This international criminal web is huge. Merrick Garland and "The Octopus"

[Kid Berwyn]

55. Untangling the Octopus

An old essay provides the story and context...

UNTANGLING THE OCTOPUS

by Steve Mizrach

October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Noriega, Iraqgate, and BCCI

Before he died in an ineptly performed 'suicide,' the young journalist Danny Casolaro was working on a book that he claimed tied together many of the 'gates' and 'miniscandals' surrounding the Bush presidency. The book identified the web which tied all the scandals together as the "Octopus," a mythical creature with tentacles stretching everywhere. Perhaps the birth of the Octopus lies in the 1980 Presidential election; and its growth occurred under the eight years of the Reagan presidency. Casolaro soon found that the Octopus may have consisted of a 'shadow government' apparatus that went back even further than Bush and Reagan. But what's left of his notes seem primarily to focus on events in the 80s and 90s.

It is very possible that in 1980, Bill Casey and other members of the Reagan team may have conspired with the Iranians to delay the release of the American hostages: they were afraid of an "October Surprise" which might damage Reagan's chances of defeating Carter. Sure enough, the hostages were released right as Reagan was being inaugurated, and in 1981, the first shipment of arms to Iran began. Gunther Rossbacher, an ex-Navy pilot, and two other foreign sources, insist that on October 21st and 22nd, Bush met with Iranian delegates in Paris. The "October Surprise" may have been how Bush and other Reagan team members located the Iranian 'moderates' that played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1984, the Boland amendment forbade any more military assistance to the Contras. So, in 1985, the underground "Enterprise" - Operation Yellowfruit - began selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to furnish weapons to the Contras. George Bush claims Iran-Contra has nothing to do with him, but other administration figures' records show he was at the secret meetings - Poindexter, in particular. Amiram Nir, an Israeli terrorism expert, insists he discussed Iranian arms deals with Bush, but that can't be confirmed... he died in a mysterious plane crash in Mexico in 1988.

It turns out the Iran-Contra scandal may have been part of a larger arms-for-hostages deal. The Iranians needed weapons in their war against Iraq, and the Reagan administration felt that the Iranians might have been able to convince the Shiite terrorists in Lebanon to release the American hostages held there. Reagan claimed no "quid pro quo," but then he also claimed he really didn't remember much, either. In any case, additional hostages were seized after the 'non-deal', and many may remain in captivity today, including the Lebanon CIA station head. One man who may have known a great deal about the Iran-Contra business was Manuel Noriega, whose name came up in the 1988 Dukakis-Bush debates. Noriega knew about the Contra drug pipeline, because he was a pusher, himself, while on the CIA payroll throughout the 1980s, and during his trial in Miami in 1989, some testimony emerged which suggested he knew something about the Central American end of the Iran-Contra affair and where some on the missing money may have 'disappeared' into.

SNIP...

Even more daring reports, such as a recent book by investigative reporter Peter Brewton, suggest the Mafia may have been involved with some of the bank fraud - as they most certainly were with the Vatican Bank scandal in Italy. Author Dan Moldea notes extensive connections between the Hollywood motion picture company MCA, the defense/nuclear contractor General Electric, the corrupt Teamsters' Union, and the Mob. Strangely, former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan had connections to all of the above. The fact that there are close Republican ties to the Teamsters, despite the party's overt anti-labor stance, is very curious; but it must be examined in the light of the Teamsters' "patriotic" support of "guns and butter" and other right-wing stances, and their links to the Mafia. (It is widely suspected that Richard Nixon may have pardoned Jimmy Hoffa after making a deal with the Teamsters to give money to his 1972 presidential campaign - yet another unwritten chapter in the Watergate saga, along with the revelations that he may have tried to frame the Democrats for the assassination attempt on George Wallace.) Anthony Summers believes that J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailed by the Mob for his homosexuality, and that is why the former FBI director continued to deny the pervasiveness of "organized crime." One of Brewton's most amazing revelations is that Bush may have actively attempted to conceal the Texas oil - organized crime - S & L - CIA links during the 1988 campaign: but so did Lloyd Bentsen, who told Dukakis it would be "a losing issue for our ticket!"

