 43, became the county’s youngest secretary of defense.

For many years he has been a vocal proponent of chemical weapons. He is chairman of the Rand Corp.

In 1988, he dropped a presidential bid, and was named a v.p. of Westmark Systems, led by past NSA Director Bobby Ray Inman.

Rumsfeld was one of Westmark’s founding directors, sharing the board with Joseph Amato, a former vice president at TRW (and a colleague of Inman’s at the National Security Agency), and Dale Frey, chairman of the General Electric Investment Corp.

Rumsfeld, a veteran political operative, was an adept at the vulgar art of public relations. He was recruited by G.D. Searle because he had “a Boy Scout image,” according to one company official.

A house politician was precisely what Searle needed to compensate for the damage done by independent researchers concerned about the toxic effects of aspartame. In March 1976, an FDA task force brought into question all of the company’s testing procedures between 1967 and 1975.

The task force described “serious deficiencies in Searle’s operations and practices which undermine the basis for reliance on Searle’s integrity.”

The final report of the FDA task force noted faulty and fraudulent product testing, knowingly misrepresented findings, and instances of “irrelevant or unproductive animal research where experiments have been poorly conceived, carelessly executed or inaccurately analyzed.”

For more, GO TO > > > The NutraSweet Syndrome; Rand Corporation

In this interview from December 7th, 1995, they discuss issues of national importance and STUNNING IMPACT.

Essentially they give out the reason for Vincent Foster’s Death, and the fact that the “resignations” of the Congresspersons are NOT for policy reasons but because they have been caught with millions in corrupt funds in Swiss Banks.

Read this to learn what the “mainstream media” doesn’t ever tell you…

Quinn’s Interview with Jim Norman

QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and currently writing for Media Bypass Magazine after having uncovered Caspar Weinberger’s Swiss bank account (we do get punished for some of the truths we uncover, do we not?). Jim is on the phone with us this morning. Good Morning, Jim.

NORMAN: Hi, how are you?

QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea of what it is we are going to launch into after 8 o’clock, and I want to give some background into this. Is it fair to say that since Iran-Contra that the government has sort of been involved in the drug business?

NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back even to the Vietnam War days — remember the Golden Triangle, Laos, Cambodia and all that, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was always on a much smaller scale. What apparently happened was that in the 80s we got into it in a big way, basically nationalizing the wholesale importation of drugs from Central and South America. The idea was that we control it somehow that way; instead, it has just become the tail wagging the dog, I think.

QUINN: It’s become the funding source for just about anything that the government covertly wants to do, and for the moneys that various elements of the government don’t want to ask the Congress for, nor do they want Congress to know about.

NORMAN: Right. And it’s an arms business, too. They are kind of all tied up together.

QUINN: So it’s arms and drugs?

NORMAN: Right.

QUINN: Kenneth Starr is currently our Whitewater prosecutor, and I have long said on this show that I find Ken Starr interesting but also troubling in that there are many elements to the Whitewater scandal. Part of the laments have to do with banking and have to do with Madison Savings and Loan, check kiting, stuff that went on with the Arkansas Development Financial Authority, but basically there are really two elements — there is Whitewater and then there is all the stuff with Mena Airport, Iran-Contra, drugs into the country, various unexplained deaths, one of them Vince Foster, the possibility of espionage on the part of the first lady, and all of this lies behind a brick wall that Mr. Starr has been positioned upon to make sure that they get Clinton but that the fire doesn’t burn past that wall; because on the other side of that wall are Republicans and Democrats. Am I right?

NORMAN: That’s right. He is not looking at Mena; he doesn’t have the authority to from Janet Reno. He does have authority to look at the Vince Foster death, but I think only inasmuch as it relates to the Whitewater situation. The whole thing is hemmed in and beyond that is this whole national security blanket that has been thrown over big parts of this thing that you couldn’t touch if you wanted to.

QUINN: It’s interesting, I find, that Dr. Henry Lee, who was part of the defense team for the Simpson trial, has ended up working on the Vince Foster affair. The word that I get is that he is going to say it was indeed a suicide. You have to remember something about Dr. Henry Lee — he was, oddly enough, the guy that was called in to do some work on the Danny Casolaro death down in Martinsburg, way back in the early nineties. Was it 1991?

NORMAN: I think it was 1991.

QUINN: This was that reporter that you may have heard about that was found dead in a motel room, supposedly from a self-inflicted wound, even though the papers (a year’s worth of investigative reporting) were all missing. He was working on the story that he called the “octopus” and basically it’s the same story that you are working on, isn’t it?

NORMAN: Yes, I know I’m talking to a lot of the same sources. Danny supposedly slashed his wrists twelve times, sometimes deep enough to cut the tendon.

QUINN: Yeah, right. And his files were all missing. Sure, there’s a suicide. Right. And they embalmed his body before they even had a chance to inform his parents that he was dead. So it’s another “Arkanside.”

NORMAN: George Williamson, who is an investigative reporter out of San Francisco, has been working on that. He has come up with all kinds of stuff — other witnesses that have disappeared, people in the hotel who just aren’t there anymore — disappeared mysteriously.

QUINN: It’s interesting. There are a lot of people who are witnesses to various deaths involved with this Arkansas crowd, Danny Casolaro for one. Also, the two young boys on the railroad tracks down in Arkansas who stumbled on the drug operation. A lot of the witnesses around that have met violent and untimely deaths as well. So here are a great deal of ugly people involved in this. We are going to get down to what it all means in terms of government corruption and scandal of immense proportions that touch both parties. This is really nonpartisan. The fact that I don’t happen to like “President Pantload” doesn’t have a whole lot to do with this; he was just sort of a guy who happened to be there with his hand out at the time. It all goes back to the late 70’s, right Jim?

NORMAN: Yeah, and even before that. Let’s start with the early 80s when Bill Casey came into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That’s when our government decided to embark on this amazing and extremely unbelievably successful effort to spy on the world’s banks. We did it! We have been spying on world banking transactions for more than a dozen years. The way we do it is by basically forcing foreign banks, wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers that let our NSA (National Security Agency) which is the intelligence arm of the government, to basically surveil wire transfers all over the globe.

QUINN: Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the banking community around the globe into buying the software that you are selling?

NORMAN: First of all you sell to front companies like this company Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information Services. They had another company called Boston Systematics, an affiliate based in Israel mainly. There is Robert Maxwell, the UK publisher, who is fronting this stuff. There are a whole bunch of people fronting this.

QUINN: Wait a minute, Robert Maxwell — isn’t he dead?

NORMAN: Yeah, he is now.

QUINN: Didn’t he have an unfortunate accident?

NORMAN: Fell off his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.

QUINN: Why, isn’t that amazing!

NORMAN: The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a few lines of code, that would allow somebody to dial into a computer without leaving any footprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then you could go around and look around in files or you could collect information from a system without the user even knowing it

QUINN: Now this software, which was originally called Promis, was stolen from a company called Inslaw by the Justice Department. It ended up somewhere, probably at E-Systems or somewhere, and it was converted into banking software. It Started out as software designed to track prosecutorial cases around the country. My question is — why didn’t Ed Meese just pay the damn bill, and none of this would ever have come to light! Danny Casolaro was chasing the stolen software when he stumbled on what it was being used for.

NORMAN: Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use in the Justice Department, but they were going to use it all over the place. If they were paying royalties on it, Inslaw would know just how extensive the use was of the software, and they didn’t want people to know how extensively it was going to be used.

QUINN: I see…

NORMAN: Plus, a lot of the profits from the resale of this went back into private profits. It was customized and resold to the intelligence community. It became sort of a basic platform database tracking system for most of our intelligence agencies and many of those abroad. The idea was “Well, we can all talk to each other now.” In fact what it has allowed us to do is basically rifle through other people’s data files abroad too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign intelligence agencies and it was also bugged. We have other ways of basically surveilling and downloading foreign electronic databases. The whole computer world is much more porous and transparent than anybody wants you to believe.

QUINN: There is a bank here that I know that uses this software right here in this town, and I’m sure that there is probably more than one. Everybody’s got it.

NORMAN: In some form or another. It goes under different names now. It’s been modified many times. I think when Inslaw had it, it was a half million lines of code. I’m told now it’s a couple of million lines anyway. It’s gone through many, many modifications over the years.

QUINN: This company, Systematics, which is I believe still 8% owned by Jackson Stevens at Stevens Inc., who, by the way, is one of the backers of Bob Dole — how troubling is that?

NORMAN: He is the co-chairman of Dole’s finance committee.

QUINN: That’s right! Bob’s in town — Hi Bob — You’d better explain this. You’d better explain Mena, too, Bob, or it’s going to follow you to the White House. Systematics, I understand, had an attorney who was kind of off the record doing work for them, named Vince Foster. Is that true?

NORMAN: Yep, that’s true. We’ve heard that from many, many sources now. In fact, Jim Leach’s committee has established that pretty well with some of the investigation that they have done. Foster was a trusted deal guy for Stevens at the law firm. Although Foster never shows up officially as an attorney of record for Systematics, he was definitely in the loop, basically smoothing out things between Systematics and the NSA, which was the main government agency that was contracting for a lot of this stuff.

QUINN: So this is how Foster got involved in intelligence, right.

NORMAN: Yes, because there is heavy duty code and computer technology stuff involved here. Apparently, some time in the early 80s he developed this relationship with the State of Israel. In fact, some of the same handlers I am told were involved in the Jonathan Pollard case. They basically nurtured him and groomed him for many years and then bingo, they hit the jackpot — he ended up in the White House. Apparently he convinced Hillary to help him out on some stuff.

QUINN: So… what is Foster involved in? It’s the mid 80s…

NORMAN: Mid 80s. Foster is at the Rose Law Firm. Think of him as a high-level marketing guy between Systematics and the NSA.

NSA — they have all these spooky contracts that they are trying to find contractors for. Foster would have been sort of a go-between there. Plus Hillary was actually an attorney of record for Systematics back in 1978 when Stevens tried to take over the Financial General Bank shares in Washington. Those bank holding companies later became First American – Clark Clifford, Robert Altman, all that crowd.

QUINN: Yeah, the BCCI thing.

NORMAN: Stevens was fronting for the BCCI crowd and trying to take over this Washington Bank Holding Co. The SEC blocked him at the time, partly because one of the things he was insisting on was that this company Systematics, which at that time was a tiny little thing in Arkansas, he was insisting that they be brought in to do all of the data processing for this multistate bank holding company in Washington. Hillary represented Systematics in that. Now the thing about Systematics at the time — it was before they even got involved with the bank spying stuff. Abroad for many years, they had been what amounted to a laundromat for covert funds for the CIA and the intelligence community, quite legally, probably. It was done for the national interest. Somebody had to move this money around and Systematics was in a perfect place to do it because they owned the computers and a whole bunch of small banks. They could move this money around electronically without the bankers even knowing about it necessarily, and it wouldn’t go through the normal clearing houses. The regulators wouldn’t see it. It would just crop up wherever the CIA needed it in whatever bogus front company account, and it was all just bits and bytes; it was a cyberbank — it still is.

QUINN: I’m here with Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine. You know, it’s interesting, here is a guy who was with Forbes Magazine, a respected senior editor who figured probably this would be his life’s work. All of a sudden, he finds himself a defrocked commando journalist working for Media Bypass Magazine out of what? Evanston, Illinois, or somewhere in Indiana?

NORMAN: Indiana.

QUINN: Yeah, that’s right. Now, I’ve got a question. Before we get into Vince Foster in the mid 80s and Hillary Clinton’s role in this, how did you get onto this whole scandal? Where did you walk through the door on this?

NORMAN: I came in the back door completely. Look, I had no ax to grind here against Bill Clinton or the Administration. I hated covering politics. I thought it was all baloney. I’m just a business writer, and I never wanted to get enmeshed in this whole Whitewater/Vince Foster thing, but it started — for a couple of years I had been following this oil company bankruptcy up in Stamford, Connecticut, because I had covered oil. This thing never made sense to me. There is no reason why this company went bust and, in fact, when I actually got into it and started redoing the oil trading transactions, the reason they lost money: they weren’t losing it. They were hiding it. They were parking it off shore with another company that was financing arms sales to Iraq, cluster bombs and stuff like that all through the 80s. And, this Chilean arms dealer, Cardone, who was providing weapons, was also, it turns out, brokering some of the sales of this stolen software. Okay, that gets me into the software story.

QUINN: So that gets you onto the Promis software, and you and Danny Casolaro are now on the same road.

NORMAN: Right, and then in the process of that, I started talking to a whole bunch of rather spooky, strange intelligence community characters, and I was sitting at a guy’s living room down in Kentucky one day. He was sitting there in the middle of the night blowing smoke rings, and he said, “Yo, by the way, Vince Foster, he was under investigation.” I said, “Under investigation, for what?” And, he said, “Well, it’s spelled ‘Espionage.'” BOINK!!… and that’s how I got on this whole Vince Foster thing.

QUINN: So that’s how it happened?

NORMAN: Yeah.

QUINN: Okay, now here it is, the mid 80s. Vince Foster is working for Systematics, and he is coming into contact with the intelligence community. What is, how did Hillary Clinton and the Israeli Mossad and all of this come together and what happened?

