Know your BFEE: A Crime Line of Treason

[Octafish]

Some DUers don't believe there's a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy or even a Bush Family Evil Empire.

Hey, I'm a Democrat and respect other's opinions and views.

But I do believe in the VRWC and BFEE, perhaps more accurately termed the Bush Transnational Criminal Enterprise. Here's why:

Bush Crime Line

• Vietnam
• Bay of Pigs
• Chile
• Watergate
• October Surprise
• El Salvador
• Reagan Survives Hinckley and Bush
• NAZI Ethnics for Reagan-Bush
• Voodoo Economics
• INSLAW/Promis
• Haiti
• Iraq-gate / Banca Nazionale del Lavoro arms to Saddam
• BCCI International Money Laundering for Terrorists & Intelligence Community arming Dr AQ Khan
• Savings & Loan scandal in general and Silverado in particular
• Iran-contra Guns/Drugs/Martial Law
• Gulf War I Glaspie Gives Go-Ahead
• Selection 2000 Shreds US Constitution
• Tax Cuts for UltraRich
• Criminal Justice Department
• Suicidal Environmental Policy
• ENRON Energy Policy
• 9-11 Criminal Negligence, at best; Treason, most likely
• Illegal Iraq Invasion
• Paperless Selection 2004

It’s interesting in reviewing the above list, just how much ultra-right, conservative Republican leadership has really been. More than a listing of criminality, the list demonstrates there have been many treasonous activites against “We the People” through “business opportunities” in the finance, energy, and defense industries.

There is one FAMILY name that runs through all the history, the four decades since the JFK administration. Since the very hour of President Kennedy’s death, and through the list of sinister events and unrelenting criminality noted above — a record of infamy stretching back 41 years today — appears the name George Herbert Walker Bush, a tradition continued by his son, George Walker Bush, beard of the BFEE.



DUers: Add, Discuss, Rip -- Whatever. I'd love to learn what y'all think, have to say and believe.

[GetTheRightVote]

1. Bush is the evil which has poisoned our lives

----- never again will I trust this government not to throw my vote away, never again will I trust these elected puppets to protect my vote, never again will I not march on lost rights, such as my vote.

I am going to march all over downtown Wash, D.C. this weekend and go on and on about the stolen election, even if I am alone it will make me feel so much better about everything .... I can't wait to see the looks on people's faces when I walk by with my sign. I am strong, I am an American, I have rights no matter what they say, I will be free, even if it is just me, I will march.

[Octafish]

2. Wow!

Yours is a most wonderful idea. It's a good bet you won't be alone long. And that's the only way we'll beat these crooks -- is banding together and showing them that we won't be cowed into silence or acquiescence regarding their treasons.

With roots going back to early presidents, the Bushes have gamed the system for 150 years. Ex-GOP strategist Kevin Phillips has documented their nastiness in "American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and Deceit in the House of Bush."

http://www.americandynasty.net

Gee. If I was anywhere near Washington DC, I'd carry a sign with you. Wait a minute... I am in Detroit and that's as good a place as any to join in.

[canadianbeaver]

4. I bet others will see you and join you!!

Please follow thru with your thought and make it happen...Have someone take a picture so you can post it here...I would be following you in a second if I could....I don't have money to fly down and I don't know if they would let me across the boarder...they may ask me if I like GW when I cross.. and I can't tell a lie..so I probablly would be turned away...wish I could go to Halifax and show Bush the Canadian Salute...I can't stand the man

[ilovenicepeople]

30. HOWDY Canadianbeaver!

Welcome to DU:hi: Don't forget to wear your black armband while bUSH is trespassing in our country,actualy we should be wearing black armbands all the time.:cry:

[smirkymonkey]

3. Great list, but would be better w/ links...

[Octafish]

6. Glad you asked. Let's start with George H W Bush and Vietnam.

George Herbert Walker Bush was a proponent of the war in Vietnam, as long as poor kids fought the war and not his smirking, drunken son, George Walker Bush. Like the Gulf War (Saddam's going to attack Saudi Arabia) and the current Iraq Invasion (Saddam's going to nuke a US city), America's big involvment in the Vietnam War began over phony evidence -- the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a a trumped-up "attack" that never happened. After a decade of slaughter, Bush's richie rich friends became very, very richie rich.

Tom Hayden reminds us of this side of George H W Bush -- the guy was pro-war to the point of lying about anyone who opposed Vietnam - or even the facts of the war. Gee. Bush lied to the American people about war. That's un-American. Sounds too familiar today...

You Gotta Love Her: Jane Fonda Was Right and Bush Was Wrong

EXCERPT...

Erased from public memory is the fact that Fonda's purpose was to use her celebrity to put a spotlight on the possible bombing of Vietnam's system of dikes. Her charges were dismissed at the time by George H.W. Bush, then America's ambassador to the United Nations, who complained of a "carefully planned campaign by the North Vietnamese and their supporters to give worldwide circulation to this falsehood." But Fonda was right and Bush was lying, as revealed by the April-May 1972 White House transcripts of Richard Nixon talking to Henry Kissinger about "this shit-ass little country":

NIXON: We've got to be thinking in terms of an all-out bombing attack.... I'm thinking of the dikes.

KISSINGER: I agree with you.

NIXON: ...Will that drown people?

KISSINGER: About two hundred thousand people.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thinkingpeace.com/pages/Articles/arts153.html

[Octafish]

8. Bay of Pigs

The Kennedy Assassination:
The Nixon-Bush Connection

by Paul Kangas

Note: All references to "George Bush" refer to George Herbert Walker Bush, Father of George "Dubya" Bush who was "elected" pResident by a 5 to 4 vote of the Supreme Court.

A newly discovered FBI document reveals that George Bush was directly involved in the 1963 murder of President John Kennedy. The document places Bush working with the now-famous CIA agent, Felix Rodriguez, recruiting right-wing Cuban exiles for the invasion of Cuba. It was Bush's CIA job to organize the Cuban community in Miami for the invasion. The Cubans were trained as marksmen by the CIA. Bush at that time lived in Texas. Hopping from Houston to Miami weekly, Bush spent 1960 and '61 recruiting Cubans in Miami for the invasion. That is how he met Felix Rodriguez.

You may remember Rodriguez as the Iran-contra CIA agent who received the first phone call telling the world the CIA plane flown by Gene Hasenfus had crashed in Nicaragua. As soon as Rodriguez heard that the plane crashed, he called his long-time CIA supervisor, George Bush. Bush denied being in the contra loop, but investigators recently obtained copies of Oliver North's diary, which documents Bush's role as a CIA supervisor of the contra supply network.

In 1988 Bush told Congress he knew nothing about the illegal supply flights until 1987, yet North's diary shows Bush at the first planning meeting Aug. 6, 1985. Bush's "official" log placed him somewhere else. Such double sets of logs are intended to hide Bush's real role in the CIA; to provide him with "plausible deniability." The problem is, it fell apart because too many people, like North and Rodriguez, have kept records that show Bush's CIA role back to the 1961 invasion of Cuba. (Source: The Washington Post, 7/10/90).

That is exactly how evidence was uncovered placing George Bush working with Felix Rodriguez when JFK was killed. A memo from FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was found, stating 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. (Source: The Nation, 8/13/88).

On the day of the assassination Bush was in Texas, but he denies knowing exactly where he was. Since he had been the supervisor for the secret Cuban teams, headed by former Cuban police commander Felix Rodriguez, since 1960, it is likely Bush was also in Dallas in 1963. Several of the Cubans he was supervising as dirty-tricks teams for Nixon, were photographed in the Za(p)ruder film.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sumeria.net/politics/kennedy.html

[BringEmOn]

22. Is this Poppy Bush in Dallas the day JFK was killed?

[Octafish]

24. Dunno. Let's get him under oath and ask.

Some DUers noted it could be David Atlee Phillips. Going by the thin tie and familiar slouch, I'm inclined toward Poppy. He had a reason to be there: Babs told Michael Beschloss she and Georgie Jr were in Dallas that day to "See the parade." George, of course, can't remember where he was. Seems the man, whoever he is, was waiting for the three tramps to go by. Note the background.



Now that wouldnt be E Howard Hunt, before the ear job, would it?

[Octafish]

100. Two FBI documents are dynamite -- They TIE George HW Bush to DALLAS

The first official FBI memo is dated 22 November 1963. It reports "George Herbert Walker Bush" phoned the FBI within minutes of the President Kennedy’s death to report his suspicions that one "James Parrott" of Houston may’ve been involved in the assassination. Wow! How's that for establishing "plausible exculpability"?



The second FBI memo, dated 29 November 1963, one week after the assassination of President Kennedy, describes the secret report of one "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency,” who cleared the anti-Castro Miami community, who “regret the assassination.” The pro-Castro community fret they might get blamed. Considering what we know about how JFK felt about Operation NORTHWOODS, maybe that was a secondary rationale behind the assassination.



SOURCE:

http://www.internetpirate.com/bush.htm

Another most interesting source, courtesy of BringEmOn:

http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/

[lenidog]

111. When it comes to Kennedy

There could be records out there placing Britney Spears on the grassy knoll.

[Octafish]

116. There's nothing funny about the assassination of President Kennedy.

"When it comes to Kennedy...There could be records out there placing Britney Spears on the grassy knoll."

Help me understand more about how Britney Spears connects to the murder of the President? I do know she's a supporter of George W Bush, so maybe you can go from there.

[lenidog]

121. If you read enough theories about the assasination

You will actually find alot that is very hilarious. Personally I find the Warren Report pretty hilarious. After all these years I tend to believe that 5% of what written or filmed about the assasination is worth considering. About another 15% has some elements worth considering and 60 percent is sheer drivel with the last 20 being out and out lunacy. The joke about Britney is being sarcastic but in way has a grain of truth in it. Pratically alive back then has been linked to the Kennedy assasination including Kennedy himself.

[lenidog]

110. Doubtful but if I recall what I read correctly

Dubya was having lunch with Hinckley's older brother at the same time the younger brother was taking potshots at Reagan.

[Debs]

104. It's bizzare

Everyone I know that was an adult when Kennedy was killed knows exactly where they were when they heard the news but Bush is saying he cant remember?????

[Octafish]

106. Let's just say, "Bush doesn't want to remember."

Bar told Michael Beschloss that she took little Georgie into Dallas that day to see the parade. Beschloss related the story to Don Imus on the air. seemslikeadream (and another DUer or two) related it on the board back 'round 22 November 2003.

Here's Dealey Plaza. The route in red is the actual motorcade route. The street that runs down the middle was the one the Dallas PD reported to the Secret Service the motorcade would follow.

Big difference in the two routes. The one in red forces the cars to slow to a crawl. And it goes by the very building designated patsy and ersatz FBI counterintelligence agent Lee Harvey Oswald has found work, six weeks before.



JFK was on his way to deliver a speech on education and the space program at the Dallas Trade Mart. If men were honest, he would have.

Unfortunately, evil won that day's battle. What's worse, ever since that day there's been a big whole in our national leadership -- VISION -- that all the presidents since JFK have been unable to fill.

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, Debs. Yeh. People who were conscious remember where they were that day. I was six and my dad was in the US Navy...