The cost for fixing the S & L mess - for returning the depositors in the banks all their savings - will be quite high. Another cost involved in the process will be the liquidation of nearly valueless assets owned by the S & Ls - such as acres and acres of undeveloped land out in the Southwest. The properties of the failed S & Ls are being sold by RTC for businessmen for a steal; and taxpayers are being asked to pick up a large part of the tab. Some estimate that the S & L cleanup may cost each and every taxpayer as much as $1000. Each and every taxpayer, of the 200 million who pay taxes! There are economists who feel the beginning wave of the S & L collapse may have contributed to the massive stock market crash of 1987, and that its impact led to other bank failures and a real estate 'bust' contributing to the 1990 recession. Crooked S & L operators received, on the average, 2.4 years in prison for ripping off America with their white-collar crimes. But a robber who steals $200 from a convenience store gets, on average, 7.8 years. One need not be a math wizard to see something glaringly wrong with that. Why have the federal prosecutors under the Bush administration been so slow to prosecute, and so lenient with their sentences? Could it be connected to the extensive amounts of money that Bush himself got from the S & Ls during his 1988 campaign?

Was there also a link between the failed Savings & Loans and BCCI? It turns out, yes, and the (now defunct) Miami CenTrust bank chairman David Paul is the key. According to a NBC special on the S & L scandal, Dexter Lehtinen, the temporary appointee to the position of federal prosecutor for south Florida, claims he was obstructed by the government from serving subpoenas on many of the big figures connected to Paul. Lehtinen was never confirmed officially for the position after serving in it for several years - some say this was because of things in his background that might lead to a confirmation fight, but others feel it was because he was digging too deeply into CenTrust's failures. Lehtinen now claims that Paul may have bribed many local and federal officials to cover up for money laundering and secret Carribean accounts to sequester 'narcodollars.' Investigators found that Paul lived a lavish lifestyle, buying gold fixtures and priceless art treasures for his office in the CenTrust building. When CenTrust was starting to face insolvency, Paul found a cash influx from an unsuspected source - BCCI financier Farouk, who tried to use CenTrust to launder money from the Banco Nazionale Lavore (BNL) in Italy. The S & L scandal is, it seems, yet another arm within the Octopus.


Bush's Teapot Dome?: the INSLAW Affair

George Bush's predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had a terribly corrupt administration. There were huge numbers of indictments, resignations, scandals, and accusations of corruption and coverrup. Housing and Urban Development, under Sam "the Invisible Man" Pierce, turned a blind eye as shifty Republican financiers raked in profits off of shady deals involving public housing. Savings and Loan regulators allowed S & L's all over the country to make ridiculously unsound investments and disappear into bankruptcy. But the corruption in the Reagan administration may have been nowhere more shocking than in the Department of Justice, whose anti-pornography crusader, Edwin Meese III, was accused of improprieties regarding the transfer of a company called Wedtech.
Bush's new Attorney General, Richard Thornburgh, may have done Meese one better, bringing the Department of Injustice one step further. For it now stands accused of being a software pirate - of having stole the Inslaw PROMIS database program from its creators without recompensating them. That PROMIS is a program that can be used to track political dissidents, among other things, has been noted by many commentators. Because William Sessions of the FBI was investigating Justice's possible role in the Inslaw/BNL affair, Attorney General William Barr suddenly launched an investigation of Session's misuse of his phone for making personal calls and allowing his wife to be at meetings - hardly the most major of offenses among government bureaucrats! Curious infighting as the ship went down, it seems.

According to Riconsciouto, the INSLAW affair might have been, among other things, a political payoff for the role a former political operative and Justice Department official, Earl Brian, played in the October Surprise. INSLAW was originally a nonprofit organization basically of quasi-governmental nature, which went private in the 1980s in an effort to market its software commercially. PROMIS was marketed to law enforcement agencies as an efficient tool for tracking criminal cases. However, its versatility for use in such wide-ranging areas as political intelligence and monitoring caught the eye of the Justice Department - which would require modifying the program's original design. So Brian first tried to seize INSLAW Corp. in an illegally authorized "hostile takeover," and when that failed, basically stole the PROMIS software outright. Copies of the program were thought to be distributed or sold to, among others, Israel, South Africa, some Central American regimes, and perhaps Saddam Hussein - by the Bush administration - all without consent or compensation for the program's original authors. It is believed that some regimes even today still use chilling, modified versions of the program for tracking political dissidents.

Continues...

OLD URL: https://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/octopus.html

Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20120127172122/https://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/octopus.html