NORMAN: Well, I think that they had been… look the Israelis were key partners with us in this bank spying effort. This is a joint allied government effort, and the Israelis were one of the key front people in this, in selling and supporting this software all over the world, so that people weren’t thinking they were getting the software directly from the U.S. You know, there was an Israeli front company used to sell this stuff to foreign banks.

QUINN: Well, they sold it to the Moscow bank. I know that.

NORMAN: Well, Systematics did, yeah, and Systematics got involved in supporting this stuff all over the world, a little company in Arkansas… Go figure. Come on.

QUINN: Yeah, really.

NORMAN: I mean, main software people, they operate in New York and places like that and not out of Podunk, Arkansas. So, at any rate, the Israelis had ties into this whole thing all along, and, you know, they are our friends. We do give them a lot of stuff and share a lot of stuff.

QUINN: Well, the whole idea was to track terrorist money, and the Israelis have a great interest in that, and rightly so. There is no problem here.

NORMAN: The name of this problem was “follow the money for terrorist reasons,” but once you set that up, you can do all kinds of stuff with it. I mean, we were spying on everybody’s money. I think that’s probably how we helped bust the Soviet Union. We found out just how deep their pockets were, where their money was, who we could bribe. You know, acting as a financial destruction of their society more than anything.

QUINN: So, how does Foster get involved in espionage?

NORMAN: Well, I think it was money. Money, money, money. And, especially you know with this whole political thing, it takes so much money to run for office. I mean, my theory is that the actual spending is probably twice of what anybody declares when you add up all of the soft dollars and everything. I think there is a tremendous need for money there, and they just weren’t real cautious about where it was coming from.

I think this thing about selling state secrets to the Israeli’s and other countries was just a business. It was just for money. I don’t think there was any ideology involved here at all, and it was one of many businesses. There is also insider trading going on here. There was the kickback on drugs and arms stuff and so the money has to go… you have to hide it some way, so it goes into Swiss bank accounts.

And Foster would have known that, yeah, we’re tracking this money off shore, but there is such a blizzard of information that unless somebody knows exactly what they are looking for they would never find anything. They thought they could cover this up pretty well so Foster had… actually he had several accounts, and there was one in particular in this bank, bank at Villa Switsaria Italiano in Chaso on the Italian border. It is a little kind of a Mafia kind of community there reputed, and so he was taking the money in there for the payments from the Swiss. He was going to Geneva every six or eight months, and his curious one-day trips -I don’t think it was for sightseeing.

QUINN: No. I’m sure he wasn’t doing any real estate work for Arkansas.

NORMAN: No. The whole thing about money laundering is… you know the money would go into a Swiss bank. Somebody would have to go physically and take it out and take it to a friendly bonded dealer or something like that, buy bearer bonds or other kinds of bonds or something that you could pledge as collateral for loans back in the states and turn it back into cash again legitimately, and so that is how money laundering works. Vince, in effect, was a bag man here because when they go to the White House all of a sudden they hit the jackpot. There was so much more goodies there, and, in fact, Deborah Goram, Foster’s executive assistant, testified under oath that Foster had given her two, inch-thick ring binders from the National Security Agency to put in Bernie Nussbaum’s safe in the White House.

What were these binders? Well, I have talked to brokering experts on this stuff, and they say, “Look, when you are talking NSA binders in the White House, you are talking mainly one thing, and these are the codes and protocols by which the President authenticates himself when he has to call up the Pentagon to say ‘let’s go nuke somebody’.”

Now, what was Foster doing with these things? He had no business with them. He would have had no access to them. It would have to come from somebody with access to the Oval Office or the Presidential living quarters.

QUINN: And, who would that be?

NORMAN: Well, I think we know who we are talking about here.

QUINN: We’re talking about Hillary Clinton, aren’t we?

NORMAN: That’s right. She has been under investigation in this whole thing, too, but I think that they had a strong case against Vince and not such a strong case against Hillary. But, you see what happened was, and this is another whole part of the story as to how they got onto Foster. Basically, there was a team of computer hackers and computer intelligence guys in the CIA who were going through most databases. They found names there that they identified as being Foster and Hillary.

They put them under surveillance actually before they went to the White House. I think it was between the election and the time that they went to the White House, and that’s when the alarm bells went off. They had been surveilling these accounts for a while, and when Foster on July 1, 1993, bought a ticket to Geneva, a round-trip one-day ticket to Geneva, these guys said, “Oops, he’s going to take the money. We’re going to beat him to it.” And, they went in. They hacked their way into the bank and obtained the necessary authorization codes on this coded account for which no signature is required to withdraw money, by the way.

QUINN: Right.

NORMAN: They were able to effect their own technically legitimate wire transfer of this money back to the U.S. Treasury, where it sits in a holding account escrowed for use by the CIA.

QUINN: So, the CIA empties Vince Foster’s Swiss bank account of its ill-gotten money.

NORMAN: Yeah, actually it wasn’t the CIA. It was this sort of renegade vigilante group of guys they called the Fifth Column that has been out doing this stuff. They don’t take any of the money for themselves. The money goes to the…

QUINN: They just do it for fun?

NORMAN: The CIA only gets the money. It is escrowed for use by the CIA but only when the CIA gets rid of a bunch of its bad apples there who’ve got dirty hands from drug kickbacks, arms.

QUINN: Let’s pick this story up. There was a meeting just before Vince Foster died on the eastern shore of Maryland in which Webster Hubbell, Vince Foster, and some others were present. Okay, this was just before Foster died. Pick up the story here.

NORMAN: All right. Well, we mentioned July 1, 1993. Foster buys this round-trip ticket to Switzerland. They raid his account. They take out $2.73 million. Foster apparently calls up the bank to let them know he was coming. They say, “Oh, Vince don’t you know you took the money out already?” Boing… that’s when he found out he was under investigation. That’s when he got so mysteriously depressed. It had nothing to do with editorials in the Wall Street Journal. He had his bank account raided big time, and he knew he was under surveillance, or he knew he was under investigation. And, that started this curious chain of events. Webster Hubbell testified that not so much Vince was depressed, but he was worried. He was afraid to use the White House telephones. The guy had heart palpitations. He couldn’t sleep at night. His doctor gave him a prescription for sleeping pills. His sister tried to get him to talk to some psychiatrist. He never got in touch with them. Instead, he hired a high-powered lawyer in Washington, Jim Hamilton, this big deal white-collar crime fix-it guy who handles people who get hauled up for Congressional hearings. And, then there is this curious meeting the weekend before Foster died. He and his wife, Lisa, go down to the eastern shore of Maryland for a getaway weekend, and then, by coincidence, they meet Hubbell and his wife down there. Hubbell, also from the Rose Law Firm, at the time the country’s de-facto top law enforcement law officer because Janet Reno in effect was taking her orders from Hubbell. They go over to the estate of Michael Cardoza, who is the son-in-law of Nathan Landau, a big deal Democratic fund-raiser, and Cardoza is also the head of Clinton’s legal defense fund. Supposedly, this was all poolside chit chat. Baloney, it was damage control. They were trying to figure out how to contain this scandal from spreading to other people in the White House, and they were trying to lean on Vince to get him to, you know, cop a plea, go quietly, or shut up and don’t talk about it. And, in fact, what my sources have told me is that there was actually a huge payment made to an account held by Lisa Foster, with more than $286,000, on the Friday before that meeting.

QUINN: Wait a minute, on the Friday before that meeting, Lisa Foster’s bank account gets a deposit of $286 million?

NORMAN: $286,000, yeah.

QUINN: I’m sorry, yeah, $286,000. Okay, so does she take it out?

NORMAN: Well, I don’t know what ever happened to that money. It is hard to tell where it came from even. It is all very mysterious to me, but it sure smells like hush money to me. It’s like, “Look Vince, don’t worry, we’ll take care of your money.”

QUINN: You don’t know if she wrote a check on it?

NORMAN: Well, I’m told that it came through the hands somehow of Sheila Anthony, who was Foster’s sister, and at the time she was a “congressional liaison” person at the Justice Department, whatever a congressional liaison is.

QUINN: So she takes the money to Foster, and Foster turns it down?

NORMAN: Well, no… I think he probably accepted it, or it went there. But, apparently, he was having second thoughts, I think. You know, on the Monday after they came back from this meeting, the records showed, the public records showed, that he has a parade of people coming by his office in the White House saying, “Hey, how’d your weekend go, Vince? You cool with this? I mean, you on board with all of this? Everything okay?” you know. Then,…

QUINN: A lot of very nervous people in the White House.

NORMAN: That’s right. Then, the day he died he had like a two-hour meeting with another person from the Arkansas contingent there. I think the problem was that they were afraid that Vince was going to talk or that he was going to crack under questioning, and here’s a guy who was now, at this point, under intense surveillance. I mean, he had not only CIA counter intelligence people, but you had NSA. You had FBI surveilling him. There was a four-person IRS team we know was assigned to tail this guy, probably in connection with the money laundering aspect of the Swiss bank account.

QUINN: God, this thing’s got everything but floats in the… I mean all they need is Goofy, a big balloon with ropes on it following this guy around.

NORMAN: You almost did. I mean, you had the Secret Service with a bomb-sniffing dog squad out there checking his car in the parking lot. The video tapes of that, gone. The video tapes of the room where they are stored, gone. I mean, this whole thing is massively covered up, and I guess it is for national security reasons.

QUINN: Well now, I understand that Foster had a meeting scheduled with Bill Clinton. I believe it was on a Wednesday.

NORMAN: Right.

QUINN: And, it was the Tuesday he was killed.

NORMAN: Right. Exactly. The question is well, gee, was he going to drop something in the President’s lap and blow the plausible deniability that he might have on this stuff.

QUINN: Well, this Foster suicide thing is so sloppy. It leads me to believe that on Tuesday they thought he would take the money and shut up, and he didn’t take it so they had to do something real quick.

NORMAN: Well, that could be it or that even if he wanted to shut up maybe they were afraid he would crack under interrogation or something. You know, it is just somebody wanted him real dead, and there is a bunch of people who had ample reason for it. This was not suicide. It was not over depression. This was a political assassination carried out on U.S. soil by a foreign government.

The Israelis were involved in this. There was apparently a three-person Mossad-contracted team that went into the apartment that Foster had gone to that afternoon where he was apparently lured by a female person from the White House staff who I think still works in the White House.

QUINN: Now, who would that be?

NORMAN: Well, I…

QUINN: Because, he had sex with her?

NORMAN: That’s the impression, yeah.

QUINN: I mean, there was semen on his shorts. There was brownish-blonde hair on his clothing and rug fibers all over him which may or may not have had to do with having sex on the floor. It might have been…

NORMAN: No, I think that was because he was rolled up in a rug afterwards and taken over to Fort Marcy Park. Now, the question is, were elements of our intelligence community involved in helping to dispose of the body and cover it up some way?

QUINN: Who is the woman in the White House?

NORMAN: I can’t say.

QUINN: Patsy Thomason?

NORMAN: No. I don’t want to say. I suspect…

QUINN: Dee Dee. Well, she’s not there anymore.

NORMAN: That name is known. I mean, she has been identified on these tapes apparently, but….

QUINN: I think Dee Dee and Bill are doing it, but that’s just me. Anyway, let’s get back to the story here. Okay, so I understand at least you are claiming that there is a videotape of Foster’s murder?

NORMAN: Well, of the people entering and leaving this apartment a few blocks from the White House where it apparently occurred.

QUINN: Has anybody located this apartment? Do you know where it is?

NORMAN: I don’t know exactly where it is myself. I am told it is actually within a few blocks of the White House.

QUINN: Okay, so they lure him here, and they pop him, and there is a videotape of it or there is a videotape of the people going in and out. Then, they go to Fort Marcy Park, and they dump him.

NORMAN: Right.

QUINN: Okay, and we’ve got a witness now that says they saw the two guys that fit the same description that Patrick Knowlton, the other witness, to Foster’s car. He describes the one guy that threatens him. One of those people is one of the two that supposedly was walking Foster, who looked drunk to this guy, into the park, but he says that they laid him out.

NORMAN: Yeah. I don’t know too much about all that stuff, but what I know is this, that Paul Rodriguez is the Editor of Insight Magazine, that came up with this Mr. X source. When Forbes decided not to run the story for reasons that were kind of mysterious to me at the time, and while I was still there, they gave me permission to publish it elsewhere. And, as I approached Insight, because they are kind of a gutsy magazine, David Rodriguez made a whole bunch of calls around Washington trying to corroborate this stuff, and I think he was making some headway. Then, he gets this visit in person from some military intelligence guy from the Pentagon who comes to him and says, “Paul, lay off this story. You don’t know what you’re dealing with here.”

QUINN: No. I think we do know what we are dealing with here. We’re dealing with the biggest scandal since maybe…

NORMAN: And, you’ve got Israeli relations at stake here. You know, the intelligence community has a lot of joint ventures with the Israelis. They don’t want to “queer” those things. I mean, we do business with those people a lot, and you know a lot of it is probably quite necessary, but you know there is a scandal here that dwarfs the Jonathan Pollard case by orders of magnitude really.

QUINN: I want to discuss a couple of things with you. First of all, now it would appear that a bunch of Republicans picking Kenneth Starr to put him in charge of this investigation of Vince Foster and the Whitewater problem in Washington, D.C. On the surface, it looked like they were going for the jugular, but see, Mr. Starr has some background that leads back to the Inslaw case we discussed earlier in the show about the Promis software and stuff. He excused himself from that litigation.