[Octafish]

9. Chile

Henry Kissinger said, "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Nice fellah that Henry the K. No wonder Dim Son Bush Jr wanted him to head the 9-11 Commish, wot?

Bush & the Condor Mystery

By Robert Parry

Newly released U.S. government documents reveal that George Bush's CIA knew more about Chile's role in an international assassination ring, code-named Condor, than Bush and the agency disclosed to FBI agents investigating a Condor terrorist bombing in Washington, D.C., in 1976.

On June 30, the Clinton administration released several documents about Operation Condor in response to demands from American researchers and requests from Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who is seeking to extradite Chile's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and put him on trial for crimes against humanity.

The new documents suggest that the CIA and its then-director, George Bush, withheld information that could have helped the FBI in its investigation of a terrorist car-bombing in Washington that killed Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt on Sept. 21, 1976.

The records show U.S. intelligence was well aware that Pinochet's government in Chile had organized seven South American military dictatorships into Operation Condor, a cross-border assassination ring to hunt down leftists. But instead of sharing that information with federal criminal investigators, Bush's CIA withheld it -- and even diverted suspicion away from Pinochet's junta.

According to the new documents, the CIA was aware that the seven Condor nations were plotting international assassinations in the weeks before the Letelier-Moffitt car-bombing. The CIA issued a series of internal reports about Condor activities and cited the possibility of "government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members."

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/100599b.html

[Octafish]

101. BFEE used to bank at Riggs, just like Pinochet

Once the favored bank of international arms dealers and fascistic despots the world over, Riggs has fallen on some bad times of late. Wonder if Bush's Uncle Jonathan bailed out before the stock tanked?

Bush Promises Probe of Pinochet-Riggs Link

Tuesday, July 20, 2004; Page E03

President Bush told Chilean President Ricardo Lagos there would be a "full investigation" into allegations that Riggs Bank helped former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet hide millions of dollars from international prosecutors.

Speaking after a White House meeting with Lagos, Bush said the issues raised in a Senate report issued last week will be investigated "in an open way."

"It's important for the facts to be 'en la mesa,' as we say -- on the table -- so that we know what course of action may or may not be needed," said Bush, who added that Lagos brought up the issue with him yesterday. Lagos last week told media in Chile that the government would investigate Pinochet's connection to Riggs with an eye toward finding out the sources of Pinochet's wealth.

The Senate report detailed Riggs's dealings with Pinochet since 1994. It said Riggs helped disguise or hide as much as $8 million when Pinochet was under house arrest in London and Spanish prosecutors had begun court proceedings to freeze his assets in the late 1990s. Riggs ultimately mailed or couriered much of Pinochet's millions back to him after he had returned to Chile, the report said.

SOURCE:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62853-2004Jul19.html

Do you think the Crawford village idiot "forgot" his promise? I don't.

[Octafish]

19. Watergate

George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin

Chapter -XII- Chairman George in Watergate

EXCERPT...

But even in the midst of the final collapse, Bush still made occasional ingratiating gestures to Nixon. Nixon pathetically recounts how Bush made him an encouraging offer in July, 1974, about a month before the end: "There were other signs of the sort that political pros might be expected to appreciate: NC Chairman George Bush called the White House to say that he would like to have me appear on a fund-raising telethon." This is what Bush was telling Nixon. But during this same period, Father John McLaughlin of the Nixon staff asked Bush for RNC lists of GOP diehards across the country for the purpose of generating support statements for Nixon. Bush refused to provide them.

On August 5, 1974, the White House released the transcript of the celebrated "smoking gun" taped conversation of June 23, 1972 in which Nixon discussed ways to frustrate the investigation of the Watergate break-ins. Chairman George was one of the leading Nixon Administration figures consulting with Al Haig in the course of the morning. When Bush heard the news, he was very upset, undoubtedly concerned about all the very negative publicity that he himself was destined to receive in the blowback of Nixon's now imminent downfall. Then after a while he calmed down somewhat. One account describes Bush as "somewhat relieved" by the news that the coup de grace tape was going to be made public, "an act probably fatal," as Haig had said. "Finally there was some one thing the national chairman could see clearly. The ambiguities in the evidence had been tearing the party apart, Bush thought." At this point Bush became the most outspoken and militant organizer of Nixon's resignation, a Cassius of the Imperial Presidency.

A little later White House Congressional liaison William Timmons wanted to make sure that everyone had been fully briefed about the transcripts going out, and he turned to Nixon's political counselor Dean Burch. "Dean, does Bush know about the transcript yet?", Timmons asked. Burch replied, "Yes." "Well, what did he do?", Timmons asked.

"He broke out in assholes and shit himself to death," was Burch's answer.

But why, it may be asked, the dermal diahhrea? Why should Bush be so distraught over the release to the press of the transcript of the notorious White House meeting of June 23, 1972, whose exhcanges between Nixon and Haldeman were to prove the coup de grace to the agony of the Nixon regime? As we have seen, there is plenty of evidence that the final fall of Nixon was just the denouement that Bush wanted. The answer is that Bush was upset about the fabulous "smoking gun" tape because his friend Mosbacher, his business partner Bill Liedtke, and himself were referred to in the most sensitive passages. Yes, a generation of Americans has grown up recalling something about a "smoking gun" tape, but not many now recall that when Nixon referred to "the Texans," he meant George Bush. ("Das Bekannte ueberhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt," as even old Hegel knew.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.tarpley.net/bush12.htm

[Octafish]

119. Wherever there's a coup d'etat, we find George Herbert Walker Bush nearby.

Consider:

Dallas -- Bush was there or on his way.
Watergate -- Bush was there to push Nixon out.
October Surprise -- Bush made sure hostages stayed put.
Gore Elected -- Bush Supreme Clowns made sure crazy monkey took office.
Kerry Elected by Exit Poll Data -- Smirk's Pioneers Fix Paperless Ballot Boxes (after Bankrolling Character Assassination)

Oh, well. At least we still have John Kerry. May he take good care.

[Octafish]

20. October Surprise

Jimmy Carter probably would’ve beaten Pruneface Reagan, but Poppy Bush and his buddies in INTEL and the military-industrial complex cut a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the hostages clear through the election. On inauguration day, they got to leave Tehran. A couple of weeks later, Israel starts sending US-supplied weapons. It proves so "profitable," that the traitor Ollie North cuts out the Israelis and decides to sell them US-direct, even after the Ayatollah kills 241 US service men and women in Beirut. That's what happens when felons run the US government.

Arafat & the Original 'October Surprise'

By Morgan Strong
November 2, 2004

A top aide to Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat has dropped a new clue about the original “October Surprise” mystery of 1980: the name of the Republican operative who sought the Palestine Liberation Organization’s help to block President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 Americans then being held hostage in Iran.

Longtime Arafat confidant Bassam Abu Sharif said that in mid-1980, he met in Paris with John Shaheen, a friend to both Ronald Reagan and Reagan’s campaign chief, William J. Casey. Abu Sharif told me that Shaheen, a former U.S. intelligence officer of Lebanese origin, extended a Republican offer of improved U.S. relations with the PLO if the Arafat-led organization would assist in persuading the Iranians to delay the hostage release until after the November 1980 elections.

SNIP...

The alleged secret deal between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Iranians popularized the idea of an “October Surprise,” a last-minute event that might alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. The phrase was coined by then-vice presidential candidate Bush in the context that Carter’s success in freeing the hostages might be his “October Surprise,” though it later came to refer to the alleged Republican scheming to derail Carter’s hostage talks.

Republican leaders have long denied that any deal with the Iranians was struck, although more than two dozen witnesses – including Iranian officials, European intelligence officers and international arms dealers – have described aspects of the 1980 Republican-Iranian contacts carried out behind President Carter’s back.

In 1992-93, a House Task Force conducted a half-hearted investigation of the controversy and judged the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal to be false. But it was later discovered that the Task Force had concealed evidence that pointed in the opposite direction, including a classified report from the Russian government stating that Bush, Casey and CIA officers had met with Iranians in Europe in 1980 to strike a deal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110204.html

Read all about it. Lots o' links:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile.html

[Octafish]

21. El Salvador

This seems odd because in my church the priest pretty much said the GOP supports the "Culture of Life." George Poppy Bush as president asked American investigators to back off when six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered by a rightist death squad. There's a lot that he has to answer for, along with the New York Times and the rest of the Mighty Whorelitzer.

El Salvador's Death Squads: New Evidence from U.S. Documents

By Lauren Gilbert

In October and November of 1993, a rash of killings in El Salvdor of ranking members of the former rebel movement, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), threatened to undermine El Salvador's hard-won peace and threw into doubt the likelihood of free and fair elections. Concerned that the whole peace process could unravel, and for the personal safety of their members, high-ranking officials of the FMLN met with United Nations officials to request an immediate investigation into the violence. In November, U.N. undersecretary Marrack Goulding made a special visit to El Salvador to investigate and U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for an "impartial, independent and credible" investigation into illegal armed groups, as had been recommended by the U.N. Truth Commission on El Salvador.

After weeks of difficult negotiations in early December, President Alfredo Cristiani finally agreed to the formation of a Joint Group whose mandate would be to investigate illegal armed groups and their possible involvement with political violence during the two-year period since the signing of the peace accords.(1) Although the signatories to the accords and the United Nations recognized the implications of the recent violence for the ability to hold free and fair elections, they also acknowledged that a full-scale investigation could tell against ARENA, the ruling party linked to death-squad activities in the past, and could even destabilize the political process by eliciting a violent response from ultra-rightist groups. Thus, it was agreed that the Joint Group's report would not be released until after the elections.

The Center for International Policy has carried out its own investigation of Salvadoran death squads based on twelve thousand previously- classified documents released by the Clinton administration last November in response to a request from Congress. The documents released by the State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department shed new light on what the U.S. government knew about the structure, operation and financing of death squads from the late 1970s and into the 1990s.

Cables and reports from the U.S. embassy in San Salvador reveal the involvement of high-ranking members of the armed forces and of ARENA in the planning and operation of death-squad activities in El Salvador throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Moreover, documents from 1990 link such activities, including a plot to oust President Cristiani, to top officials of the ARENA government and armed forces, including, among others, Vice-President Francisco Merino, supreme-court president Mauricio Gutierrez Castro, Col. Sigifredo Ochoa Perez, General Juan Orlando Bustillo, and Col. Francisco Elena Fuentes.

U.S. documents paint a vivid and disturbing picture of the roots of right- wing terrorism in El Salvador, of the role of ARENA in creating civilian paramilitary structures, and of the involvement of high-ranking members of the armed forces in death-squad activities. Although this report focuses on civilian death squads and in particular on the ARENA paramilitary structure, which worked in close coordination with the intelligence units of the security forces and the military, U.S. documents also suggest that throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s death squads were also being run out of the security and military forces.(2) These groups usually operated out of the S-2 intelligence units and frequently involved civilians in some capacity.(3) Although this report focuses on the role of the ultra-right and in particular the ARENA party in sponsoring violence in El Salvador, we do not wish to downplay the very important role of military institutions in death-squad activities.