NORMAN: And, the reason was because he was the inside counsel for William French Smith at the Justice Department in 1982 at the time that the Inslaw software was expropriated by the government…

QUINN: Okay. So he really is not in the position to be the pit bull to expose this. He is in a better position to get Clinton on whatever Republicans need to get him on and make sure that Republicans don’t get burned here.

NORMAN: I think that’s it. Yeah.

QUINN: Okay, now. Given that that’s the case and given that the Washington inside-the-beltway crowd on both sides of the aisle are trying to make sure that the fix is in on this, how do you think or what leads you to believe that this is going to come out, and through what channels?

NORMAN: Well, again, it goes back to resources of mine. Basically, there are a few good guys in the intelligence community, particularly this handful of people in the so-called Fifth Column, who are so incensed about this bipartisan coverup, the government’s inability and unwillingness to deal with the high level corruption here, they’ve just decided to take things into their own hands. They never had government authorization to go raid the foreign bank accounts, but….

QUINN: How many accounts are there? How many people in the government right now have Swiss bank accounts filled with money from BCCI, drug laundering, defense kickbacks, arms trades, I mean all of this nonsense?

NORMAN: Not as many as two years ago. These guys have been out raiding these accounts. They’ve pulled back $2.5 billion, more than $2.5 billion with a “B” dollars from 300, 400, 500 of these accounts. There is probably 3,000 coded Swiss and other foreign bank accounts that they have been rifling through the computers on.

QUINN: How can there be this many of them and it doesn’t come out?

NORMAN: It is because it is endemic corruption. The government is corrupt. Why should we give the President of South Korea $600 million? … country more powerful, more worth corrupting, more venal and with weaker controls for policing this stuff.

QUINN: Well, because we don’t believe it can happen here.

NORMAN: That’s right. We’re Americans. Well, this is greed and money. But, there is….

QUINN: Well, it’s murder too.

NORMAN: That’s right, and there have been hundreds of these accounts already raided, and nobody, NOBODY has been able to stand up and say, “I was robbed.” Why? Because, the money came from exactly what you said — kickbacks on drugs, kickbacks on arms, insider trading, and they never paid any taxes on this stuff. They’ve never disclosed it, and the minimum sentence for willful tax evasion is ten years, that’s the minimum. So, what you have going on right now in Congress is basically, there is an Angel of Death. Actually, there are two I’m told. There is one on the Democratic side and one on the Republican side.

QUINN: Now, do they make their rounds together?

NORMAN: No. It’s separately. What I’m told is that the people in Congress with these Swiss bank accounts, who have had these accounts, if they haven’t already left, if they haven’t had the good sense to already get their butts out of there, they have been delivered, hand delivered a brown paper envelope with transaction records of their Swiss bank accounts, and within a day or so they get a visit from this Angel of Death who says it’s time for you to go, time to do some career planning, you’re out of here, we don’t want you in the government when the stuff hits the fan here, as it’s gonna do in the spring apparently. The records are going to start coming out. It’s going to be obvious. These vigilantes are just going to take this situation into their own hands and release this stuff, I’m convinced.

QUINN: These people are real patriots. They could end up dead doing this.

NORMAN: Some of them may already have. I think… but they’ve planned this quite well. I think they’ve got it down now. They know that if anything happens to them, that the stuff would just come out in a gush, so it would be counterproductive for….

QUINN: Yeah, but I mean is it going to come out in the mainstream media. You’ve got the Mena story being spiked a year ago by Katherine Graham at the Washington Post, and I’ve uncov… you, what I stumbled on a memo from Paul Keiser yesterday from the editor at the Washington Post who writes me in this memo a flat out blatant lie. He says that the authors of the Mena story, that was supposed to run January 26, 1995, in the Washington Post Outlook Section, had withdrawn the article before the Washington Post had decided to run it, and that’s just a flat out lie.

NORMAN: Well, it’s technically probably true. But, what they’ve done, they’ve left those people dangling by a thread for like 6-8 months. I don’t blame them for taking the story elsewhere as the….

QUINN: Yeah, but no, but Jim they didn’t. The type galleys had been laid, and the artwork had been done. It was supposed… they didn’t pull it until the Thursday before the Sunday it was supposed to run.

NORMAN: Right. Well, technically the Post can say, “Oh, we never quieted you…” That’s what they told me at Forbes, too, about my story. Finally, I never got a good reason why my story didn’t run at Forbes. Ultimately, they said, “Oh, we didn’t trust your sources.” But, actually what my immediate supervisor said, “We can’t say this about Systematics,” which was a big advertiser at Forbes, and we can’t say this about the Israelis.

QUINN: Yeah, right.

NORMAN: That’s why it didn’t run in Forbes.

QUINN: Well, there’s actually no proof that Systematics has deliberately delivered stolen software. I mean, they may not even know that the software was stolen, and it may be another version of it.

NORMAN: Systematics is under heavy duty investigation, though, right now for money laundering, because once you set up a system for laundering covert funds for the government, who knows what else you can piggyback on top of that. The suspicion is that this was the quid pro quo here in return for laundering, supposedly, call it legitimate funds that the intelligence community can piggyback other stuff to.

QUINN: Let’s get back to the Angel of Death here and the resignations in Congress, which have been pretty much attributed by guys like Rush Limbaugh to the fact that Democrats just don’t like being in the minority anymore, and they don’t have the guts or stamina to stick it out the way the Republicans did for 40 years. And, some of that may be true, but how many of these people who have said that they are pulling their hats out of the ring… And, now we have two Republicans… How many of these people have been visited by this so-called Angel of Death? All of them?

NORMAN: Well, the figures I’ve heard is that I think there’s like 25 or 26 so far since the last election who have decided they are not going to run again or had actually resigned and out of there, like NORMAN MINETA from Los Angeles. Of those, I’m told about 21 or 22 so far can be directly attributed to Swiss bank account problems. There is probably another dozen or so that are going to go that way. Again, there is an argument that, “Oh, we just can’t stand the nasty politics in Washington anymore.” Come on, give me a break.

QUINN: Well, I like Patsy Schroeder. She wanted us to believe that now that the Democratic party is in such good shape she can leave it and it doesn’t… did you see that?

NORMAN: No….

QUINN: That was great. Oh yeah, now that….

NORMAN: Patsy Schroeder, somebody noted on the Internet that at the news conference where she was announcing she wasn’t going to run, there had already been re-elect Schroeder bumper stickers printed up. I mean, she… take this guy Ron Coleman from Texas, a Congressman down there. He made his announcement at his supposed re-election campaign kickoff party.

QUINN: You’re kidding? This is right out of a… this is a movie.

NORMAN: That’s right. Listen, these people have been confronted. They’ve been given 24 hours basically to clean out their desks. That’s what it amounts to.

QUINN: So, they’re gonna try and get all these people out who have Swiss bank accounts before it hits the fan. Now, when do you suppose that this is going to happen? Can you give us a timetable?

NORMAN: Well, that’s happening in tiers. I mean, we’ve already seen a bunch of departures. I think that the early spring is the timetable. You know, Wall Street is going to get hit with this stuff too. Now, every year in the spring, soon after the first of the year, after these guys collect their year-end bonuses, you have a big exodus. But, I’m told Wall Street is going to get hit with this big time this year because those guys were in it too. You gotta remember, there was so much money sloshing around here…

QUINN: Yeah, really.

NORMAN: … from arms deals. You could not launder all of that money without the knowing, willing cooperation and participation of major banks, major brokerage houses, and…

QUINN: Goldman Sachs possibly?

NORMAN: Oh yeah. Look, Goldman…

QUINN: I always found it strange that Robert Rubin showed up when he did.

NORMAN: This Goldman, they were the chief investment bankers to Robert Maxwell in the U.K., helped Maxwell loot a half a billion dollars out of his pension funds, and it now costs a huge amount of money for a settlement there.

QUINN: It sounds like somebody’s calling you.

NORMAN: They still have the bond for ADFA, the Arkansas Development…

QUINN: Whoa, hold on a second. What’s that?

NORMAN: That’s another one of these…

QUINN: Well no, I know what it is. You’re telling me that Goldman Sachs was holding the bonds for the Arkansas Development?

NORMAN: No, they were the underwriter on a bunch of these $8 billion or so of bonds that ADFA marketed to who knows whom..

QUINN: Oh man. You know, I have transactions on my desk at home, $80 million of money transfers to the Fuji Bank in the Cayman Islands from ADFA, the Arkansas Development Financial Authority, who I believe never had more than $8 million to begin with. I mean, where did they get $80 million, and what’s it going to the Fuji Bank for? The interest rate? Come on, the Switzerland of the Caribbean. Jim, I gotta let you go. I gotta wrap this up here, but I want to thank you for joining us this morning.

NORMAN: It’s a pleasure. I’ll keep you posted as more develops. There’s going to be more coming down the pike here soon.

QUINN: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m gonna call you later on today. I’ll give you my home number. Let’s stay in touch because if what you say is true and if there are truly some patriots in the intelligence community who are finally going to blow the whistle on this. By the way, all of these resignations and the Angel of Death and all of this, I think is evidence that these people know that this is inevitable that this is going to come out.

NORMAN: It’s like AIDS. I think there are a bunch of people back before the last election who realized they, in fact, have slept with the wrong woman or person, and they did not run again, but there has been denial, denial, denial by a bunch of these people. Finally, I think it’s like the Angel of Death is finally coming around saying, “You gotta go. Bye. You’re outta here.”

~ ~ ~

CREDITS

If you are a talk show host and want to contact either one of these guys for an interview you can reach James Norman at MEDIA BYPASS MAGAZINE, 1-800-4-BYPASS

Jim Quinn can be contacted at WRRK, 7 Parkway Center, Suite 780, Pittsburgh, PA 15220, Fax Number 412-928-9290, Internet address is quinn@sgi.net homepage at http://www.warroom.com or Compuserve 72662,3507.

THE REPUTED COCAINE BANK MONEY LAUNDRY WIZARD FOR GEORGE BUSH FAMILY ARRESTED IN CHICAGO

by Sherman H. Skolnick

The reputed cocaine bank money laundry wizard for former President George Herbert Walker Bush and two of his sons has been arrested in Chicago.

The matter is tied as well reportedly to corrupt top IRS Officials, Chicago Region Office, fingered by our work.

Giorgio Pelossi, a prominent Swiss accountant, was arrested January 20, 2000, at O’Hare International Airport, after officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, INS, found he was wanted on an international arrest warrant issued in Milan, Italy, about a year previous.

Pelossi, 61, was somehow actually traveling under his own name. His name showed up on a passenger manifest in a routine check provided to officials of the INS. [Savvy sources, however, dispute that it was so “routine” but was rather a follow up of matters outlined in our TV documentary, 11/29/99.]

In his appearance before a Federal Magistrate in Chicago, Pelossi agreed not to oppose being sent back to Italy by extradition. Pelossi signed papers in Chicago’s Federal District Court waiving his right to a hearing in Chicago.

Pelossi is reportedly the cocaine bank money laundry expert for the former president and two of his sons, Texas Governor George W. Bush and Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Some claim that the matter also reportedly implicates the other son, Neil Bush, who escaped federal prison through a reputedly corrupt arrangement upon the downfall of Denver-based Silverado Savings & Loan Association, an apparent CIA proprietary operation of which Neil Bush was an official. Some contend Silverado, at the hands of Neil Bush, was likewise a money laundry for illicit funds including reportedly narcotics trafficking.

For a year or more now, journalists and commentators in Spain have been writing and talking about the Elder Bush and two of his sons, George W. and Jeb, being reportedly implicated in billions of dollars of dope money laundered through banks in Spain, Italy, Mexico, and the United States.

The cocaine banking cartel, for which Pelossi reportedly was the kingpin and brains, was centered in Milan and Barcelona. According to stories, some date-lined Rome, in December, 1995, by Reuters, United Press International, and other news and law enforcement personnel, Italian authorities contended they had proof leading them to assert that the Archbishop of Barcelona was implicated with the Vatican Bank and others in a vast money laundry ring reportedly involving, among others:

[1] FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CICERO (a Chicago suburb, Al Capone Land, a long-known mafia enclave). Later it became the flagship of PINNACLE BANC GROUP. Still later, to confuse matters, the bank was called Old Kent Bank, a unit whose head office is Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Pinnacle was the successor and alter ego to the mysterious, scandal-wrecked, BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL, which supposedly (although not actually) went under in 1991. BCCI was a reputed assassination and espionage funding apparatus for various intelligence agencies, including the American CIA, the French CIA, and Israel’s The Mossad (The Institute).

Bishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the VATICAN BANK until 1991, was also the dominant force controlling First National Bank of Cicero. Marcinkus was originally from Cicero and ran a church there. Marcinkus fled the Vatican, sheltering himself with his Vatican passport, when Italian authorities sought to grill him and possibly prosecute him for various criminal offenses he reportedly committed as Vatican Bank chief. He returned to the U.S. and lives in Sun City, Arizona.

[2] Roger D’Onofrio, an American CIA official, with dual citizenship, U.S. and Italy, living near Naples, Italy. Italian authorities, in the wire service and other stories of December, 1995, described him as the CIA’s secret paymaster in Italy, to fund political assassinations of those not liked by the American CIA, and to pay-off or destroy opposition parties in the Italian government.

The Pelossi-Marcinkus-D’Onofrio ring reportedly, through Vatican Bank and other financial institutions, trafficked in smuggled gold, osmium nuclear bomb triggers, high quality counterfeit foreign currencies, and other illicit goods and services.

With the corrupt connivance of top officials of the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, Chicago Region office, Pelossi reportedly arranged the laundering of billions of dollars through concealed and dummy accounts, reportedly in the following banks, among others; and for and on behalf reportedly of George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and the Elder Bush, their father:

HARRIS BANK OF CHICAGO, and their Foreign Exchange section, called ForEx, a unit of BANK OF MONTREAL owned principally by the whiskey-soaked BRONFMAN FAMILY [SEAGRAMS booze, Cineplex Odeon movie theater chain, as well as numerous operations of records-entertainment in California].

The former major owner of Harris Bank, now also a major stockholder of Bank of Montreal, is U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R.,Ill.).

Harris Bank/Bank of Montreal are interlocked with the worldwide Mexican bank cartel, Grupo Financiero Bancomer.

In May, 1998, Bancomer pleaded guilty to U.S. federal criminal charges of vast dope money laundering. They tried to whitewash the matter with an explanation on their website: http://www.bancomer.com

Bancomer has operated in the U.S. through branches in Los Angeles and New York. Their attempt to open a branch in Chicago was opposed by one or more City of Chicago Alderman who referred to the Bancomer criminal guilty plea. Yet, the Federal Reserve apparently is ready to let Bancomer operate throughout the U.S. in various units.

Bancomer is not only reportedly implicated in the Russian embezzlement caper, where many billions of dollars disappeared or were laundered; they also are reportedly implicated in the ring of which Pelossi has been the brains and kingpin, for the Bush Family and others, Portugal, SPAIN, Italy, and elsewhere, including MORROCO, and COLUMBIA.

HARRIS BANK also has secret and dummy accounts of reputed terrorist OSAMA BIN LADEN.

His concealed accounts are reportedly jointly with SHARON PERCY ROCKEFELLER, top official in Washington, D.C. of PBS, and her family. She is the wife of U.S. SENATOR JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER 4th (D., West Virginia).

Her family reportedly are in the construction business with bin Laden.

[President Clinton says he cannot “find” reputed terrorist bin Laden’s accounts to freeze them. Really?]

In October, 1998, we confronted top officials of Harris Bank in Chicago with their secret accounts of the mysterious 50 million dollars of federal agency funds originally parked with Household Bank which merged with Harris Bank. The funds, belonging to Joseph Andreuccetti, were secretly transferred without his permission to Little Rock, Arkansas, to try to cover up the embezzlement of Madison Guaranty S & L, for which Bill and Hillary Clinton are subject to federal criminal prosecution for stealing bank funds.

REPUBLIC NATIONAL BANK OF NEW YORK: The bank is a reputed money laundry for smuggled gold as used by the intelligence agencies, such as the American CIA. The principal owner of the Bank, Edmond J. Safra, was murdered in December, 1999, supposedly by the acts and doings of his purported male “nurse”, an unstable former member reportedly of the Green Berets, apparently part of one of their “hit” teams.

(As to the murder of Safra, visit our website: http://www.skolnicksreport.com and see the story, “Murder in the Gold Market” as well as the update.)

The arrest of Giorgio Pelossi is apparently just another event related to our one-hour public access Cable TV Documentary cablecast within Chicago, to some 400,000 viewers, on November 29, 1999. Our program, called “Broadsides”, showed pictures of an ocean-going boat, renamed “California Rose”, a reputed traveling money laundry, plying between MEXICO, through the Caribbean, including stopping at the Dutch Island of St.Maartens, a dope laundry haven, and then on to Portugal and SPAIN.

The boat, as we stated, is a reported gambling casino, apparently owned and operated by current, recently current, and former top U.S. INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE officials, Chicago Region office.

For some twenty years, they reportedly operated a dope traffic “immunity” zone in a western suburb of Chicago, four large buildings called Kingspoint Condominiums. The buildings, originally owned by Joseph Andreuccetti, were seized by the corrupt IRS officials, NOT for the public Treasury, BUT FOR THEIR OWN PERSONAL INTEREST.

Andreuccetti was kept in an apparent fraudulent INVOLUNTARY Bankruptcy, for almost 14 years, at the connivance of First National Bank of Cicero and the nephew and godson of Bishop Paul Marcinkus.

Reportedly participating in all this was Congressman Henry Hyde [R.,Ill.] who lived near Kingspoint.

(For details, see the three part series “Corrupt IRS Officials Face Exposure in Dope Bust”. Part 3 has pictures of the IRS boat. Visit our website: http://www.skolnicksreport.com )

Our sending six heavy volumes of corruption documents to the Inspector General of the U.S. Treasury apparently caused the dope bust situation in January, 2000, as well as the arrest of Pelossi.

Pelossi is reportedly interwoven with the German political scandal that has tarred former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his conservative political party, the Christian Democratic Union. Pelossi, according to published reports, has provided German prosecutors with information about alleged pay-offs to German political figures.

[The Chicago Sun-Times on January 27, 2000, had a much-censored, watered down story about Pelossi leaving out many details that the presslords are well aware are involved about the Bush family and the corrupt IRS.]

~ ~ ~

Since 1958, Mr.Skolnick has been a court reformer. Since 1963, founder/chairman, Citizen’s Committee to Clean Up the Courts, disclosing certain instances of judicial and other bribery and political murders. Since 1991 a regular panelist, and since 1995, moderator/producer, of one-hour, weekly public access Cable TV Show, “Broadsides”, Cablecast on Channel 21, 9 p.m. each Monday in Chicago. For a heavy packet of printed stories, send $5.00 [U.S. funds] and a stamped, self-addressed business sized envelope [4-1/4 x 9-1/2 #10 size] WITH THREE STAMPS ON IT, to Citizen’s Committee to Clean Up the Courts, Sherman H. Skolnick, Chairman, 9800 South Oglesby Ave., Chicago IL 60617-4870. Office, 7 days, 8 a.m. to midnight, (773) 375-5741 [PLEASE, no “just routine calls]. Before sending FAX, please call.

Email: skolnick@ameritech.net:

From The Laundrymen:

During George Bush’s presidency, the CIA went into the coke-smuggling business. Using a cutout in Venezuela, in 1990, the agency adroitly smuggled a ton of pure cocaine into the United States. The idea was to use it to snare traffickers. Instead, it wound up being sold on the streets, a fact that came to light only three years later, thanks to the investigative skill of the CBS television program “60 Minutes.” . . .

* * *

From COMPROMISED – Clinton, Bush and The CIA:

A Date with Death…

Barry Seal had become the most important informant in the history of the Drug Enforcement Administration and had tied the Sandinista government together with the Medellin Cartel.

As a result of leaks from Oliver North and the White House, the cartel had put a $500,000 price on Seal’s head. In addition, Seal had handed the DEA three of the best drug cases it had ever had, testifying as the government’s chief witness.

The DEA was winning plaudits from the White House over the Sandinista “sting,” but Seal had been left twisting in the wind. While he was undeniably a major asset for the DEA … he was now a major liability for the CIA and George Bush because of the knowledge he had confided to Terry Reed about Bush’s sons….

~ ~ ~

Feb. 19, 1986, turned out to be the last day of Barry Seal’s life. His blood, along with pieces of flesh and bone, were splattered all over the interior of his car. The Baton Rouge police report, in cold official language, described what happened to him that day: “Autopsy determined the cause of Seal’s death to be multiple gunshot wounds fired by an automatic weapon,” the crime report said. “Three rounds entered Seal’s upper torso, and four entered the left head. Some fifteen rounds were recovered at the murder scene.”…

~ ~ ~

Since the Air America reunion at Marr’s house two months earlier, the “over-the-hill gang” was getting their act together…. On Sept 13, 1986, they had managed to put five planes in the air simultaneously and, on one night alone, 10,000 pounds of supplies had been dropped deep into Nicaragua into the hands of “freedom fighters” . . .

Bob Dutton, who was reporting to Oliver North from the field, said that more than 180,000 pounds of supplies had been dropped successfully. But in the Reagan administration’s rush to accomplish the aerial delivery effort, there were lapses in security that would soon impact on the Reeds and compromise the Enterprise’s operations. Their lifestyle in Mararitaville would literally come to a crashing halt.

Oct 5, 1986, was a cool night on the north shore of Lake Chapala, and the Reed family was just preparing for a sweater-weather barbecue when the claxon rang at the compound’s front gate. It was a strangely sober, and somber, Mitch Marr standing outside the iron gate. “I guess you heard the news? … ‘

A confused Terry just stared at him, wondering what on earth was going on.. “What’s the matter, Mitch?”…

“His name is Hasenfus. He was ‘the kicker’ on the plane– you don’t know, do you? … I forgot, you don’t have satellite TV… COOPER’S DEAD! He got shot down.”

After a long pause, Marr sighed and continued. “Some commie shit put a heat-seeker up his ass and his 123 went down in flames….”

After another pause, Marr turned to a briefing mode.

“But I guess this guy Hasenfus survived the crash, and the commies got him….”

Though Terry didn’t know it at that moment, words like Iran-Contra and Irangate were being written by newspaper editors everywhere. As Hasenfus was being pulled out of the jungle on a leash by a Sandinista soldier, political shockwaves were beginning to reverberate around the world.

Back in the White House, damage control was already under way.

There would be a flurry of questions about why a C-123 military cargo plane registered to a CIA proprietary in Miami had been shot down that day in Nicaragua with gringos and guns aboard.

There were, of course, responses from Washington:

President Ronald Reagan said, “There is no connection with that (between the U.S. and the shootdown) at all. He lied.

Vice President George Bush said, “This man (Hasenfus) is never– is not working for the United States government. He lied.

Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams said, “Let me repeat flatly that there was no U.S. government involvement in this . . . direct, indirect, provision of material financing, whatever you want to call it . . . none.” He lied.

Eugene Hasenfus, the survivor and now a prisoner in Managua, told it somewhat differently. “I worked for the CIA, who did most of the coordination of these flights.” He had a rope around his neck. He told the truth.

The covert supply operation had turned overt, and Oliver North was heading for the shredder. . . .

* * *

From The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider, by Al Martin:

INSIDER STOCK SWINDLE FOR “THE CAUSE”

I’d like to interject at this point the infamous case of the Peruvian Gold Certificate Scam, engineered in 1988 by George Bush, Sr.

George, himself, was involved, and so was his counsel C. Boyden Gray. Helping in this fraud was George’s personal friend and very loyal Republican scamskateer, then Nevada Secretary of State, Frankie Sue DelPapa. . . .

This is the famous case of that Peruvian gold certificate which was one of the unusual gold certificates issued by the Trans-Continental Agreement between the United States and certain South American countries in 1875, wherein the United States agreed to support certain South American countries which were then in some financial difficulty, including Peru.

The United States Treasury issued a limited number of high-value gold certificates based on its own deposits. Simply put, these were then hypothecated by South American central banks, which could then be used to borrow bullion against the U.S. Treasury.

Almost all of these certificates were redeemed in 1913 and 1914. However, one certificate was left outstanding, which it’s believed was an oversight at the time. These certificates were compounded in perpetuity, that is, they had no limitation.

The interest was payable in gold … And the compounding of said gold payment was accrued at a fixed price of $20 an ounce.

Now what happened, therefore, is that this one remaining certificate consequently became worth a fortune.

Although it had been technically listed as canceled by the United States Treasury after the expiration of the redemption period in 1914, George Bush was able to get a waiver (as he knew he would, given his position) from the U.S. Treasury, indicating that this was still a valid and negotiable instrument. . . .

This certificate, through a long series of transactions, ultimately winds up in the hands of a retired Secret Service agent, Mr. Durham, who at one time … had worked with one of George Bush’s Secret Service security details.

Through some underhandedness, Bush was able to garner control of this instrument through essentially out-and-out fraud committed by Frankie Sue DelPapa regarding a Nevada corporation, which had been formed by Mr. Durham and others to hold this certificate and the rights thereunto, called the Cosmos Investment Corporation.

DelPapa essentially switched all the officers and principals and directors of the Cosmos Corporation into another corporation that had been formed by George Bush and some others known as the Hellenic Investment Holding Group, Limited.

It was absolutely a blatant fruad.

Durham subsequently died. His widow tried to pound the drum on this thing for a long time, but couldn’t get anywhere with it. Simply put, the mainstream media … considered it too old and too conspiratorial to touch.

But I have a lot of the documents. . . .

It’s interesting to note the route that this certificate takes once it gets in the hands of George Bush. It winds up getting hypothecated at both Sumitomo and Daiwa Banks in Tokyo. It is re-hypothecated at Jarlska Bank of Copenhagen. Re-hypothecated again through the Greek National Bank.

Papandreou was still in power. Papandreou and George Bush Sr had been involved in many marginal business transactions involving the surreptitious hypothecation of gold bullion at the Bank of Greece through the Union Bank of Switzerland and Credit Lyonnais in France and Bank Paribas. . . .

You can see through the continuation of this deal a pattern where new fraud has to be committed to pay back old fraud and so on.