CONTINUED...

http://poemundi.com/resumenL.htm

[Octafish]

23. Reagan survives Hinckley and Bush

Just a couple of months after Reagan is sworn in, Reagan is ALMOST taken out and Bush stood ready to take charge. His son Neil was ready to have dinner that night with John Hinckley’s brother, Scott, but Reagan survived the assassination attempt and dinner got canceled. Meanwhile, at the White House, Alexander Haig says, "I'm in charge here." Odd how these “One Degree of Separation” coincidences always happen to Poppy.

NEIL BUSH (AND HIS FAMILY)—I
 
    In the millions of words written in the national news media about Neil Bush and his part in the Silverado Savings & Loan scandal, no reference has been made to an extremely significant fact of his life.

     Neil Bush, son of the then vice president of the United States, was scheduled to have dinner on March 31, 1981, with Scott Hinckley, brother of John Hinckley, the day after a bullet came within an inch of making Neil Bush's father the new president of the United States.

     Even though John Chancellor had let slip out this most remarkable assassination coincidence shortly after John Hinckley tried to kill President Reagan, it was censored by NBC News and the other organs of the national news media during thesubsequent 10 years. And even in the several months of extensive coverage of Neil Bush's part in the massive savings and loan fraud, no mention was made of his role in the continuing coverup of the most significant story in the 1980s.

     Back in 1981, I thought the dinner engagement was so extraordinary that I looked everywhere for it in the days following Chancellor's raised-eyebrow report in the hours after the shooting. One magazine laughed at it and a few smaller papers carried a story by United Press International, but the Associated Press and the other major news outlets, in response to my numerous protests, made clear to me that they had no intention of letting the American people learn of Neil Bush's connection to the Hinckleys or, for that matter, the many other astonishing unanswered questions in the wake of the Bush-Hinckley coverup.

    Thus I spent almost three years researching, writing and publishing a book that details scores of facts that would forever erase the ludicrous myth that John Hinckley gunned down President Reagan "to impress Jodie Foster." The Afternoon of March 30: A Contemporary Historical Novel wove the facts of the case into a fictional framework in order to explain how the coverup fit into other events that the national news media had failed to report, misreported or underreported. Whether there was a conspiracy to elevate George Bush to the presidency remains unofficially uninvestigated; that our major organs of information did not report significant facts about the Bush-Hinckley and Bush-Hinckley-Hunt connections is absolutely documented. I have never been a conspiracy theorist; I am an analyst of press performance with credentials extending over four decades.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nathanielblumberg.com/neil.htm

[lenidog]

112. It was NEIL!!

I thought it was GW. Thanks for putting me straight on that again.

[Octafish]

26. NAZI Ethnics for Bush

The GOP's conservative for a reason. All the NAZIs the greedy bastards brought over after World War II to fight the commies had to express their political WILL, sort to speak, somehow.

A Fresh Look

by Carla Binion

Nazis and the Republican Party

Investigative reporter Christopher Simpson says in BLOWBACK that after World War II, Nazi émigrés were given CIA subsidies to build a far-right-wing power base in the U.S.These Nazis assumed prominent positions in the Republican Party's "ethnic outreach committees." Simpson documents the fact that these Nazis did not come to America as individuals but as part of organized groups with fascist political agendas. The Nazi agenda did not die along with Adolf Hitler. It moved to America (or a part of it did) and joined the far right of the Republican Party.

Simpson shows how the State Department and the CIA put high-ranking Nazis on the intelligence payroll "for their expertise in propaganda and psychological warfare," among other purposes. The most important Nazi employed by the U.S. was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's most senior eastern front military intelligence officer. After Germany's defeat became certain, Gehlen offered the U.S. certain concessions in exchange for his own protection. Gehlen promoted hyped up cold war propaganda on behalf of the political right in this country, and helped shape U.S. perceptions of the cold war.

Journalist Russ Bellant (OLD NAZIS, THE NEW RIGHT, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY) shows that Laszlo Pasztor, a convicted Nazi war collaborator, built the Republican émigré network. Pasztor, who served as adviser to Republican Paul Weyrich, belonged to the Hungarian Arrow Cross, a group that helped liquidate Hungary's Jews. Pasztor was founding chairman of the Republican Heritage Groups Council.

Two months before the November 1988 presidential election, a small newspaper, Washington Jewish Week, disclosed that a coalition for the Bush campaign included a number of outspoken Nazis and anti-Semites. The article prompted six leaders of Bush's coalition to resign.

CONTINUED...

http://www.bartcop.com/nazigop.htm

[Octafish]

27. Voodoo Economics

SYNOPSIS: Rolling Stone's Will Dana interviews Paul Krugman on the Bush administration's economic policy

SNIP...

DANA: The White House is now proposing a tax cut of about $500 billion in the next ten years. Is this a significant amount of money, in terms of government spending?

KRUGMAN: Roughly speaking, we've got a $10 trillion economy and a $2 trillion budget each year. So $500 billion over ten years is not much, with respect to either one. In some ways, that's a misleading number. You know, if you take the original Bush proposal, it's $726 billion over ten years. But if you look at the ancillary stuff like Social Security savings accounts, we're actually talking about something that will, in the end, be subtracting something like an additional one percent of GDP from government revenue. At this point, the budget deficit is bigger than all nonmilitary discretionary spending combined. So even if you eliminated the court system — eliminated everything except for Social Security, Medicare and government pensions — you'd still have a deficit.

DANA: How does the Bush tax cut compare to the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s?

KRUGMAN: Well, the combined Bush tax cuts — the one in 2001 and the one that he's now proposing — end up being bigger. And the thing, of course, is that we're twenty years closer to the point when we have to face the big, looming problem. The reason to worry about deficits is not what they do now but how do we cope with all of those baby boomers hitting Social Security and Medicare? If you've run up a large government debt before the baby boomers retire, and you've got overall tax revenue at a level that is insufficient to cover the cost of Social Security and Medicare, then you're setting yourself up for a fiscal crisis. And that's what we're doing.

CONTINUED...

http://memes.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=1955&mode=mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

[Octafish]

28. Inslaw PROMIS

BFEE turd Ed Meese and cronies, um, took software that enabled the Justice Department to track criminal prosecutions (PROMIS - Prosecutor's Management Information System), got their INTEL buddies add a trap door, and then sold it to governments and organizations around the world, making it possible to track what every BFEE-connected dictator or friend from Saddam to d’Aubission is up to -- in Freedom™’s name. Neat idea, but it turns out that Osama bin Laden may've put in his own trap door.

Here's a nice overview from Michelle Malkin, of all people:

America's spy software scandal

Michelle Malkin (archive)
July 9, 2003

Did Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have access to a U.S. computer tracking program that enabled them to monitor our intelligence-gathering efforts and financial transactions? If so, who is responsible for allowing the program to fall into their hands? And who else among America's enemies might have access to the tracking system?

It's an explosive spy software scandal that no one in official Washington wants to investigate.

This complex, tangled story began two decades ago, when a tiny private company called Inslaw Inc. developed a software package to help U.S. attorneys' offices in large urban districts keep tabs on their criminal prosecutors' caseloads. The program, dubbed the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), was effective and popular. It allowed a prosecutor to locate defendants and witnesses, track motions and monitor ongoing investigations. In 1982, Inslaw won a large Justice Department contract to implement the system nationwide.

In the meantime, Inslaw also developed privately owned enhancements to PROMIS. Despite contractual guarantees of Inslaw's proprietary rights to the enhanced version of PROMIS, the Justice Department essentially commandeered the improved program for its own uses without paying for it. Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy and began an endless fight with the Justice Department to recoup its losses.

CONTINUED...

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20030709.shtml

Here's an excellent Inslaw PROMIS history from WIRED in 1993:

The INSLAW Octopus

Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice

By Richard L. Fricker

Hacking & Warez

The House Judiciary Committee lists these crimes as among the possible violations perpetrated by "high-level Justice officials and private individuals":

>> Conspiracy to commit an offense >> Fraud >> Wire fraud >> Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees >> Tampering with a witness >> Retaliation against a witness >> Perjury >> Interference with commerce by threats or violence >> Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) violations >> Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys >> Receiving stolen goods

SNIP...

Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html

The BFEE never sleeps and neither should we.

[Octafish]

34. Haiti

After his first exile in 1990, regime-changed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was asked what the United States could do to help him restore democracy to Haiti? Aristide said all George Bush Sr had to do was pick up the phone, call the generals and say, “Get out” and they would quit their coup and the first democratically elected leader of Haiti in 75 years would be returned to power. Bush didn't and Aristide wasn't until Presidnet Clinton sent the US Marines, many years and many Haitian lives later.

The reason for Bush Senior's inaction? Aristide said he didn’t know the answer, but he suspected Bush’s politics favored the landowners over the masses. (“Sounds familiar,” I then thought and still think today.)

Aristide said that the generals were deep into the wholesale cocaine importation business. Now who would be their partner in all that? Besides the wealthy landowners, for whom the Generals worked, I mean.

A final point: Remember the BFEE turd Jesse Helms called Aristide a murderer who necklaced his victims. That's odd, because Aristide is a former Catholic priest who survived an assassination attempt during Mass. He wasn't really into Liberation Theology, but believed that the people deserve more than the scraps.

Sounds like the US is heading in the same direction under Baby Doc Bush. Soon 1-percent own 99-percent of the country - The New Feudalism.

Here's what Congresswoman Waters has to say about things today:

Thugs, Killers and Drug Dealers Now Control Haiti

Because Our Government Ignored Warnings

Not to Support the Coup D'Etat

September 22, 2004

Dear Colleague:

       Please read the attached Associated Press article on the crisis in Haiti, "Disarmament deadline passes without progress in Haiti." This is one of many recent articles reporting on the complete breakdown of government authority in Haiti. 

       Last February, several members of the Congressional Black Caucus tried to warn the Bush Administration and the Department of State not to support or facilitate the impending coup d'etat in Haiti. We warned them that this coup d'etat was being organized and carried out by thugs, killers and drug dealers, and they were becoming involved in an unholy alliance with these criminals. We warned them that these thugs, killers and drug dealers could not be contained once they were allowed to overthrow the democratically-elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 

       Our warnings were ignored, and President Aristide was forced to leave Haiti by a coup d'etat on February 29, 2004, with the cooperation of the United States, France, Canada and the Haitian opposition's Group of 184.

       Our warnings have come true. The thugs, killers and drug dealers who overthrew President Aristide now exert de facto control over Haiti. They have taken over several police stations, chased away the police officers and set up bases in several Haitian towns. Last July, Interim Prime Minister Gerard Latortue, who was hand-picked by the Bush Administration, set a deadline of September 15, 2004, for all armed groups in Haiti to disarm. The thugs, killers and drug dealers ignored this deadline, and the Haitian government did nothing when the deadline passed but announce that it would negotiate with them. Now that the deadline has come and gone, it has become clear that the U.S.-backed government of Interim Prime Minister Latortue is a joke.

       Many of the thugs, killers and drug dealers who carried out the coup d'etat are former members of the Haitian Army, which was disbanded in 1995 and which is notorious for its history of human rights violations. The thugs are now demanding the reestablishment of the Haitian Army, and they even had the gall to claim that the Haitian government owes them more than 10 years of back pay.