I think what frightened the mainstream media is the incredible sums of money that are involved. And ultimately, a Peruvian gold certificate turned out to be the seed or germination of a series of transactions that ultimately forced Daiwa and Sumitomo to create fictitious trading losses in order to cover losses incurred in a series of fraudulently obtained, politically related loans….

It was only in recent years, in 1995, that I was again retained by representatives of the original owner, or his widow, should I say, in an effort to negotiate with Bush….

So I talked to an attorney who had previously represented me in Miami, Neil Lewis, who is very closely aligned with Republican interests in Miami and is a personal friend of both Neil and Jeb Bush….

After a few days, Neil Lewis got back to me and said that the Bushes feel that there are so many layers of protection between them and this transaction that nobody will ever be able to uncover it and they simply did not wish to deal.

So, that ended that….

For more on Sumitomo, GO TO > > > Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate

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From latimes.com., May 7, 2000:

PROBLEMS WITH A GLOBE-TROTTING FATHER

Politics: Ex-President Bush’s many foreign dealings could pose conflicts if his son wins White House

By ALAN C. MILLER, JUDY PASTERNAK, Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON–Since leaving the White House in 1993, George Bush has sought to maintain his ideal of a dignified retirement from the nation’s highest office. He has turned down offers to sit on corporate boards, steered clear of political wrangling and largely stayed out of the public eye.

But Bush sometimes cuts a different figure when it comes to his international dealings. Overseas, he has collected six-figure speaking fees, occasionally weighed in with foreign governments for private companies and sometimes sparked controversy.

In Japan, the former president spoke to 50,000 disciples of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in a stadium rally–drawing protests from Christian leaders and other critics of Moon’s Unification Church.

In Argentina, he wrote then-President Carlos Menem on behalf of Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn, which helped touch off a parliamentary inquiry about Bush’s possible influence in the country’s internal affairs.

In Indonesia, he jumped into a hot dispute over gold mining rights, contacting then-President Suharto to praise a Canadian company that had retained the former president as an advisor.

And in Kuwait, the Arab oil state freed from Iraqi occupation in the Persian Gulf War, the former president interceded with the emir’s government on behalf of a U.S. oil company.

Makes $4 Million a Year on Circuit

No other former president has created such an international profile. And no other former president has made so much money on the global lecture circuit in such a short time–about $4 million a year in speaking fees. For a single engagement, he received stock that rose in value to more than $13 million at one point.

Normally, such good fortune would be of only passing interest. But George Herbert Walker Bush may be on the verge of an unusual, sensitive new role: father of the next U.S. president. And if Bush’s son Texas Gov. George W. Bush wins the White House in November, he could face the ticklish challenge of reining in his dad’s far-flung activities.

Potential conflicts of interest loom if the son occupies the Oval Office. Would U.S. and foreign companies seek to curry favor by steering business to the father’s associates? Would any future overseas flaps involving the former president escalate into diplomatic incidents?

Both Bushes, father and son, said that there is no cause for concern.

“I will expect the highest ethical standards of the members of my family,” the governor said through a spokesman.

The 75-year-old former president, when asked whether his son’s election would influence his future global pursuits, said through a spokesman: “I am sure that it would.” But he declined to say how.

Another aide, chief of staff Jean Becker, said: “President Bush understands better than anyone the absolute necessity of avoiding even the appearance of impropriety, especially when it comes to a president’s family and friends. President Bush would never do or say anything that would interfere in any way with, or raise questions about, how George W. Bush is conducting himself as president.”

But a source close to the former chief executive acknowledged “increased sensitivity to the groups that President Bush now speaks to because of his sons in public life”: Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as well as George W. Bush.

Nevertheless, one expert on the post-presidency is troubled by some of Bush’s current activities.

Since leaving the White House, the elder Bush has projected a “public persona [as] the happy World War II veteran who is letting the American people see him jumping out of airplanes and being the good family man,” said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at the University of New Orleans. “And the covert persona is going around giving talks with people like Rev. Moon and representing American corporate interests in foreign countries.”

Brinkley, who wrote a book about Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency, added: “If his son becomes president, he needs to distance himself from all corporations and from going abroad and taking speaker fees.”

The matter of how the ex-president’s global profile may affect George W. Bush is especially sensitive because, if the Texas governor is elected, he is expected to lean on his father–as well as his father’s former White House aides–for guidance on international affairs. George W. Bush says that, while his father would have no formal role in his administration, “of course, I will seek his advice.”

Moreover, during a presidential campaign, many foreign powers look for opportunities to ingratiate themselves with a potential incoming administration. And when a former president visits a foreign country, he attracts attention.

On his frequent journeys to Beijing, Bush usually meets with President Jiang Zemin. His expenses often are paid by U.S. companies pursuing business in China.

A 1998 mission to China was sponsored in part by the Chubb Group of Insurance Cos., which has been seeking an insurance license from the Beijing government. Bush discussed the Asian financial crisis with an American business group, one of six talks for Chubb worldwide.

“If you’re unknown in China and trying to get known and you’re trying to get a license there, having a former president at a reception might get people to come who might not come otherwise,” said Mark Greenberg, Chubb senior vice president. “We get to rub shoulders with them and get to know them better.”

It is unclear to what extent Bush’s overseas involvements could affect his son’s presidential duties because the former president is not required to disclose any information about his activities or income. His office declined requests for a list of speaking fees, appearances and business sponsors.

There are no federal regulations that address how former presidents earn a living. They are entitled to a pension of $157,000 a year, round-the-clock Secret Service protection, office space and a $96,000 annual allowance for personal staff. And they enjoy full use of U.S. embassies abroad. The public cost for each former president is about $4 million a year, Brinkley said.

Bush has rejected one perk available to former GOP presidents–$150,000 a year from the Republican National Committee for administrative expenses. “He just simply didn’t think it was necessary,” Becker said.

Bush and Gerald R. Ford have been particularly aggressive among recent ex-presidents in pursuing financial opportunities. Ford joined the board of directors of at least eight firms but has scaled back to three. He has been a paid consultant and has given speeches as well.

Former President Reagan created a stir in 1989 when he received $2 million from a Japanese firm for delivering two speeches in Tokyo. But even before the 1994 announcement of his Alzheimer’s disease, Reagan had been less active than Bush as a paid speaker. Carter’s international prominence is based largely on his peacemaker role in various conflicts.

Bush, whose net worth was about $3.7 million while he was president, makes about 50 speeches a year. He serves as an orator-for-hire for about 40 companies, trade associations and universities annually–a pace he has kept up since 1993, said Gian-Carlo Peressutti, Bush’s spokesman. The number of paid trips abroad varies each year, ranging from four to eight. Sometimes he visits more than one country on a single journey.

For his standard speech–a behind-the-scenes look at his presidency and his view of current events–Bush commands about $80,000 for domestic talks and about $100,000 plus expenses for foreign engagements. . . .

Instead of taking cash for a 1998 speech in Tokyo, Bush accepted stock in Global Crossing Ltd., a technology start-up company. His holdings were worth about $13.4 million in November when he filed papers to sell some shares.

Bush also raises large sums for charity and is active with the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, the Points of Light Foundation and other causes.

After losing to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush returned to Houston to carve out his role as a retired president. He decided that he would neither serve as a corporate director nor advocate specific positions for any interest group.

“He did not want to be put in a position of supporting or lobbying for one American company over another,” Becker said. “He also did not feel it was an appropriate use of his past government positions or influence.”

But Bush has bowed to entreaties from U.S. companies and friends to weigh in on their behalf with foreign officials.

In 1998, he made “an exception to his black-and-white rule about lobbying for a company,” Becker said, when he sent a letter to the Kuwaiti oil minister at the request of the Chevron Corp., which was competing for business there. Bush acted because Chevron was the only U.S. company bidding and specified in his note that he had no stake in the deal, she said.

And Bush has twice taken a position as a corporate advisor. Becker said that this role differs from a corporate director because Bush does not participate in decision-making.

One firm he advises, the Carlyle Group, is a Washington-based investment company that acquires and manages defense, aerospace and other corporations worldwide. Frank C. Carlucci, Reagan’s Defense secretary, is Carlyle’s chairman, and James A. Baker III, Bush’s secretary of State, is a senior counselor.

Although Carlyle touts Bush’s position on its Web site, its executives did not return calls about his capacity as senior advisor of Carlyle’s Asia Advisory Board.

Last year, Bush visited South Korea with Carlyle associates who were seeking to purchase three South Korean firms. Bush met with government officials, including then-Prime Minister Kim Jong Pil, and joined Carlyle members in greeting the South Korean companies. Becker said that Carlyle pays Bush only to give talks to company advisory boards, clients and prospective clients. His meetings with heads of state “are personal in nature and not official in any way,” Becker said. They are strictly “social calls” that do not include discussions of business deals, she said.

Carlyle also co-sponsored a 1998 Bush mission to China, one of his numerous trips to that country.

As a post-presidential visitor, he has expressed views on sensitive policy issues, advocating permanent normal trade with Beijing and recognition for China’s progress on human rights.

Such a continued role in China for the elder Bush could complicate dealings between a second Bush administration and Beijing. Relations with China have proved challenging for recent U.S. presidents, who have sought to balance a desire to increase trade and foster democracy with concerns over human rights.

In 1995, Bush was recruited by another high-powered friend, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, to become a senior advisor to the International Advisory Board of Barrick Gold Co., a Toronto-based mining firm. Bush was paid about $15,000 a year plus travel expenses to provide advice at four meetings in four years, Barrick spokesman Vince Borg said.

Bush helped in a Barrick campaign to gain approval to mine gold in Indonesia from what was believed to be the world’s largest deposit. He wrote in 1996 to President Suharto, with whom he had a long-standing relationship, to laud the company:

“I simply want to take the liberty of telling you how impressed I am with Barrick, its visionary leadership, technological achievements and great financial strength.”

At the time, Bre-X Minerals Ltd. of Calgary had exploration rights. But, soon after Bush’s letter, the Indonesian government decreed that Bre-X make Barrick a partner–and give it three-quarters of Bre-X’s revenue rights.

Angry Bre-X shareholders mounted a telephone blitz with investment markets and the press that led Suharto to approve a different joint venture without Barrick. Shortly thereafter, the gold deposit was exposed as a monumental fraud. Bush resigned from Barrick last year.

No president can be expected to completely control the behavior of family members. Indeed, history is replete with examples of first family relatives who have caused embarrassment.

Carter’s brother, Billy, created a furor over his dealings with the terrorist regime in Libya. Richard Nixon deployed a telephone tap to keep tabs on the potentially dubious ventures of younger brother Donald.

The senior Bush knows the feeling. His son Neil was a paid director in a Denver savings and loan that failed, costing taxpayers $1 billion. And President Bush’s brother, Prescott, helped arrange U.S. investment deals for a Tokyo company that, according to Japanese police, was controlled by an underworld kingpin.

The prospective Bush father-son presidential scenario is virtually without precedent in U.S. history. Only John Adams, the second president, had a son who became the nation’s chief executive. But Adams was out of office 24 years when John Quincy Adams took office in 1825, and he died a little more than a year into his son’s administration.

In contrast, only eight years would separate the Bush administrations if Gov. Bush is elected in the fall. And the elder Bush, who served as vice president, CIA director, United Nations ambassador and envoy to China, shows no signs of easing his foreign travels.

Some of the former president’s excursions drew notice because of his association with certain individuals and organizations.

The former president gave speeches throughout Japan in 1996 for the Women’s Federation for World Peace, which is led by Moon’s wife. The highlight was Bush’s appearance at the Tokyo Dome rally, which included a laser show and giant video screens. Bush’s speech on family values was followed by Moon’s wife praising her husband and his church.

The United Church of Christ and a group of 300 lawyers suing Moon’s church urged Bush to skip the event. The groups said that Bush’s participation would bolster the credibility of Moon’s church.

Detractors have criticized the messianic Moon and his recruiting and fund-raising tactics, likening his church to a cult. He also spent a year in a U.S. federal prison in 1982 for tax evasion and has publicly described America as “Satan’s harvest.” A Bush spokesman said that the nonprofit federation headed by Moon’s wife is separate from the church. Bush’ Japan tour was part of a series of speeches for the federation–some in the U.S.–for which he was paid several million dollars.

Bush made another appearance for a Moon-related organization that prompted headlines in Argentina. He was the main attraction at a black-tie dinner in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996, to launch Tiempos del Mundo, a Spanish-language daily newspaper owned by Moon.

As the reverend beamed nearby, Bush saluted him for starting the Argentine paper as well as Moon’s conservative Washington Times. A Unification Church bulletin said afterward: “Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige.”

Bush’s friend, then-Argentine President Menem, was scheduled to attend the dinner but backed out after his secretary for religious affairs called the Unification Church “blasphemous and anti-Christian.”

Bush was paid by Moon’s Washington Times Foundation. Peressutti, the Bush spokesman, said that the former president has not spoken to a Moon-connected group since 1996.

Bush’s closeness to Menem has led to considerable–and sometimes erroneous–speculation in the Argentine press. First elected in 1989, Menem, who served 10 years, is credited with modernizing and bringing stability to Argentina’s economy but has been tainted by allegations of corruption against members of his inner circle and former Cabinet aides.

Since leaving the White House, Bush has met with Menem during five trips to Argentina and three Menem visits to the United States.