       Last month, the thugs, killers and drug dealers took over a police station in the coastal town of Petit-Goave, a key transit point for illegal drugs, and now control the town. This puts them in a position to significantly increase drug trafficking through Haiti and profit from this lucrative trade. Remissainthe Ravix, the leader of the thugs in Petit-Goave, fought alongside Guy Philippe during the coup d'etat. Guy Philippe is a former police chief who led several coup attempts against President Aristide between 2000 and 2003 and has a reputation for drug trafficking.

       It is imperative that Members of Congress understand that the United States has made another mistake in Haiti. The Bush Administration's unholy alliance with the thugs, killers and drug dealers who carried out the coup d'etat has backfired, and the thugs are now threatening the Bush Administration's hand-picked interim government. The Bush Administration carried out another "regime change" without any plans to stabilize the country, disarm the thugs or win the peace. 

  I will be meeting with other interested Members of Congress in the coming weeks to discuss the current crisis in Haiti and the U.S. government's response. I urge all Members who are concerned about the future of Haiti to join me. The policies of the United States created this mess, and the United States has an obligation to develop and implement policies to clean it up.

Sincerely,

Maxine Waters
Member of Congress

[seemslikeadream]

80. Conclusive Evidence of U.S. Role in Kidnapping and Coup

PRESS ADVISORY
Monday, April 4, 2004
Media Contact: Dustin Langley 212-633-6646

As Bush Administration Scrambles to Shore Up Appointed Haitian Regime Commission to Present Conclusive Evidence of U.S. Role in Kidnapping and Coup

Date: Wednesday, April 7
Time: 6:30- 9:30 pm
Location: The Whitman Theatre at Brooklyn College

Panel to include: Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Major Owens, Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Ossie Davis, Gil Noble, Amy Goodman, Ron Daniels, and other prominent activists and journalists

The Bush Administration is facing a growing crisis over its role in the coup in Haiti and the kidnapping of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who continues to speak out about his abduction by the U.S. The 15-member organization of Caribbean nations, CARICOM, has refused to recognize the U.S.-installed regime and has called for an investigation, despite intense pressure and threats from the U.S. The 53-member African Union has raised the same demand.

On Wednesday, April 7, the Haiti Commission of Inquiry will initiate a public inquiry of the role of the Bush Administration in the crisis in Haiti. Delegations that visited both the Central African Republic and the Dominican Republic will present conclusive evidence that U.S. Special Forces armed, trained, and directed the "rebels" and engineered the abduction of President Aristide.

The preliminary report from the Commission states, "two hundred U.S. Special Forces soldiers came to the Dominican Republic as part of 'Operation Jaded Task,' with special authorization from President Hipólito Mejia. We have received many reports that this operation was used to train Haitian rebels. We have received many consistent reports of Haitian rebel training centers at or near Dominican military facilities. We have received many consistent reports of guns transported from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, some across the land border, and others shipped by sea."

Johnnie Stevens of the International Action Center, a member of the delegation to the Central African Republic, said, "The U.S.-installed Prime Minister, Gerard Latortue, has hailed the paid mercenaries as freedom fighters, and had thus discredited himself among the Caribbean nations."

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a desperate bid to lend some credibility to the Latortue government, is now visiting Haiti for the first time. This attempt to put U. S. weight behind the isolated colonial-style regime is a response to its growing isolation. Sara Flounders, of the International Action Center, said, "This visit by Powell is a sign of the Bush Administration’s growing isolation and disarray. The U.S. is desperately trying to shore up a discredited regime in the face of international opposition to the appointed government of Haiti after the stinging rebuke directed at the U.S. by the recent CARICOM meeting." Flounders is a member of the Haiti Commission of Inquiry and was part of the delegation to the Central African Republic, where she visited with President Aristide shortly after his kidnapping.

Kim Ives from Haiti Progres, who was part of the delegation to the Dominican Republic, told the media, "In the course of our investigation here, we met with many Haitians who were forced to flee Haiti following the coup d'etat of Feb. 29. Their testimony gave very concrete names and faces to the stories of violence which we have heard that the so-called rebels, trained and assembled in the Dominican Republic, have carried out in Haiti over the past month. We were also touched by the tears of refugees who told us of how they are apprehensive over the fate of their loved ones left behind in Haiti."

http://www.iacenter.org/haiti_0407press.htm


Operation Jaded Task

US Troopers Secretly Land in Dominican Republic

The military training operation nicknamed Jaded Task took by surprise Dominican Foreign Ministry.

The US Army started today a training operation in the Caribbean country as part of routine maneuvers of the Southern Command. The landing had been kept so secretly that Dominican Foreign Ministry Hugo Tolentino was reported... by the TV.

As per the first reports, the US troops are training Dominican soldiers on anti-terrorism operations in the north of the island. When the national media started announcing the landing, country's Foreign Minister was having a lunch. Tolentino said that, as chief of the Dominican diplomacy, he should have been formally advised, as personally requested to the Dominican Army and the US Embassy to Santo Domingo.

(snip)

However, the most interesting thing, here, is that the Communist Party of the Dominican Republic did know about the operations. This correspondent had access to two formal communications issued by the US Embassy including details of these activities, during the Communist summit held in Buenos Aires in January. There, the US ambassador to Santo Domingo reported about 10.000 soldiers coming to the Dominican Republic to take part of the training.

Moreover, the communists and other leftist forces in the country made know such documents to the local media in November. According to the denounce, US soldiers can freely enter and leave the country without any kind of permission. Also, they can do it through owned means of conveyance.

more
http://english.pravda.ru/world/2003/02/20/43514.html

[seemslikeadream]

82. Who's who of the Haiti Coup - death squad veterans and convicted murderers

Rebel leader Louis-Jodel Chamblain talks with other rebels at their headquarters in the Mont Joli Hotel in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, Saturday Feb. 28, 2004. (AP Photo/Pablo Aneli).

Louis-Jodel Chamblain

Convicted assassin and leader of death squads

Chamblain was the number 2 man in the FRAPH death squad which participated in the campaign of terror during the 1991 coup against Aristide.
Terrorising supporters of Aristide's Lavalas Family party, the group was blamed for thousands of killings before a US intervention ended three years of military rule in 1994.
"I am scared of what I did, not of what I didn't do," Chamblain told the AP. "I never committed murder. I am not a terrorist. I am not a drug dealer. I am not a criminal."

He was, however, convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment for the September 11, 1993 murder of Aristide financier Antoine Izmery, who was dragged from Mass in a church, made to kneel outside and shot.
Chamblain was also convicted for the April 23, 1994 massacre in the pro-democracy region of Raboteau.
A CIA intelligence memorandum implicated him in the October 14, 1993 assassination of Justice Minister Guy Malary who, with his bodyguard, was ambushed and machine-gunned.

According to the CIA memorandum, dated October 28, 1993, and obtained by the Centre for Constitutional Rights, "FRAPH members Jodel Chamblain, Emmanuel Constant, and Gabriel Douzable met with an unidentified military officer on the morning of 14 October to discuss plans to kill Malary".
Emmanuel "Toto" Constant was the founder of FRAPH.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20040307T04000... ...

Analysis: Haiti's diverse rebels


The exiles' leader is Louis Jodel Chamblain, 50, who fled to the Dominican Republic in 1994.

A former sergeant, he is accused taking part in a number of atrocities during the years of military rule.

He was suspected of involvement in a 1987 election massacre, in which 34 voters were killed and a civilian-run ballot aborted.

In 1993 in co-founded the Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress - Fraph, which sounds like "hit" in French.


The group is accused of killing thousands of supporters of Mr Aristide.

Plots

Mr Chamblain denies involvement in any paramilitary activities and describes himself as a "Haitian patriot".

He returned from exile with another controversial former soldier, Guy Philippe, 35.


Aristide supporters are being hunted down across the north
Trained in the United States and Ecuador, he was a senior security official under President Rene Preval, a civilian elected in 1995.

Now Mr Philippe and Mr Chamblain are allies, and celebrating their capture of Cap-Haitien, the country's second city at the weekend.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3515267.stm


Louis Jodel Chamblain


Chamblain was joint leader - along with CIA operative Emmanuel “Toto” Constant - of the Front révolutionnaire pour l’avancement et le progrès haïtien, (Revolutionary Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress) known by its acronym - FRAPH - which phonetically resembles the French and Creole words for ‘to beat’ or ‘to thrash’. FRAPH was formed by the military authorities who were the de facto leaders of the country during the 1991-94 military regime, and was responsible for numerous human rights violations before the 1994 restoration of democratic governance.

Among the victims of FRAPH under Chamblain’s leadership was Haitian Justice Minister Guy Malary. He was ambushed and machine-gunned to death with his body-guard and a driver on October 14, 1993. According to an October 28, 1993 CIA Intelligence Memorandum obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights: “FRAPH members Jodel Chamblain, Emmanuel Constant, and Gabriel Douzable met with an unidentified military officer on the morning of 14 October to discuss plans to kill Malary.” (Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the leader of FRAPH, is now living freely in Queens, NYC.)

In September 1995, Chamblain was among seven senior military and FRAPH leaders convicted in absentia and sentenced to forced labour for life for involvement in the September 1993 extrajudicial execution of Antoine Izméry, a well-known pro-democracy activist. In late 1994 or early 1995, it is understood that Chamblain went into exile to the Dominican Republic in order to avoid prosecution.

http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng02-25.html

The most disturbing figure in the rebel leadership is Louis Jodel Chamblain. He is reported to have led the insurgents’ attacks on Central Plateau towns, including the regional capital of Hinche.

Chamblain was a sergeant in the Haitian army (FAd’H), and a member of the elite Corps des Leopards. He left the army in 1989 or 1990 and reappeared on the scene in 1993 as one of the founders of the Revolutionary Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress (Front révolutionnaire pour l’avancement et le progrès haïtien, FRAPH). Known as its number two leader, he had a reputation for violence and action (in contrast to the better known and more media-friendly Emmanuel “Toto” Constant). In the report of Haitian Truth and Justice Commission, there is a statement by Emmanuel Constant that explains that FRAPH’s central committee was composed of himself, Chamblain, Mireille Durocher-Bertin, a lawyer who was murdered in 1995, and Alphonse Lahens (a prominent Duvalierist).

Chamblain was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for the 1993 murder of businessman and activist Antoine Izmery, as well as for involvement in the 1994 Raboteau massacre. He is also implicated in the assassination of Justice Minister Guy Malary, who was ambushed and machine-gunned to death with his body-guard and a driver on October 14, 1993. According to a 1993 CIA Intelligence Memorandum obtained by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights, “FRAPH members Jodel Chamblain, Emmanuel Constant, and Gabriel Douzable met with an unidentified military officer on the morning of 14 October to discuss plans to kill Malary.”

Chamblain escaped to the Dominican Republic in 1994, after the U.S. military intervention in Haiti, and returned to the country in late 2003 or early 2004.

http://www.flashpoints.net/Haiti_Rebel_Leaders.html



Novak's friend Boniface Alexandre


When Caribbean neighbor Jamaica gave asylum to Aristide two weeks ago, an infuriated LaTortue immediately recalled Haiti's ambassador to Kingston. A second return of Aristide as a free man is ruled out. Boniface Alexandre, the Supreme Court chief justice who became provisional president upon Aristide's resignation under Haiti's constitution, is a careful jurist who measures his words -- except when it comes to Aristide. "He cannot come back to Haiti," Alexandre told me. Aristide will return only if it is decided to indict and extradite him, Justice Minister Bernard Grousse informed me.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn200403...

Haiti: Marines patrol and rebels disarm


While Aristide has been replaced by interim President Boniface Alexandre, his real authority in Haiti has come into question, particularly now that rebel forces have entered the city and proclaimed their intention to reinstate the military.

Led by 36-year-old former military officer Guy Philippe -- who Tuesday proclaimed himself the "military chief" in Haiti -- the rebels began taking over cities in the North in early February with the intention of forcing Aristide's resignation.

The rebels and Haiti's political opposition -- though not aligned -- had been calling for Aristide to step down after what has been termed faulty elections in 2000 and widespread allegations of human rights abuses and corruption.

Since completing their sweep of the Caribbean nation, the rebels said days ago that they would put down their weapons at the request of the president, then appeared to modify their stance as Haiti's second coming of the military. Many of the rebels were soldiers in the nation's army when Aristide disbanded it in 1995.

The president was ousted in a military coup in the early 1990s then restored to power in 1994 with the help of 20,000 U.S. troops.

http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040303-123122-1...

29 February 2004

Haitian President Resigns, Supreme Court President Sworn In
U.S. deploys Marines as initial contingent of multinational force

Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide resigned and departed Port-au-Prince the morning of February 29, resolving the impasse at the root of violence in Haiti in recent weeks, according to the U.S. State Department.

In a February 29 statement, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that the United States facilitated Aristide's safe departure and noted that Haitian Supreme Court President Boniface Alexandre has been sworn in as head of state until presidential elections are held.

The statement called on all Haitians to respect the peaceful and constitutional succession, and added that the United States will deploy U.S. Marines as the intitial contingent of a multinational force.

The U.S. will also work with the international community to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing international support for Haiti's transition, the statement said.

Under a plan crafted by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the U.S. and international community "will facilitate the urgent formation of an independent government that will represent the interests of all of the Haitian people."

Following is the text of the statement:




Statement by Richard Boucher, Spokesman


Statement on the Resignation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti


Jean-Bertrand Aristide has resigned as president of the Republic of Haiti, submitting a letter of resignation before departing Port-au-Prince safely early this morning. At President Aristide's request, the United States facilitated his safe departure from Haiti.
.
In conformity with Haiti's constitution, Supreme Court President Boniface Alexandre has been sworn in as head of state until presidential elections are held. We have been informed that Prime Minister Yvon Neptune will continue to serve as Haiti's head of government until a successor is appointed in the next days, within the framework of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Plan of Action.

We call on all Haitians to respect this peaceful and constitutional succession and to refrain from any actions that will undermine national reconciliation. We urge all Haitians to cooperate with the international community as it supports measures to build a more just society and to help defeat the scourge of poverty and disease.

The decision by President Aristide to resign resolves the political impasse that is the root of the violent unrest in Haiti in recent weeks. Therefore, the United States will deploy a contingent of U.S. Marines as the initial contingent of a multinational interim force. We have been informed that several other countries are prepared to move quickly to join this mission.

During the course of the day we will continue consulting with our partners in CARICOM and the Organization of American States, as well as Canada and France, to seek a resolution of the United Nations Security Council authorizing international support for a peaceful and constitutional transition in Haiti. As envisaged under the CARICOM plan, the international community will facilitate the urgent formation of an independent government that will represent the interests of all of the Haitian people.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/200... ...



André “Andy” Apaid, Jr.,


Last December, after a powwow with the International Republican Institute in Santo Domingo, the Haitian opposition returned to Port-au-Prince to establish the “Group of 184,” a supposedly broad front of “civil society” organizations modeled on similar anti-government coalitions in Chavez’s Venezuela and Allende’s Chile.

The head of the “184" today is André “Andy” Apaid, Jr., also head of Alpha Industries, one of the oldest and largest assembly factories in Haiti.

On Nov. 11, Haiti’s Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert confirmed that Apaid is indeed a U.S. citizen, a rumor which had been circulating since the industrialist’s emergence on the political scene. According to Privert, Apaid was born to Haitian parents in the U.S. and came to Haiti in 1976 as a foreign businessman on a visitor’s visa.

After five years, any foreigner can obtain Haitian nationality by naturalization under the Constitution’s Article 12, but “Andy” Apaid has never done this, according to the government.

Andy is following in the political footsteps of his father. As founder of Alpha Sewing in the 1970s, André senior was a close to dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and remains “a notorious Duvalierist,” according to Eric Verhoogen in the Multinational Monitor (April 1996). Apaid senior headed up the “civil society” (read: bourgeoisie) campaign to support the 1991-1994 military coup against President Aristide, which successfully eased U.S. sanctions on the export of goods from Haiti’s assembly sweat-shops.

“When asked at a business conference in Miami soon after the coup in 1991 what he would do if President Aristide returned to Haiti, Apaid replied vehemently, ‘I’d strangle him!’” Verhoogen wrote. “At the time, Apaid was heading up the United States Agency for International Develop-ment’s (USAID’s) PROMINEX business promotion project, a $12.7 million program to encourage U.S. and Canadian firms to move their businesses to Haiti.”

http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng11-12.html


ANDY APAID JR.:

The most outspoken leader of the opposition coalition, Apaid is a factory owner born in the United States. His family fled Haiti under Francois Duvalier, or "Papa Doc," who ruled from 1957 to 1971.

Favoring pressed pastel shirts and gold-rimmed glasses, Apaid looks like a Miami businessman but says he is totally Haitian at heart.

"I am just as much a part of this country as anyone," Apaid, in his early 50s, said recently. "That's why I am saying we must choose another path for the country."

But without a constitutional amendment, he will never become president because of his dual nationality. He has rejected the U.S.-backed settlement plan, saying Aristide must leave office.

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0204/26haitiwho.ht...

The most outspoken leader of the opposition coalition, Andre (Andy) Apaid is a factory owner born in the United States. His family fled Haiti under Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled from 1957 to 1971.

Favoring pressed pastel shirts and gold-rimmed glasses, Apaid looks like a Miami businessman but says he is totally Haitian at heart.

"I am just as much a part of this country as anyone," Apaid, in his early 50s, said recently. "That's why I am saying we must choose another path for the country."

But without a constitutional amendment, he will never become president because of his dual nationality.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/01/Worldandnation/Key_fi... ...

The Washington-backed Democratic Convergence opposition front and the Haitian bourgeoisie’s “Group of 184” civil society front (G184), led by a U.S. citizen and sweatshop magnate André “Andy” Apaid, Jr. (see Haïti Progrès, Vol. 21, No. 35, 11/12/03), have been quick to embrace, foment and urge on the student demonstrations.

So on Dec. 11, about 10,000 students, with the G184 and Democratic Convergence leaders in tow, marched through the streets of the capital. (Bourgeois radio stations inflated the demonstration up to 5 fold). On hand were Apaid, former Haitian Army colonel Himmler Rébu, Convergence leader Evans Paul, writer Gary Victor, the head of the Civil Society Initiative (ISC) Rosny Desroches, and dissident Lavalas senators Prince Sonson Pierre and Dany Toussaint. Later that day on Radio Kiskeya, Toussaint virtually called for a coup by saying that the “international community” was reluctant to remove Aristide from power only because they feared anarchy would result. But, he reassured them, he could “restore order within 48 hours” due to his connections in the police and former army.

http://www.haiti-progres.com/2003/sm031217/eng12-17.htm...


Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship. (William Blum)



Evans Paul


The Kerry report claims Martinez is the bag man for Colombia’s cocaine cartels, and supervises bribes paid to the Haitian military. According to Miami attorney John Mattes, who is defending a Cuban-American drug trafficker cooperating with U.S. prosecutors, Martinez was paid $30,000 to bribe Haitian authorities into releasing two drug pilots jailed in Haiti after the engine in their plane conked out, forcing them to land in Port-au-Prince.

Martinez claims innocence from his lavish home in Petionville, an ornate suburb where Haiti’s ruling class live, overlooking the slums of the capital. He runs the casino at the plush El Rancho Hotel, that prior to the embargo realized nearly $50 million in business each week, a cash flow adequate to conceal a major money laundering operation.

But the most disturbing allegations have been of the role played by the CIA in keeping many of the coup leaders on the agency’s payroll, as part of an anti-drug intelligence unit set up by the U.S. in Haiti in 1986. Many of these same military men have had their U.S. assets frozen, and are prevented from entering this country because of their role in overthrowing Aristide, and subsequent human rights violations, including torture and murders of political opponents, raising the question—was the U.S. involved in a cocaine coup that overthrew Aristide?

Former Democratic party head and current secretary of commerce Ron Brown headed a law firm that represented the Duvalier family for decades. Part of that representation was a public relations campaign that stressed Duvalier’s opposition to communism in the cold war. United States support for Duvalier was worth more than $400 million in aid to the country, before the man who called himself Haiti’s President-for-Life was forced from the country.

Even Duvalier’s exit from Haiti, in February 1986, is shrouded in covert intrigue and remains an unexplored facet of the career of Lt. Col. Oliver North. Shortly after Duvalier’s ouster, North was quoted as saying he had brought an end to Haiti’s nightmare, a cryptic statement that was never publicly perused by the Iran-Contra hearings.

Francois and his men have a history of involvement in the torture of opponents and death-squad-style murders of Aristide supporters. In one recent incident, attaches mobbed Port-au-Prince City Hall to prevent the capital’s mayor, Evans Paul, an Aristide supporter, from entering his offices.

One person was killed and 11 wounded during the September 8th incident, when the mob opened fire on Aristide supporters. Witnesses say the attack began when attaches dragged two of Paul’s aides from a car, viciously beating an Aristide official. Francois is also considered responsible for the murder of Justice Minister Guy Malary.

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43a/415.html

Another top figure in the opposition coalition, Paul is a former mayor of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, who was in hiding from the brutal military regime during much of his term until U.S. troops arrived in 1994.

Paul, who is in his late 40s, was head of a center-left coalition that nominated Aristide for president in 1990. Paul managed Aristide's successful election campaign but broke ranks after Aristide left him out of his inner circle.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/01/Worldandnation/Key_fi... ...

EVANS PAUL:

Another top figure in the opposition coalition, Paul is a former mayor of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, who was in hiding from the brutal military regime during much of his term until U.S. troops arrived in 1994.

Paul, who is in his late 40s, was head of a center-left coalition that nominated Aristide for president in 1990. Paul managed Aristide's successful election campaign but broke ranks after Aristide left him out of his inner circle.

A playwright and journalist when dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier ruled Haiti, Paul was jailed for opposing him.

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0204/26haitiwho.ht...