In 1994, Bush traveled to Buenos Aires twice, delivering paid speeches to banker and pharmaceutical groups. That April, Bush also did a favor for gambling mogul Steve Wynn, who often hosts the former president at his exclusive Las Vegas home and golf course.

Menem had issued a decree allowing construction of a casino in Buenos Aires. Wynn’s Mirage Resorts Co. wanted to build it. At Wynn’s request, Bush wrote Menem that Wynn was favorably known to him while stating that he had no financial interest in the deal, Peressutti said. Wynn thought the note would “establish his credentials,” said Mirage spokesman Alan Feldman.

After local officials objected to the Argentine federal government’s making such decisions, Menem withdrew his approval and Wynn’s casino project died.

Nevertheless, after Argentine news accounts of Bush’s visits and alleged Bush family meddling in government decisions, seven members of the country’s Chamber of Deputies sent extensive written questions to Menem about his relationship with the Bush family.

The lawmakers, including several prominent opposition figures, asked whether Bush went to bat for Mirage. They also inquired about Neil Bush, whose company was awarded oil exploitation rights by the Argentine government in 1987. They never got a reply.

But Menem’s former ambassador to the United States said in an interview that continuing suspicions in the Argentine press about Bush family activities in Argentina are unfounded.

Before Menem left office in December, his government provided $200,000 in seed money for a new Argentine Studies Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Menem spoke there in March and had lunch with George W. Bush at the Texas Governor’s Mansion.

Menem has expressed a desire to seek Argentina’s presidency again in 2003. His ties to former President Bush could prove sensitive if his son wins the White House.

Experts say that candidate Bush and his father should publicly outline what steps they would take to avoid any potential complications.

“It’s not too soon . . . to think about it,” said Charles O. Jones, a University of Wisconsin political scientist. “There would have to be tremendous caution on the ex-president’s part in doing what he’s been doing.”

– Times staff writers Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires and William C. Rempel in Los Angeles, and researchers John Beckham in Chicago and Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this story.

From COMPROMISED – Clinton, Bush and The CIA:

A reported conversation between Barry Seal and Terry Reed:

(Barry):

“There ain’t nothin’ in this world more powerful that good ol’ fu*kin’ blackmail, Terry. And don’t let anybody ever tell ya different. Jeeeesus Christ, I got some good shit on some big people.”. . .

(Terry):

“Calm down Barry. Tell me what’s going on.” . . .

(Barry):

“Terry, what’s most important right now is for ya to play ball with these guys and get your ass down to Mexico ASAP. You impressed the shit out of Leroy . . . Robert Johnson, too. I won’t be able to come to Mexico right now. I’ve got a little matter to take care of. But ya get on down there . . . and I’ll be joining ya soon.” . . .

(Terry):

“What’s this blackmail you’re talking about?” . . .

(Barry):

“Ever hear the old expression, it’s not what ya know, it’s who ya know? Well, whoever said that just hadn’t caught the vice president’s kids in the dope business, ’cause I can tell ya for sure what you know can definitely be more important than who you know.” . . .

(Terry):

“What’s this about the vice president’s kids and dope?” . . .

(Barry):

“I don’t wanna tell ya too much, ’cause truthfully ya don’t have a need to know. But Terry, I been workin’ with several federal agencies for the past couple of years, as ya probably suspicioned. In the course of that business, a person can’t help but run across some real sensitive information. It seems that some major players in the Medellin Cartel, whom I personally know, ran across some knowledge that’s very valuable to both the Republicans and the Democrats. Real national security stuff. It seems some of George Bush’s kids just can’t say no to drugs, ha ha ha ha. . . . Well, ya can imagine how valuable information like this would be, can’t ya? That could get ya out of almost any kind of jam.” Seal paused for a moment then asked, “Ya ever play Monopoly? The information I got is so good it’s just like a get-out-of-jail-free card . . . ha, ha, ha, ha YEE-HAWWWWW.”…

(Terry):

” Barry, are you telling me George Bush’s kids are in the drug business?…”

(Barry):

” Yup, that’s what I’m tellin’ ya. A guy in Florida who flipped for the DEA has got the goods on the Bush boys. Now I heard this earlier from a reliable source in Colombia, but I just sat on it then, waitin’ to use it as a trump card, if I ever needed it. “Well, I need to use it now. I got names, dates, places . . . even got some tape recordin’s. Fu*k, I even got surveillance videos catchin’ the Bush boys red-handed. I consider this stuff to me invincible. Now this is real sensitive shit inside of U.S. Customs and DEA, and those guys are pretty much under control. It’s damage control as usual. But where it gets real interestin’ is what the Republicans will do to the Democrats in order to dirty up the people who might use this information against Bush.”…

(Terry):

“So you’ve got direct knowledge of the Republicans trying to neutralize some Democrats before they can nuke Bush with this?”

(Barry):

“Hell, yeah. I’ve been part of it. Remember that meetin’ we had at SOB’s when I told ya, ya should play ball with these guys . . . Remember in that meetin’ I told ya I had a plan to blow the lid off the whole damn Mena deal and shut it down due to adverse publicity?

“Well, what I didn’t tell ya was that project was already in effect, and the Republicans were already trying to neutralize some important people in Arkansas … namely, the Clinton family.

“Yeah, that day ya explained to me the connection between the Ward family, the Rose Law Firm and the governor’s mansion, well I about shit! Ya see what ya didn’t know was I was on a secret mission by none other than the Agency to sort of uh, dirty up some people real close to the governor. Now, I had been workin’ on this through Dan Lasater.

“Now Dan’s a good ol’ boy and all that, but he’s gotta drug problem, and he’s got the balls to be stealin’ from the Agency, too. From what I hear, Dan’s been doin’ a lot of questionable out-a-state investin’. In fact, he’s stashin’ a lot of cash in a resort in New Mexico.

“I was told to exploit that, which I was workin’ on. But you come along with this new connection.

“I saw an immediate way to get some white stuff up some noses around Bill Clinton real fast.”

(Terry):

“Barry, this is heavy shit! Are you saying you were the source of the cocaine ending up around a lot of important people in Arkansas? . . . There’s a major scandal brewing there. . . . Did you have anything to do with Roger (Clinton) and some of those guys in Lasater’s firm getting investigated?”…

(Barry):

“Terry, I told ya when I met ya, I’m in transportation and I transport what the government wants transported. In this case, the Republicans…and the Bush family…wanted some stuff transported through Mena and into Arkansas that would end up in the noses of some very prominent Democrats.

“And yes, I must ‘fess up, I’ve had a hand in that. YEEE-HAWWWWWW! It’s not who ya know, it’s what ya know….”

~ ~ ~

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 1986, turned out to be the last day of Barry Seal’s life. His blood, along with pieces of flesh and bone, were splattered all over the interior of his car. The Baton Rouge police report, in cold official language, described what happened to him that day: “Autopsy determined the cause of Seal’s death to be multiple gunshot wounds fired by an automatic weapon,” the crime report said. “Three rounds entered Seal’s upper torso, and four entered the left head. Some fifteen rounds were recovered at the murder scene.”

* * *

From The American Spectator, June 1999, by Byron York:

George’s Road to Riches:

On April 15, Texas governor George W. Bush … made public his 1998 tax returns.

It’s something Bush has done each year since his first governor’s race, but this time was different; the figures contained in the returns were … simply astonishing. The governor, who had reported income of $271,920 in 1997, estimated that he made $18.4 million in 1998.

Bush’s income came from two main sources. The great majority — nearly $15 million — came from his stake in the sale of the Texas Rangers baseball team. An additional $3 million or so came from a blind trust that manages his investments . . . The smallest component of Bush’s income was his salary as governor, $99,121.

What was perhaps just as surprising as the size of the numbers was that the national press did not seem particularly interested in Bush’s unusually good fortune. The New York Times devoted all of 137 words to the story; the Washington Post gave it 189. Other papers didn’t mention it at all….

Far more than tales of youthful drinking and carousing, the record of Bush’s rise to wealth reveals how he became what he is today. It’s a complicated tale of family connections, hard work, and sweet deals, topped off by a taxpayer-subsidized baseball bonanza that may leave some Republicans feeling queasy about how their candidate got rich….

~ ~ ~

In the beginning, Bush was able to seek advice from a number of family friends, people like James Allison, Jr., a newspaper publisher and political strategist who had run Bush’s father’s successful campaign for Congress, and Martin Allday, a lawyer and businessman whom President Bush would later appoint chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Allday introduced Bush to Paul Rea, a geologist and oil executive who would later play an important role in Bush’s career.

Other family friends and supporters pitched in as well. According to an analysis in the Dallas Morning News, Arbusto’s early investors included people like FitzGerald Bemiss, a childhood friend of President Bush’s who invested $80,000 … George L. Ball, chairman of Prudential-Bache Securities, who invested $100,000; financier Lewis Lehrman, who invested $47,000; and John Macomber and Willam Draper, both later appointed to the Export-Import Bank, who invested $172,550….

~ ~ ~

Mr. Uzielli’s $1 Million Check

The first well was dry. Then others didn’t work out. … by the early 1980’s Arbusto’s balance sheet was trending downward…

Bush needed investors, but he had already tapped many of the most obvious sources. So it was a very fortunate day in January 1982 when he found his biggest single benefactor in an international businessman named Philip Uzielli….

When Arbusto got in a bind, Uzielli, using money form a Panamanian company owned by his family, came to the rescue with a $1 million investment. The money bought Uzielli a ten-percent interest in Arbusto, which raised eyebrows because all of Arbusto, including the desks and the paper clips, was worth less than $500,000 at the time. Why would a man invest $1 million to buy ten percent of a company that was worth less than $500,000?…

Uzielli would ultimately “lose” nearly all his money.

~ ~ ~

From Harper’s Magazine, Feb 2000: How George W. Bush Got Rich – A heartwarming tale of influence, cronyism, and $1.7 billion, by Joe Conason:

On December 6, 1994, one month after he defeated Ann Richards to become governor of Texas, George W. received a large but belated campaign contribution from an acquaintance named Thomas O. Hicks …

Hicks was easily one of the wealthiest men in Texas, and more specifically, he was the chief executive of Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, an investment partnership he founded….

Of the scores of appointments made by an otherwise weak governor under the Texas constitution, a seat on the University of Texas Board of Regents is among the most desirable. It carries significant prestige, opportunities for patronage, and preferred access to season tickets (or luxury boxes) at Longhorn football games. For someone like Tom Hicks, however, being a regent provided something far more valuable….

Hicks had conceived an ambitious plan for the state university system’s financial assets– more than $13 billion— that matched his own bold investment style.

~ ~ ~

Friends and long-time associates of Thomas Hicks, and his firm’s past and future business partners– as well as major Republican contributors and political supporters of the Bush family– received hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of Texas investment funds.

Under the guidance of Tom Hicks, a growing portion of the university’s investment choices had a decidedly Republican tinge. On March 1, 1995, the regents voted to place what would prove to be a comparatively modest $10 million with The Carlyle Group….

That a firm run by his father’s associates would be awarded an investment contract only weeks after George W. was elected to office was unseemly at best. But the Texas governor had his own long-standing and lucrative ties to Carlyle that dated back almost a decade. Among his more obscure business activities was a corporate directorship at Caterair, one of the nation’s largest airline-catering services, which was acquired by Carlyle in 1989.

The next year, a seat on the company’s board was arranged for George W. by the former Nixon White House aide and longtime Bush associate Fred Malek, who was then an adviser at Carlyle. Although Bush remained on the catering company’s board until 1994, his earnings as a Caterair director are not specified on his personal financial forms filed with the Texas Ethics Commission….

These days it is the governor’s father who benefits from the Washington investment firm’s largesse.

Since leaving the White House, George Herbert Walker Bush has been paid by Carlyle for speeches at events sponsored by the merchant bank….

* * *

From the web posting by Real People for Real Change:

George W. Bush, Jr. – The Dark Side

Just like Dan Quayle and Steve Forbes, two other politically-connected rich kids, Bush Junior joined his home state’s National Guard. It’s not clear how he got past the waiting list, but his dad was a U.S. Congressman at the time, and his grandfather was a famous U.S. Senator.

Instead of going to Vietnam, he flew cool jet planes around Texas, valiantly defending us against the Mexican air force. His political connections got him a sweet deal — they not only got him into the National Guard, and got him the last (rare) training slot for pilots despite the fact that he scored the lowest allowable score – 25/100 – on a pilot’s aptitude test, but he was assigned to fly an older plane (the F102) which was being phased out at the time, which meant that he had no chance at all of going to Vietnam….

On this issue, too, Bush has weaseled in a manner eerily reminiscent of Bill Clinton. He claims that he joined the guard to fly planes, just like his dad. But George Bush, Sr., a genuine war hero, joined the Navy, not the National Guard. Both the Navy and Air Force had plenty of openings when Bush Jr. joined, but he chose the stateside Guard.

Furthermore, his enlistment form had a check box to indicate you volunteered to go to Vietnam or not. His was checked NO, but now he claims that the clerks there often filled that part out and checked NO for you.

Once he joined, Bush was promoted to First Lieutenant in just 4 months, a very short time, and was given several months off to work on a political campaign. He was also released 6 months early to work on another campaign….

Insider Business Deals.