DENIS CODERRE:



Canada's minister responsible for the Francophonie — of French-speaking countries that include former French colonies like Haiti — was minister for citizenship and immigration in January 2002, which would have put him in touch with Canada's large Haitian community. Coderre oversaw the implementation of a new act to protect refugees and migrants.

A political scientist, Coderre was first elected to Canada's House of Commons in 1997. In 1999, he joined the federal Cabinet as secretary of state for amateur sport and helped establish the headquarters for the World Anti-Doping Agency in Montreal.

Coderre came to Haiti declaring, "We clearly don't want Aristide's head. We think Aristide must remain in place."

http://www.ajc.com/news/content/news/0204/26haitiwho.ht...



Guy Philippe: Profile


In 2000, Haitian authorities said they had discovered Philippe was plotting a coup with a group of other police chiefs. Philippe fled to the Dominican Republic, the country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Haitian and U.S. authorities say that Philippe was involved in drug trafficking while he was police chief in Cap-Haitien, as well as during his exile in the Dominican Republic, although he has never been officially accused of any drug crimes.

The Haitian government has accused Philippe of organizing an attack on the police academy in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, in July 2001, and another attack in December 2001 on the national palace. The Organization of American States investigated, but was unable to find out who was behind the attacks.

Philippe was thought to have been in exile, but in February 2004, he appeared at a news conference at the side of one of the leaders of the anti-Aristide rebels.

His rebel group, the National Front for the Liberation of Haiti, is largely made up of former soldiers who lost their jobs when the military was demobilized.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/haiti/philippe.html

Guy Philippe
Guy Philippe is a former member of the FAD’H (Haitian Army). During the 1991-94 military regime, he and a number of other officers received training from the US Special Forces in Equador, and when the FAD’H was dissolved by Aristide in early 1995, Philippe was incorporated into the new National Police Force.

He served as police chief in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Delmas and in the second city, Cap-Haitien, before he fled Haiti in October 2000 when Haitian authorities discovered him plotting what they described as a coup, together with a clique of other police chiefs. Since that time, the Haitian government has accused Philippe of master-minding deadly attacks on the Haitian Police Academy and the National Palace in July and December 2001, as well as hit-and-run raids against police stations on Haiti’s Central Plateau over last two years.

http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng02-25.html

The leader of the insurrectionary forces, Guy Philippe, age thirty-five, trained by the United States as an army officer in Ecuador. He was integrated into the new Haitian National Police in 1995 and his first command post was in Ouanaminthe, on the northern border with the Dominican Republic. Later, in about 1997 to 1999, he served as police chief for Delmas, a large urban district on the north side of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. During his tenure there, the UN/OAS International Civilian Mission learned that dozens of suspected gang members were summarily executed, mainly by police under the command of Inspector Berthony Bazile, Philippe’s deputy.

On October 18, 2000, Haiti’s prime minister announced that Philippe and other officers were plotting a coup d’etat. Before they were arrested, however, the men escaped over the border to the Dominican Republic.

http://www.flashpoints.net/Haiti_Rebel_Leaders.html

Ernst Ravix



According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights report on Haiti, dated 7 September 1988, FAD’H Captain Ernst Ravix, was the military commander of Saint Marc, and head of a paramilitary squad of “sub-proletariat youths” who called themselves the Sans Manman (Motherless Ones). In May 1988, the government of President Manigat tried to reduce contraband and corruption in the port city of Saint Marc, but Ravix, the local Army commander, responded by organising a demonstration against the President in which some three thousand residents marched, chanted, and burned barricades. Manigat removed Ravix from his post, but after Manigat’s ouster, he was reinstated by the military dictator, Lt. Gen. Namphy.

Ravix was not heard of again until December 2001 when former FAD’H sergeant, Pierre Richardson, the person captured following the 17 December attack on the National Palace, reportedly confessed that the attack was a coup attempt planned in the Dominican Republic by three former police chiefs- Guy Philippe, Jean-Jacques Nau and Gilbert Dragon - and that it was led by former Captain Ernst Ravix. According to Richardson, Ravix’s group withdrew from the National Palace and fled to the Dominican Republic when reinforcements failed to arrive.

http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng02-25.html


Jean-Pierre Baptiste - nom de guerre is Jean Tatoune


Among the rebel leaders was the notorious Jean-Pierre Baptiste, smiling and looking triumphant. It did not seem to matter that Mr. Baptiste, whose nom de guerre is Jean Tatoune, had been freed by rebels last year from a prison where he had been serving a life sentence for his participation in the killings of Aristide supporters in Gonaïves in 1994. Mr. Latortue hailed the rebels as "freedom fighters."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/29/international/america...

Haiti: Perpetrators of serious past abuses re-emerge

Haiti Support Group

The emergence of former paramilitary leaders convicted of past human rights violations as leaders of the armed opposition force is fuelling a conflict that has already taken too many lives, said Amnesty International as the crisis in Haiti continues to deepen.

"At the best of times, the spectre of past violations continues to haunt Haiti," Amnesty International said today. "At this crucial stage, when the rule of law is so fragile, the last thing that the country needs is for those who committed abuses in the past to take up leadership positions in the armed opposition."

On 14 February Louis Jodel Chamblain, a notorious former paramilitary leader, reportedly gave an interview to a Haitian radio station to say that he had joined the armed movement seeking to overthrow President Jean Bertrand Aristide. He was accompanied by a former police commissioner.

In September 1995 Chamblain was among seven senior military and paramilitary leaders convicted in absentiaand sentenced to forced labour for life for involvement in the September 1993 extrajudicial execution of Antoine Izméry, a well-known pro-democracy activist. Chamblain had gone into exile to avoid prosecution.

Chamblain has reportedly joined forces with the leaders of the armed opposition based in Gonaïves.

Another of the leaders, Jean Pierre Baptiste, alias "Jean Tatoune", is also a former paramilitary leader who was sentenced to forced labour for life for participation in the 1994 Raboteau massacre. He was among the prisoners who escaped from Gonaïves prison during the August 2002 jailbreak of Amiot 'Cubain' Métayer, deceased leader of the formerly pro-government group which violently took over control of Gonaïves on 5 February. Gang
members under Jean Tatoune's direction have been accused of numerous abuses against government officials and supporters, as well as other Gonaïves residents, over past months.

"The Haitian authorities must do everything in their power to arrest these individuals, who have both already been convicted of serious violations," Amnesty International said. "For their part, political opposition parties must condemn the emergence of these notorious figures at the head of the armed movement to oust Aristide, and must do everything in their power to demonstrate their own commitment to human rights and the rule of law."

Background Information

Louis Jodel Chamblain and Jean Tatoune both belonged to the paramilitary organisation FRAPH, formed by military authorities who were the de facto leaders of the country following the 1991 coup against then-President Jean Bertrand Aristide. FRAPH members were responsible for numerous human rights violations before the 1994 restoration of democratic governance.

The group was at first known as the Front révolutionnaire pourl'avancement et le progrès haïtiens, Revolutionary Front for Haitian Advancement and Progress. The acronym FRAPH phonetically resembles the French and Creole words for 'to beat' or 'to thrash.'

Antoine Izméry was gunned down in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Port-au-Prince on 11 September 1993, while attending mass. The mass was being held to commemorate the fifth anniversary of a massacre committed during an attack on Aristide, then a parish priest, on 11 September 1988 at the St. Jean Bosco Church in La Saline, a shanty town on the outskirts of the capital.

After the 5 February attack in Gonaïves, unrest spread to nearly a dozen towns in the center and north of Haiti. Concerns are increasing about the humanitarian situation in the towns under control of anti-government forces and other areas cut off by the conflict. The first demonstration of the political opposition since the violence began took place in Port-au-Prince on 15 February; demonstrators were confronted by rock-throwing government supporters, and police used tear gas and fired their guns into the air to disperse both groups.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engAMR360062004?Op...


Public Document
http://www.oneworld.net/article/view/79531/1 /

Jean Pierre Baptiste ("Jean Tatoune") is another FRAPH member convicted in the Raboteau massacre trial and sentenced to forced labour for life.

Others convicted of or indicted for human rights abuses escaped from the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince on Sunday 29 February in the atmosphere of lawlessness that followed the departure of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. AI fears that they may join the rebel forces, thus gaining access to weapons and potentially to positions of influence.

Police and judicial officers, witnesses and human rights defenders involved in past prosecutions may be at risk of reprisal attacks from those they helped bring to justice.

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/hti-100304-action-eng

Even US officials acknowledge that the leaders of the Haitian coup d’etat are “death squad veterans and convicted murderers,” (NYT 2/28/04). Two of these are Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste, leaders of FRAPH (Haitian Front for Advancement and Progress), a murderous rightwing group that was funded by the US for many years and played a leading role in overthrowing Aristide in 1991. FRAPH’s name, according to the Times, is a play on the French “frapper” (“to hit”).

Both Chamblain and Baptiste have been convicted of political murders. Chamblain, a former Haitian Army officer, has been hiding in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Baptiste was serving a life sentence until he recently broke out of jail.

http://www.ucimc.org/feature/display/16099/index.php

Mr. Latortue has no democratic mandate. Haitians are bitterly split between Aristide supporters and opponents, and both sides are heavily armed. Clearly, he needs to reach out to those on both sides of this divide who want to move their country forward. But Mr. Latortue aided neither national reconciliation nor his own shaky legitimacy by the unseemly ceremony he took part in last Saturday.

Ferried by American military helicopters to the city of Gonaïves, where the anti-Aristide revolt began, he stood on a stage with killers like Jean-Pierre Baptiste. Mr. Baptiste, who escaped from prison in 2002, is a death squad leader convicted of participating in a 1994 massacre of Aristide supporters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/opinion/24WED2.html?t...

Jean Tatoune
Jean Pierre Baptiste, alias “Jean Tatoune”, first came to prominence as a leader of the anti-Duvalier mobilisations in his home town of Gonaives in 1985. For some years he was known and respected for his anti-Duvalierist activities but during the 1991-94 military regime he emerged as a local leader of FRAPH.

On 22 April 1994, he led a force of dozens of soldiers and FRAPH members in an attack on Raboteau, a desperately poor slum area in Gonaives and a stronghold of support for Aristide. Between 15 and 25 people were killed in what became known as the Raboteau massacre.

In 2000, Tatoune was put on trial and sentenced to forced labour for life for his participation in the Raboteau massacre. He was subsequently imprisoned in Gonaives, from where he escaped in August 2002, and took up arms again in his base in a poor area of the city. At various times he has spoken out against the government, and at other times in favour of it, but since September 2003 he has allied himself with the followers of murdered community leader, Amiot Metayer, and vowed to overthrow the government by force.
http://www.haiti-progres.com/eng02-25.html



Butteur Metayer


Butteur immediately assumed command of his brother's army, soon renamed the Artibonite Resistance Front. The situation in Gonaives rapidly disintegrated, and some said Butteur's tactics were just as cruel as paramilitary operations in previous years.

The Times of London reported that Butteur's army "left the rotting bodies of dead policemen to be eaten by wild pigs and have taken several other towns in the interior, where they murdered more policemen."

Butteur sometimes sported a Hyatt Orlando golf shirt and bands of bullets across his chest. He challenged Aristide openly during press conferences at the family home.

Aristide, said Butteur and the other rebels, had become corrupt, relying on armed gangs and siphoning money away from the poor, away from schools, giving it to his supporters.

http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/04/Worldandnation/Haitia... ...

Amiot Metayer's Sept. 22 assassination led to protest rallies in Gonaives that eventually boiled over into rebellion. He had been the leader of the Cannibal Army street gang, which Butteur Metayer says was armed by Aristide's Lavalas Party to terrorize the president's opponents in the city -- a charge Aristide denied.

Metayer was viewed by many people in Gonaives as a Robin Hood who lavished gifts on slum dwellers and his killing angered supporters.

After Butteur Metayer launched the rebellion, former soldiers of the disbanded Haitian army crossed the border from the Dominican Republic to join the uprising. It was the former troops who gave impetus to the push that put half of Haiti in rebel hands within two weeks.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,112992,00.html

Aristide finally had Metayer arrested last year after months of pressure from the OAS, which demanded he be tried for allegedly burning homes of opponents. Gang members rammed a tractor into the prison to free him in September, and Metayer's bullet-riddled and mutilated body was found days later.

"They took out his eyes. They took out his heart," Latortue said.

Metayer's brother, Butteur, assumed leadership of the gang; he claimed Aristide ordered his brother's killing to keep him from publicizing damaging information about him.

With his death prompting the uprising that brought about Aristide's downfall, Metayer has become a hero in the town. Many feared him. Others saw him as a Robin Hood who lavished gifts on slum-dwelling Aristide supporters.

Thousands of them have fled the city since the Feb. 5 gunbattle in which Metayer's men killed several police officers and torched government buildings.
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/03/20/haiti.... /

The city of Gonaives, where the slaves finally overcame Napolean's forces and gained independence has been one of the most political cities in the country. In the 1980s, the city was again the center of independence when rebel forces defeated the brutal (U.S. supported) Duvalier dictatorship. The country has experienced 30 coups since gaining its independence. As of February 5, it seems the country is thrown into armed conflict again. Rebel forces began a violent effort to overthrow the Aristide government and take control of the capital. Over 40 people been killed and more than a dozen cities seized by the rebels. Gonaives is now in the hands of what the newly named "Artibonite Resistance Front" (formally known as the Cannibal Army). Led by two brothers, Amiot and Butteur Metayer, the Gonaives chapter of the resistance has received "reinforcements" from neighboring Dominican Republic. The men who have joined the resistance from abroad are largely former military leaders of Haiti, exiled or hiding from histories of torture and abuse. Butteur Metayer told the Associated Press that Louis-Jodel Chamblain, former soldier from Haiti responsible for death squads in the 1980s and atrocities following the 1991 military coup is gathering forces for the resistance as well.

Back in Orlando, Metayer and his sister also have gratitude for another person: President Bush.

"I don't know how to thank him" for encouraging Aristide to get out, said Gertrude Metayer.

http://www.thesnapper.com/news/2004/02/19/NationWorldIs... ...



The new Prime Minister of Haiti, Gerard Latortue, waves duirng a visit to his hometown, Gonaives, Haiti on Saturday, March 20, 2004.(AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)


for all working links see this thread
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1307941

[seemslikeadream]

86. WHILE I SIT HERE TRYING TO THINK OF THINGS TO SAY

SOMEONE LIES BLEEDING IN A FIELD SOMEWHERE

SO IT WOULD SEEM WE'VE STILL GOT A LONG LONG WAY TO GO

I'VE SEEN ALL I WANNA SEE TODAY

WHILE I SIT HERE TRYING TO MOVE YOU ANYWAY I CAN

SOMEONE'S SON LIES DEAD IN A GUTTER SOMEWHERE

AND IT WOULD SEEM THAT WE'VE GOT A LONG LONG WAY TO GO

BUT I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE

SWITCH IT OFF IT WILL GO AWAY

TURN IT OFF IF YOU WANT TO

SWITCH IT OFF OR LOOK AWAY

WHILE I SIT AND WE TALK AND TALK AND WE TALK SOME MORE

SOMEONE'S LOVED ONE'S HEART STOPS BEATING IN A STREET SOMEWHERE

SO IT WOULD SEEM WE'VE STILL GOT A LONG LONG WAY TO GO, I KNOW

I'VE HEARD ALL I WANNA HEAR TODAY

TURN IT OFF IF YOU WANT TO (TURN IT OFF IF YOU WANT TO)

SWITCH IT OFF IT WILL GO AWAY (SWITCH IT OFF IT WILL GO AWAY)

TURN IT OFF IF YOU WANT TO (TURN IT OFF IF YOU WANT TO)

SWITCH IT OFF OR LOOK AWAY (SWITCH IT OFF OR LOOK AWAY)

SWITCH IT OFF

SWITCH IT OFF

SWITCH IT OFF

SWITCH IT OFF

SWITCH IT OFF

TURN IT OFF


thanks to
phil collins for the words
the people of Haiti for their courage
bob

[Octafish]

88. Not much $ to be made o Haiti, but da drugs da come ouddadere - Hoo Boy!e.

Haiti

from the book

The CIAs Greatest Hits

by Mark Zepezauer

US troops invaded Haiti five times, once staying for almost twenty years (1915-35). At the end of that prolonged visit, during which we killed thousands of Haitians for daring to rebel, we left the country in the hands of the local National Guard, confident that they'd carry on our good work.

From this arrangement emerged the Duvalier family dynasty and their private terrorist force, the machete-wielding Tontons Macoutes. "Papa Doc" Duvalier (he was a medical doctor) also relied on voodoo incantations and, during a 1959 uprising, the timely assistance of the US military. When Papa Doc died in 1971, his 19-year-old son, called Baby Doc, became "president-for-life."

Throughout the blood-drenched rule of the Duvaliers (nearly 100,000 killed by the Tontons Macoutes alone), the US barely uttered a peep about human rights violations. In 1986, however, when it became apparent that Baby Doc's presidency could not in fact be sustained for his entire life (unless he died soon), the Reagan administration airlifted him to a retirement villa in France and started talking about the "democratic process."

Before that could begin, however, the Haitian military had to be further strengthened. CIA money began flowing to Haiti, which had already seen US aid double during the Reagan years. The CIA set up an anti-narcotics service called-appropriately-SIN ("national intelligence service"). As one CIA man admitted, SIN used its millions in CIA subsidies mainly to suppress popular movements by means of torture and assassination. Far from combating drugs, many SIN officers engage in the drug trade themselves.

In 1990, elections were finally allowed. Haitians stunned the US by rejecting the candidate we preferred in favor of a left-wing Catholic priest, Jean Bertrand Aristide. The Bush administration could scarcely conceal its joy when Haiti's US-trained military deposed Aristide eight months later.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Haiti_CIAHits.html

[donheld]

92. Maxine Waters for President

i love that woman

[bobbieinok]

98. we need to realize....a great many people may like what she says but

are turned off by her manner when they see her in person or on TV.

[donheld]

124. Well i've seen her many times on TV and i've always been Impressed by her

She has more balls than most democrats.

[Octafish]

127. Someone else with a lot of guts is Cynthia McKinney.

...I understand she'll be sworn-in as a United States Representative in January.

YES!

[seemslikeadream]

129. The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney

Did I mention to you that (ex-)Congresswoman McKinney is black? And not just any kind of black. She’s the uppity kind of black.

What I mean by uppity is this:

After George Bush Senior left the White House, he became an advisor and lobbyist for a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Hey, a guy’s got to work. But there were a couple of questions about Barrick, to say the least. For example, was Barrick’s Congo gold mine funding both sides of a civil war and perpetuating that bloody conflict? Only one Congressperson demanded hearings on the matter.

You’ve guessed: Cynthia McKinney.

That was covered in the . . . well, it wasn’t covered at all in the U.S. press.

McKinney contacted me at the BBC. She asked if I’d heard of Barrick. Indeed, I had. Top human rights investigators had evidence that a mine that Barrick bought in 1999 had, in clearing their Tanzanian properties three years earlier, bulldozed mine shafts . . . burying about 50 miners alive.

I certainly knew Barrick: They’d sued the Guardian for daring to run a story I’d written about the allegations of the killings. Barrick never sued an American paper for daring to run the story, because no American paper dared.

The primary source for my story, an internationally famous lawyer named Tundu Lissu, was charged by the Tanzanian police with sedition, and arrested, for calling for an investigation. McKinney has been trying to save his life with an international campaign aimed at Barrick.

That was another of her mistakes.
more
http://www.alternet.org/story/16172

[Octafish]

130. Gee. I was just about to post that. How's about...

Palast controlling you, too?

Edit: What follows...

Cynthia McKinney: “We Need Narco News, and It Needs Us”
A Letter from Georgia's Congresswoman-Elect on the Need for Authentic Media

By Cynthia McKinney
Please Distribute Widely
November 9, 2004

Dear Friend,

I am one of the silver linings to come out of Election Day 2004 in the United States.

After being driven from my seat in Congress two years ago by a hostile corporate media that seeks to demonize those of us who speak our minds and our hearts against power, the voters of Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District returned me to Washington on November 2nd.

I return to Washington ready to fight.

But before I get to Washington in January 2005, I ask you to join me in contributing to the Internet newspaper that made a free online media possible in the United States and elsewhere: Narco News.

When we contribute to the journalism of Narco News through The Fund for Authentic Journalism, we in Civil Society also become co-publishers of the newspaper – a pioneering experiment that is working to bring democracy to the Media. Read more about this innovative project, and make a contribution today, at this link:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org

CONTINUED...

http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1123.html

[Octafish]

35. Iraq-gate, BNL & Arms to Saddam

Just how do you think Iraq managed to run its war against Iran for all those years? Saddam had to get juice from somebody, and George Bush wanted to sell him the arms he needed to kill the Iranians he attacked. So, George got the US taxpayers without their knowledge, to loan (read: "give") Saddam $5 billion in "agricultural credits." Meanwhile the Iran-Iraq war is prolonged by years and several hundreds of thousands of lives are lost. Of course, Bush needed a patsy, so his henchmen found a low-level banker in Miami to take the fall. His bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, got a slap on the wrist. Notice, too, how they cover up their criminality by labeling public information "secret." Neat, that BFEE.

Here's what the great Liberal thinker and ex-Agnew speechwriter William Safire had to say on the subject. It's from the Congressional Record, entered by Rep. Tom Lantos and the late Rep. Henry Gonzalez.


THE ADMINISTRATION'S IRAQ GATE SCANDAL

(BY WILLIAM SAFIRE)

(Extension of Remarks - May 19, 1992)



HON. TOM LANTOS

in the House of Representatives

TUESDAY, MAY 19, 1992

* Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, just 1 year ago, Americans were flush with the glow of the military victory over Saddam Hussein. Parades were held in the largest of cities and in the smallest of hamlets. New York and Washington were trying to outdo each other in the splendor of their competing celebrations of victory.

* This year, however, we are wallowing in the sordid aftermath of the revelations of the misguided administration policy that brought about that war. We have been treated to details of how the administration bent over backwards in its misguided effort to support the regime of Saddam Hussein on the very eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

* Mr. Speaker, William Safire summarized this squalid tale of policy run amuck in an excellent article that appeared in yesterday's issue of the New York Times. I ask that this article be placed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to read it carefully.