Bush, Jr. has made a lot of money off three business deals. In each one, his contribution is hard to perceive, yet he walked off with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in deals arranged by his father’s political cronies….

The Oil Business: Rewarded for Losing Money.

Like his dad, Junior struck out in Texas and founded an oil company, Arbusto Energy, Inc., with $20,000 of his own money. (Arbusto is the Spanish word for bush.) The company foundered in the early 1980’s when oil prices dropped (and his dad was Vice President.)…

The 50 investors, who were “mainly friends of my uncle” in Junior’s own words, put in $4.7 million and lost most of it. Junior claims that investors “did pretty good,” but Bush family friend Russell Reynolds told the Dallas Morning News: “The bottom line was there were problems, and it didn’t work out very well. I think we got maybe 20 cents on the dollar.”

As Arbusto neared collapse, Spectrum 7 Energy Corp bought it in Sept, 1984. Despite his poor track record, the owners made Bush, Jr. the president and gave him 13.6% of the parent company’s stock….

Spectrum 7 was a small oil firm owned by two staunch Reagan/Bush Sr. supporters — William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds. These two were also owners of the Texas Rangers and allowed Bush Jr. to purchase a chunk of the team cheaply; he later sold it for over 24 times what he paid.

Within two years of purchasing Arbusto and making Bush Jr. president, Spectrum 7 was itself in trouble; it lost $400,000 in its last 6 months of operation. That ended in 1986, when Harken Energy Corporation bought Spectrum 7’s 180-well operation….

Junior got $227,000 worth of Harken stock, and a lot more. He was named to the board of directors, made $80,000 to $100,000 a year well into the 1990’s as a “consultant” to Harken, and was allowed to buy Harken stock at 40% below face value….

He also borrowed $180,375 from Harken at very low rates; the company’s 1989 and 1990 SEC filings said it “forgave” $341,000 in loans to unspecified executives….

So, what did Junior do for all this money? It’s hard to say exactly, but things happened for Harken after Junior came on board: it got a $25 million stock offering from an unusual bank with CIA ties; it won a surprise exclusive drilling contract with Bahrain, a small Mideast country; and an Arab member of its Board of Directors was invited to White House policy meetings with Pres. George Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft….

Easy Money From Odd Sources.

The firm’s $25 million stock offering was underwritten by Stephens, Inc., an Arkansas bank whose head, Jackson Stephens, was on President Bush’s “Team 100.” (That was a group of 249 rich persons who gave at least $100,000 each to his presidential campaign committee.) Stephens placed the offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank of Switzerland, which (according to the Wall Street Journal) was not known as an investor in small American companies. . . .

Union Bank did have other connections: it was a joint-venture with the notorious BCCI in a Geneva-based bank, and was involved in a scandal surrounding the Nugan Hand Bank, a CIA operation in Australia whose executives were advised by William Quasha, the father of Harken’s chairman (Alan Quasha).

Union Bank was also involved in scandals surrounding Panamanian money laundering by BCCI, and Ferdinand Marcos’ movement of 325 tons of gold out of the Philippines. . . .

Selling Oil Stock Just Before Iraq Invaded.

George Bush, Jr. sold 60% of his stock in Harken Oil in June, 1990 for $848,560. That was brilliant timing; in August, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Harken’s stock dropped 25%. Soon after, a big quarterly loss caused it to drop further. . . .

A secret State Department memo in May of that year had warned that Saddam was out of control, and listed options for responding to him, including an oil ban that might affect U.S. oil prices. . . .

We can’t be sure that the President or an aide mentioned these developments to his son, or that Harken’s representative who was admitted to meetings with the President picked up something and reported back to Junior. But it is the simplest and most logical explanation. . . .

Furthermore, Harken’s internal financial advisers at Smith Barney had issued a report in May warning of the company’s deteriorating finances. Harken owed more that $150 million to banks and other creditors at the time. George Bush, Jr. was a member of the board and also of Harken’s restructuring committee, which met in May and worked directly with the Smith Barney consultants. He must have known of these warnings. . . .

These are pretty clear-cut indications of illegal insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission, controlled at the time by President George Bush, investigated but chose not to press charges. . . .

Junior also violated another SEC rule explicitly. He was required to register his sale as an insider trade by July 10, 1990, but didn’t until March 1991, after the Gulf War was over. He was not punished or cited. . . .

For more on Harken Energy, GO TO > > > Aloha, Harken Energy

For more on the Sultan of Bahrain, GO TO > > > Flying High in Hawaii

For more on BCCI, the ‘bank of crooks and criminals’, GO TO BCCI

* * *

From Associated Press, 3/2/00, by Jonathan Salant:

McCain Stings Bush on Sleep-Overs for Cash

Eight of the 31 overnight guests at the Texas governor’s mansion last year helped Gov. George W. Bush raise a record $70 million for his Republican presidential bid . . .

Bush’s chief rival, Sen. John McCain, likened the practice to President Clinton’s use of the Lincoln Bedroom to house big givers to the Democratic Party.

“Bill Clinton only charges $10,000 a night. He charges $100,000 a night,” McCain said …

The donors, who included Bush’s chief fund-raiser and seven “pioneers” who raised at least $100,000 each, were among the 31 overnight visitors that Bush entertained at the mansion since Jan 1, 1999, according to records released at the request of the Associated Press.

Don Evans, a close friend of the Texas governor and the national finance chairman of his presidential campaign, stayed at the mansion seven times last year.

Seven other guests were members of Bush’s “pioneers” . . .

>> Don Jordan, chairman of Reliant Energy.

>> Brad Freeman of the investment firm Freeman, Spogli & Co.

>> Texas Public Safety Commissioner Jim Francis.

>> Indianapolis Mayor Steve Goldsmith.

>> Michigan Gov. John Engler.

>> Craig Stapleton, a cousin and executive with Marsh & McLennan, an insurance and investment firm.

>> Roland Betts of the development firm Chelsea Piers Management . . .

Three of his father’s former colleagues — ex-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State George Schultz and former Education Secretary Bill Bennett — spent a night. . . .

* * *

From If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates:

. . . Old Mr. Powerhouse watches George W. Bush swing with his slow roundhouse right of Compassionate Conservatism, then watches Al Gore counterpunch with his feeble left jab of Practical Idealism, and he just laughs and laughs, not caring one whit whether Compassionate Practicality, Conservative Idealism, or any combination thereof wins in November — because he owns both of these pugs.

Among the corporations already represented on the money lists of both the Bush and Gore campaigns are:

Aetna, AT&T, BellSouth, Boeing, Citigroup, Du Pont, Enron, Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Intel, Lazard Freres, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Microsoft, Monsanto, Morgan Stanley, Raytheon, Roche, Time Warner

* * *

Robbing from the Poor and Giving It to the Insurance Companies.

From The Buying of the President 2000: . . .

Calling Texas “litigious heaven,” Bush promised during his first campaign for governor that, if elected, he would push legislation to limit frivolous lawsuits.

He argued that fewer lawsuits would lead to lower insurance rates for average Texans. Of course, limiting the right to sue would also benefit insurers . . .

Bush has raised millions from companies that have pushed “tort reform.” Farmers Insurance Group, Inc., based in Los Angeles, is Bush’s No. 8 career patron.

During his first two gubernatorial races, Bush also collected $4.5 million from officers and board members of Texans for Lawsuit Reform and the Texas Civil Justice League.

In June 1995, Bush followed through on his campaign promise and signed a series of bills that limit the access of victims to the court system and the amount of damage awards they can receive. Bush also signed into law measures that make it harder for consumers to sue real estate agents and that make it more difficult for them to collect damages when they’re injured by more than one party.

Limiting personal-injury lawsuits did produce savings for insurance companies, but that money went straight to the industry. From 1996 to 1998, insurance companies made a $3 billion profit while the average Texan’s auto insurance rates continued to climb.

Texans have paid the price in other ways, too. When a jury in San Antonio found that an oil company’s lax safety measures had caused the death of a refinery worker, it wanted to send a message by ordering the company to pay $42.5 million in damages to the worker’s widow.

But thanks to the laws Bush signed, the company walked away paying only $200,000. . . .

* * *

George W. Bush’s Top 10 Career Patrons

1. Enron Corporation

2. Sanchez family and related business interests.

3. Vinson & Elkins.

4. Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst, Inc.

5. Bass family and business interests.

6. The Sterling Group.

7. Pilgrim’s Pride Corp.

8. Farmers Group, Inc. (Zurich)

9. Sam and Charles Wyly, Jr. and business interests.

10. Arter & Hadden.

As Clinton and the media repeatedly pointed out Mineta is the first Asian-American Cabinet member. One television news commentator made the observation that this was a good political move on Gore’s part in order to garner the badly needed California Asian-American vote.

“He brings an in-depth understanding of American business and a strong sense of the needs of our high-tech economy,” President Clinton said.

“But he also has a deep concern for people, for people in places who are not yet fully participating in this economy.“

* * *

From Stupid White Men, (copyright 2000) by Michael Moore:

Secretary of Transportation – Norman Y. Mineta

A leftover from the Clinton administration, the only “Democrat” in Bush’s cabinet, Mineta has his own corporate connections. When he was a congressman representing Silicon Valley, he received campaign contributions from Northwest Airlines, United Airlines, Greyhound, Boeing and Union Pacific.

After retiring from the House, he went to work at Lockheed Martin.

What better place to park himself now than at the cabinet department that “oversees” all of them?

* * *

From USA Today, 6/30/00: . . . Clinton’s choice of Mineta stands to bolster the Gore campaign in pivotal California. … He has close ties to the state’s Asian-American groups, as well as the deep-pocketed defense, aerospace and computer industries.

“Some might say that the months remaining in this administration is not a lot of time to make a difference in the life of our nation, but I disagree,” Mineta said at a White House news conference. “Six months is a virtual eternity in the new economy. …

Mineta joined defense contractor Lockheed Martin as a lobbyist in 1995 after serving 21 years in the House. . . .

The last seven months of the Clinton administration are likely to be busy ones at Commerce.

The department is playing a major role in Clinton’s campaign to normalize trade with China. It will wrap up the once-a-decade census and soon issue a politically sensitive report on unfair practices of foreign steelmakers. . . .

A coalition of pro-trade business groups spoke out yesterday to urge Lott and other Senate Republicans to schedule a vote on the China legislation as quickly as possible. . . .

* * *

A Catbird Comment: Whoa, Nellie!!! Back that up and run it past me again — slowly! Wasn’t Al Gore just on the Congressional hot seat for the 1996 campaign fund-raising scandals? And didn’t those scandals revolve around illegal contributions from foreign interests– mainly China? And wasn’t one of the major aero-space firms involved in the scandals, LOCKHEED MARTIN?

Holy corporate quid pro quo, Batman!

* * *

For more on Norman Mineta, GO TO > > > Year of the Dragon

For more on Lockheed Martin, GO TO > > > Tarnished Wings

March 7, 2002

Independent Counsel: Clinton Would Have Been Convicted

By Pete Yost, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – President Clinton could have been indicted and probably would have been convicted in the scandal involving Monica Lewinsky, independent counsel Robert Ray contended yesterday in his final report.

Writing this last chapter on the affair that damaged the former president’s second term, Ray said Clinton lied in January 1998 testimony denying a sexual relationship with Lewinsky. Clinton also “impeded the due administration of justice” by drawing presidential secretary Betty Currie into his false account, Ray added.

“The independent counsel concluded that sufficient evidence existed to prosecute and that such evidence would ‘probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,'” said the report, quoting from Justice Department guidelines for bringing criminal cases.

Just before Clinton left office early last year, his lawyers made an arrangement with Ray that spared him from criminal charges in the Lewinsky affair. In addition to admitting that he “knowingly gave evasive and misleading answers” about his sexual relationship, Clinton surrendered his law license for five years.

Ray said the belief that “sufficient evidence existed to prosecute President Clinton was confirmed by President Clinton’s admissions” on his last full day in office “and by evidence showing that he engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.” . . .

“The $70 million investigation of President Clinton from 1994 to 2001 was intense, expensive, partisan and long … and there’s nothing new in this report,” said Clinton lawyer David Kendall.

Regarding Ray’s findings in the Lewinsky matter, “it’s not clear what the purpose of the report is other than to promote Robert Ray’s Senate campaign, Monica Lewinsky’s HBO special and the Paula Jones vs. Tonya Harding boxing match,” said Jerrifer Palmieri, a former spokeswoman for Clinton.

Ray acknowledges that he is considering seeking the nomination to challenge Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., but has not announced his candidacy or filed any paperwork.

But House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., called the report “a welcome event” that “will permit the public to evaluate fully President Clinton’s misconduct and the independent counsel’s investigation.”

The report focused on two events: Clinton’s testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit and his interaction with Currie, the presidential secretary he summoned to the White House for a meeting the day after that testimony.

According to Currie’s testimony, Clinton told the secretary that she had always been present when Clinton was with Lewinsky, that Lewinsky “came on to” Clinton, that Currie “could see and hear everything” and that the president never touched the White House intern.

The House impeached Clinton in December 1998, accusing him of perjury and obstructing justice.

The senate declined to convict his the following February.

* * *

From Year of the Rat: . . .

Our thesis is simple: The Clinton administration has made a series of Faustian bargains and policy blunders that allowed a hostile power to further its aims in Washington.

In the main, Bill Clinton and Al Gore did it for money.

In these pages, we will show that, in order to gain and hold onto power, the Clinton administration has acted recklessly, allowing the wrong people to gain access to our most important political and economic secrets. Any number of Chinese arms dealers, spies, narcotics traffickers, gangsters, pimps, accomplices to mass murder, communist agents, and other undesirables will appear in these pages, all associated in one way or another with the White House and money.

~ ~ ~

Did the Clinton administration sell out America’s national security to one of this country’s leading and most dangerous adversaries merely to raise campaign cash? In the pages that follow, we will prove our answer, which is: YES !

~ ~ ~

The Clinton-Gore inauguration in mid-January 1993 was another opportunity for the Riadys to open their wallets.

James Riady and John Huang each gave $100,000 to cover the cost of inaugural parties. The Riadys brought a number of friends from Indonesia to Washington for the swearing in ceremony. . . .

Their generosity continued. At the direction of Mochtar Riady, Joe Giroir — a Lippo partner and Arkansas “Friend of Bill” (FOB) — bestowed a life-sized bust of Clinton upon the National Portrait Gallery. Giroir has personally contributed $200,000 to the DNC since 1993, something made easier by his $500,000-a-year compensation from Lippo. . . .

In return for such generosity, the Riadys and their friends were given unparalleled access to the White House. In Jakarta, James Riady likes to brag about where he was on the afternoon of April 18, 1993.

On that day eighty members of the Branch Davidian religious cult were holed up in their compound outside of Waco, Texas, when it was shattered by a tank-led assault. By the time the FBI and Treasury’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents had completed their work, seventeen American children had burned to death….

As might be expected, the White House was a busy place that afternoon, and the president was preoccupied. Clinton was not too distracted, however, to chat with his leading contributors — James Riady, John Huang, and Mark Grobmyer — in his little study off the Oval Office. Riady later told Indonesian diplomats that, during their chat, a television in the corner showed the Waco compound burning over and over as CNN repeated its coverage.

Clinton even took time to show his visitors the White House Situation Room, then on full alert. White House entry logs confirm that Riady and his companions were in the presidential offices (West Wing) of the White House that day.

They apparently also dropped in on Robert Rubin, now secretary of the treasury, who was then a White House economics official….

For more on the Riadys, GO TO > > > The Indonesian Connection

For more on Robert Rubin, GO TO > > > Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate; Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs

* * *

From No One Left to Lie To: . . .

On December 10, 1998, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, David Shippers, delivered one of the most remarkable speeches ever heard in the precincts.

A leathery Chicago law ‘n order Democrat, Mr. Schippers represented the old-style, big city, blue-collar sensibility … The spirit of an earlier time, of a time before “smoking materials” had been banned from the White House, rasped from his delivery. After pedantically walking his hearers through a traditional prosecutor’s review of an incorrigible perp … Mr. Schippers paused and said:

“The President, then, has lied under oath in a civil deposition, lied under oath in a criminal grand jury. He lied to the people, he lied to the Cabinet, he lied to his top aides, and now he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.”

* * *

Now, David Shippers tells us what really happened behind closed doors in the impeachment of William J. Clinton, in his remarkable first-hand account:

SELLOUT: The Inside Story of President Clinton’s Impeachment, by David P. Schippers:

Contemptible Behavior.

As our deadline approached, we still wanted to expand our inquiry beyond Monica Lewinsky….

The Independent Counsel’s Office sent over two large file boxes– one for the Democrats and an identical one for us. It was stuffed with transcripts of grand jury testimony, witness interviews, and FBI reports.

There was information about alleged hush money payoffs to Webster Hubbell by John Huang and the Riady group, which tied into our investigation of Chinagate. But more shocking were the investigative reports about the alleged rape of a woman named Juanita Broaddrick. There was also information … of the President’s alleged groping of Kathleen Willey.

Because of the nature of the alleged offenses, both the Willey case and the Broaddrick case were important– if the charges could be proven– in establishing a pattern of obstruction, perjury, and witness tampering. In the Willey case in particular, the President had given a deposition in which he emphatically denied the allegations….

But bad things happened after Willey was subpoenaed to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case. This story was even more shocking than the President’s alleged assault on a married woman.

On July 31, 1997, [David] Gecker [Willey’s friend and attorney] received, without warning, a fax from the President’s attorney. Both Willey and her attorney … confirmed to us that it was a document entitled “Statement of Kathleen Willey” and that it came with the instruction that she was to read it as a public statement. It said: “The President of the United States never sexually harassed me in any way, and I have always considered myself to be on excellent terms with him.”

She ignored the request.

In Aug 1197 the groping incident was reported in the Drudge Report and Newsweek. Around this time she received a phone call from an acquaintance who was a major financial donor to President Clinton. He told her to avoid giving a deposition if she was subpoenaed in the Jones case and to deny that anything had ever happened because only two people know and “all you have to do is deny it, too.”

He called several other times, encouraging her to say, “I can’t remember; it’s none of your business.”

Willey was subpoenaed in the fall of 1997 but wasn’t actually called to testify until Jan 10, 1998. Shortly after she received the subpoena, Gecker was visited by one of the President’s lawyers. Gecker told Kathleen the gist of the meeting: Clinton’s lawyer was suggesting she avoid testifying by taking the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Gecker told Clinton’s attorney that his client wouldn’t take the Fifth because she had done nothing wrong….

A short while before Willey was scheduled to testify, Gecker received another visit from the same lawyer. This time Gecker was told that he was only “a real estate lawyer” and that Kathleen Willey should really be represented by a top criminal attorney. Gecker responded that he was perfectly capable of handling a deposition and that he could not see any possible reason that Kathleen needed a criminal lawyer. Gecker added that even if she wanted such a lawyer, Willey was broke and could not afford the fees charged by top Washington criminal lawyers. The President’s attorney offered that she wouldn’t need to worry about fees because “we will take care of that.”…

Gecker conveyed this to Willey. She was frightened and convinced that if she testified she would be indicted by Janet Reno’s Justice Department. She had seen how Billy Dale of the White House Travel Office had actually been indicted and tried for crimes he had not committed, reportedly because he had gotten in the way of the Clinton administration. She had seen the smears and attacks on Paula Jones. To add to her fears, she felt intimidated by events that followed.

Shortly before her Jan 10 deposition, Willey came out of her Virginia home to find all of her tires flat. Her mechanic asked, “Who the hell did you tick off? Your tires were flattened with a nail gun.”…

As the deposition got closer, the intimidation increased. One day her cat, Bullseye, disappeared. On Jan 8, two days before she was to testify, Willey was walking her dogs in a secluded area early in the morning. A man in a jogging suit approached her:

JOGGER: Good morning, did you ever find your cat?

WILLEY: No, we haven’t found her yet.

JOGGER: That’s too bad. Bullseye was his name, wasn’t it? . . . Did you ever get those tires fixed?

WILLEY: They’re fine. . .

JOGGER: So, —— and —— [Willey’s children]? . . . and our attorney, Dan, is he okay?

WILLEY: He’s fine.

JOGGER: I hope you’re getting the message.

Willey was terrified. She turned and ran. The jogger called after her, “You’re just not getting the message, are you?”…

The deposition began as scheduled….

Gecker saw that Willey was nervous. When the Jones attorneys asked about the incident in the Oval Office, she looked terrified. Gecker asked for a short recess to consult with his client….

“Kathleen, there is no turning back, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell the truth, the whole truth,” she answered, with tears in her eyes. She went back and answered every question put to her.

The next morning Willey stepped outside to pick up the newspaper. There on the porch, within a few feet of the front door, the skull of a small animal lay facing her….

~ ~ ~

Kathleen Willey wasn’t the only woman from President Clinton’s past with an outrageous story to tell.

A week or so after the election, Pete Wacks, Diana Woznicki, and I met with Congressman Bob Barr and Larry Klayman. Klayman is a lawyer and the leader of Judicial Watch, which had vigorously pursued Clinton scandals from Filegate to Chinagate, deposing John Huang, the mysterious employee of the Dept of Commerce and later of the Democratic National Committee. Barr thought Klayman might be able to help us….

Klayman had testimony on Filegate that he thought showed clear abuse of power by the President. He was building a case on Commercegate, having uncovered evidence of a scheme by Huang to sell Commerce Dept junkets to heavy contributors to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Klayman had developed an informant close to Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who gave testimony showing a pattern of raffling off trips on federally funded trade missions….

~ ~ ~

During our investigation, we began receiving reports that one of the “Jane Does” mentioned in the Jones case was a woman who might have been assaulted by then-Arkansas Attorney General William Clinton….

I asked Diana Woznicki to look into the matter.

Within a day or two, Diana reported to me about a woman in Arkansas, Juanita Broaddrick, who alleged that Clinton had raped her years earlier. A shocking story, but nothing in itself that would affect our case in the Senate.

Then Diana dropped the bomb.

“Oh, one more thing that I picked up. She was subpoenaed by the Jones lawyers. She filed an affidavit denying everything.”

Bingo! That changed the whole picture. Three questions had to be answered: Was the original assault story true? Where did she get the affidavit? And was she pressured directly or indirectly by the White House to sign a false affidavit?…

I sent Diana and John [Kocoras] to meet with Broaddrick and her lawyer in Arkansas. … Diana said Broaddrick appeared to be hiding something. When asked if she had executed a false affidavit in the Jones case, she acknowledged that she had. Her lawyer interrupted, saying that the affidavit wasn’t technically false, and Broaddrick retorted, “Yes, it was!”

Later, Broaddrick phoned Diana and unburdened herself for about an hour-and-a-half, telling her the full story.

I asked Diana the critical question, “Do you believe her?”

Diana, who had extensive experience helping rape victims as a Chicago cop, said definitively, “Juanita fits the pattern of the classic rape victim.”

Here is the story as told by Juanita Broaddrick to Diana Woznicki as part of our investigation:

Juanita Broaddrick met Bill Clinton in 1978, when he made a campaign stop at a nursing home that she owned. At the time, Broaddrick was a young married woman who worked in the long-term care industry … while Clinton, Arkansas’s Attorney General, was campaigning for his first term as Governor. During the visit, Clinton told Broaddrick to call him and visit his headquarters to pick up campaign materials the next time she was in Little Rock.

In the spring of that year, Broaddrick and a female friend attended a health care conference in Little Rock. She remembered Clinton’s invitation and called for an appointment . . .

Clinton called her back and suggested they meet in the hotel coffee shop to talk about his campaign. A few minutes later, he called again. He told Juanita there were reporters in the coffee shop and asked if they could meet in her room so they could talk without interruption. Broaddrick hesitated because she was alone in her room … In those days it was still considered unusual for a woman to meet a man alone in her hotel room, especially in the South.

Then she thought, “This is the Attorney General; if I can’t trust him, who can I trust?” So she agreed to the meeting.

When the Attorney General arrived, he was alone. … The two engaged in some general small talk, and Broaddrick ushered Clinton to the window, where the coffee service was laid out.

Suddenly, Clinton began kissing her, at first not forcefully. But then he threw her on the bed and kept kissing her. She struggled to get away, and as she did, he got on top of her and bit her lower lip as a way of controlling her. . . .

She kept saying no, that she didn’t want this to happen. The pain became excruciating. He forced her legs apart and raped her.

At one point in the attack, Clinton assured Juanita that there was no danger of her getting pregnant. He said, “I had mumps when I was a kid; I’m sterile.”

Finally, the ordeal appeared to be completed. Clinton rose up slightly as though he were about to withdraw. Then he said, “My God, I can do it again!” And he did.

When Clinton finally completed the assault, Broaddrick was close to collapse. She was sobbing uncontrollably, afraid of what might happen next, confused, and in a panic.

Clinton appeared unfazed. He cooly rose from the bed and went into the bathroom. All the time Juanita was afraid to move. He emerged after a few minutes and started to walk out. When he reached the door, he turned to his sobbing victim … smiled, and said, “You better do something about that lip. Get some ice on it.”

Then he put on his sunglasses and left….

* * *

See on the net: Tenacious Tentacles; Vince Foster; Who is Leo Wanta?; Clinton Scandal Clips; Democratic Chinese Fund Raising; Questions Linger About Ron Brown; The Confidential Commerce Files; Ron Brown and the Balkans; The Clinton Stories the Media Still Won’t Cover; Whitewater and Clinton Scandals

# # #

A Connecticut Yankee in King Kamehameha’s Court

Aloha, Harken Energy

Birds on the Power Lines

The Carlyle Group: Birds that Drink from Cesspools

Condoleezza and The Chicken Hawks

Crouching Dragon ~ Hidden Rats

Dirty Money, Dirty Politics & Bishop Estate

Dirty Gold in Goldman Sachs

Flying High in Hawaii

Nests in the Pentagon

Nests on the Rails

The Eagle Awakes

The Eagle Hooded

The Indonesian Connection

The Kissinger of Death

The Mercenaries

The Nests of Osama bin Laden

The Secret Nests

The Story of Enron

The Strange Saga of BCCI

Rand Corporation

Tarnished Wings: The Greed at Lockheed

Thorns in the Rose Garden

Yakuza Doodle Dandies

~ o ~

MORE OF THE CATBIRD’S FAVORITE LINKS

THE CATBIRD SEAT FORUM

THE CATBIRD SEAT

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