(BY WILLIAM SAFIRE)

Washington: Americans now know that the war in the Persian Gulf was brought about by a colossal foreign-policy blunder: George Bush's decision, after the Iran-Iraq war ended, to entrust regional security to Saddam Hussein.

What is not yet widely understood is how that benighted policy led to the Bush Administration's fraudulent use of public funds, its sustained deception of Congress and its obstruction of justice.

As the Saudi Ambassador, Prince Bandar, was urging Mr. Bush and Mr. Baker to buy the friendship of the Iraqi dictator in August 1989, the F.B.I. uncovered a huge scam at the Atlanta branch of the Lavoro Bank to finance the buildup of Iraq's war machine by diverting U.S.-guaranteed grain loans.

Instead of pressing the investigation or curbing the appeasement, the President turned a blind eye to lawbreaking and directed another billion dollars to Iraq. Our State and Agriculture Department's complicity in Iraq's duplicity transformed what could have been dealt with as `Saddam's Lavoro scandal' into George Bush's Iraqgate.

The first element of corruption is the wrongful application of U.S. credit guarantees. Neither the Commodity Credit Corporation nor the Export-Import Bank runs a foreign-aid program; their purpose is to stimulate U.S. exports. High-risk loan guarantees to achieve foreign-policy goals unlawful endanger that purpose.

Yet we now know that George Bush personally leaned on Ex-Im to subvert its charter--not to promote our exports but to promote relations with the dictator. And we have evidence that James Baker overrode worries in Agriculture and O.M.B. that the law was being perverted: Mr. Baker's closest aid, Robert Kimmett, wrote triumphantly, `your call to . . . Yeutter . . . paid off.' Former Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter is now under White House protection.

Second element of corruption is the misleading of Congress. When the charge was made two years ago in this space that State was improperly intervening in this case, Mr. Baker's top Middle East aide denied it to Senate Foreign Relations; meanwhile, Yeutter aides deceived Senator Leahy's Agriculture Committee about the real foreign-policy purpose of the C.C.C. guarantees. To carry out Mr. Bush's infamous National Security Directive 26, lawful oversight was systematically blinded.

Third area of Iraqgate corruption is the obstruction of justice. Atlanta's assistant U.S. Attorney Gail McKenzie, long blamed here for foot-dragging, would not withhold from a grand jury what she has already told friends: that indictment of Lavoro officials was held up for nearly a year by the Bush Criminal Division. The long delay in prosecution enabled James Baker to shake credits for Saddam out of malfeasant Agriculture appointees.

When House Banking Chairman Henry Gonzalez gathered documents marked `secret' showing this pattern of corruption, he put them in the Congressional Record. Two months later, as the media awakened, Mr. Bush gave the familiar `gate' order; stonewall.

`Public disclosure of classified information harms the national security,' Attorney General William Barr instructed the House Banking Committee last week. `. . . in light of your recent disclosures, the executive branch will not provide any more classified information'--unless the wrongdoing is kept secret.

`Your threat to withhold documents,' responded Chairman Gonzalez, `has all the earmarks of a classic effort to obstruct a proper and legitimate investigation . . . none of the documents compromise, in any fashion whatsoever, the national security or intelligence sources and methods.'

Mr. Barr, in personal jeopardy, has flung down the gauntlet. Chairman Gonzalez tells me he plans to present his obstruction case this week to House Judiciary Chairman Jack Brooks, probably flanked by Representatives Charles Schumer and Barney Frank, members of both committees.

`I will recommend that Judiciary consider requiring the appointment of an independent counsel,' says Mr. Gonzalez, who has been given reason to believe that Judiciary--capable of triggering the Ethics in Government Act--will be persuaded to act.

Policy blunders are not crimes. But perverting the purpose of appropriated funds is a crime; lying to Congress compounds that crime; and obstructing justice to cover up the original crime is a criminal conspiracy.



SOURCE:

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1992/h920519l.htm

MODS: The above is an official government document and is not restricted by copyright considerations. Thanks for all you DU!

[Octafish]

36. BCCI

BCCI - the Bank of Credit and Commerce International -- enabled money laundering for narcotraffickers, terrorists and the world's intelligence agencies. Termed the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" by Robert M. Gates, George Bush Sr's Director of Central Intelligence, the bank bribed government officials around the world -- including the United States.

BCCI was the terrorists’ favorite bank, used by among others Abu Nidhal, Osama bin Laden, Ollie North, CIA, SIS and KGB. The Reagan and Bush administrations and friends on both sides of the aisle in Congress did all they could to keep it open.

Same with the Pakistanis. They funneled BCCI billions to Dr. Abul Qadeer Khan and his team who built the Pakistani H-Bomb. John Kerry got BCCI shut down, but he failed to mention that in the televised debates, much to my chagrine.

Wikipedia, on BCCI and many other topics, makes an excellent resource:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_International

Uncle Sam has an excellent resource, dated December 1992, which ties the players to the crime. It also outlined a few suggestions on how to rid the nation of this tentacle of the Octopus:

SUMMARY OF LEGISLATIVE RECOMMENDATIONS

1. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE UNITED STATES DEVELOP A MORE AGGRESSIVE AND COORDINATED APPROACH TO INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CRIME, AND TO MOVE FURTHER AGAINST FOREIGN PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIAL LAWS THAT PROTECT CRIMINALS.

2. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT RECONSIDER THE POLICIES AND PRACTICES THAT LED TO ITS INEFFECTIVENESS IN INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING BCCI, AND IMPAIRED ITS ABILITY TO COOPERATE WITH OTHER INVESTIGATIONS OF BCCI BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE, NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY, AND THE SENATE.

3. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY AND STATE DEPARTMENT UPGRADE THE TRACKING OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES, AND THE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION CONCERNING SUCH INSTITUTIONS.

4. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE CONGRESS CONSIDER WHETHER ADDITIONAL OVERSIGHT MECHANISMS ARE NECESSARY TO ENSURE THE CIA'S ACCOUNTABILITY ON THE PROVISION OF INFORMATION.

5. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FEDERAL AGENCIES IMPOSE NEW REQUIREMENTS ON FOREIGN AUDITORS TO PROTECT U.S. INTERESTS IN ANY CASE IN WHICH ANY SUCH AGENCY IS RELYING ON AN AUDIT CERTIFIED BY A FOREIGN AUDITOR. AT MINIMUM, THIS SHOULD REQUIRE FOREIGN AUDITORS WHOSE CERTIFICATIONS ARE USED BY INSTITUTIONS DOING BUSINESS IN THE U.S. AGREE TO SUBMIT THEMSELVES TO U.S. LAWS.

6. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE PRESIDENT AND THE SECRETARY OF STATE ADVISE THE GOVERNMENT OF ABU DHABI THAT ITS WITHHOLDING OF DOCUMENTS AND WITNESSES PERTAINING TO BCCI FROM U.S. FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT INVESTIGATORS, THE FEDERAL RESERVE, THE NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND THE CONGRESS THREATENS VITAL U.S. INTERESTS AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

7. FURTHER ATTENTION NEEDS TO BE GIVEN TO THE PROBLEM OF THE REVOLVING DOOR IN WASHINGTON, AND THE IMPACT ON THE REGULATORY PROCESS AND ON LAW ENFORCEMENT OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE IN WASHINGTON. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THE CONSIDERATION OF LEGISLATING A FEDERAL STATUTORY CODE OF CONDUCT FOR ATTORNEYS WHO PRACTICE BEFORE FEDERAL AGENCIES.

8. THE SELF-REGULATION OF THE U.S COMMODITIES MARKETS BY THE COMMODITIES FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION, THE CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE, AND THE CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE IS INADEQUATE TO PROTECT THOSE MARKETS AGAINST MONEY LAUNDERING INVOLVING TRADES

FROM ABROAD. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE EXCHANGES MAKE MONEY LAUNDERING ILLEGAL, AND DEMAND THAT THIS REQUIREMENT BE ACCEPTED BY FOREIGN COMMODITIES EXCHANGES WITH WHOM THEY DO BUSINESS, AS A CONDITION OF ACCESS TO US EXCHANGES.

9. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FURTHER STEPS BE TAKEN TO INSURE ADEQUATE ACCOUNTABILITY OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS DOING BUSINESS IN THE UNITED STATES, INCLUDING REQUIRING FOREIGN BANKS FORM SEPARATELY CAPITALIZED HOLDING COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES AS A CONDITION OF LICENSE AND THE CONSIDERATION BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE OF ESTABLISHMENT A MINIMUM STANDARD FOR CONSOLIDATED REGULATION THAT EXCLUDES BANK REGULATORY HAVENS.

10. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FOREIGN INVESTORS WHO PURCHASE SUBSTANTIAL SHARES OF U.S. BUSINESSES BE REQUIRED TO APPEAR PERSONALLY IN THE UNITED STATES AS INSURANCE THAT THE FOREIGN INVESTOR IS NOT ACTING AS A NOMINEE FOR SOMEONE ELSE.

11. TURF WARS CONTINUE TO SEVERELY DAMAGE THE ABILITY OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES IN THE UNITED STATES TO DO THEIR JOB. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A COMMITTEE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS WHOSE JOB IT IS TO CONDUCT OVERSIGHT OF, PREVENT, AND RESPOND TO FAILURES OF COOPERATION IN LAW ENFORCEMENT.

12. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT A STATUTORY MECHANISM FOR THE RECEIPT BY CONGRESS OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INFORMATION BE ESTABLISHED.

CONTINUED...

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/


DU has posted many excellent threads on the topic as well. When I get to my faster computer, I'll link in those as well.

[Octafish]

37. Savings & Loan Scandal

Legalized robbery in the form of “loans” made to the politically connected, Mafia and INTEL-huggers. Odd how even Neil Bush, who made millions while Silverado, the S&L he helped direct, lost billions in bad loans to Bush cronies, never spent a day in jail. Meanwhile a kid from Detroit steals a pair of shoes from the mall and it’s OK to shoot him dead. Oh well. After the trillion-dollar taxpayer-financed bailout “fixes” everything, Poppy’s very, very, very rich friends become ultra-rich. Poppy's kids too, like Silverado Neil and Santos Jebthro.

TRUST OR HUSTLE: The Bush Record

David E. Scheim

BACKGROUND ON THE S&L BAILOUT. The failure of hundreds of U.S. Savings and Loans during the 1980s, as detailed in such sources as Stephen Pizzo’s Inside Job1 and Pete Brewton’s Untold Story,2 cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $500 billion.3   A U.S. House committee concluded that over three-quarters of all S&L insolvencies appeared to be linked to serious misconduct by senior insiders or outsiders.4  In 1988, the comptroller of the currency found that less than 10 percent of recent bank failures had been caused solely by economic factors.5

One indication of the role of criminal conduct in S&L losses was the workings of just one New York figure, Mario Renda, who worked in conjunction with the Mob, according to a sworn federal deposition.6  Renda  brokered as much as $5 billion per year in deposits into 130 S&Ls across the county, all of which failed.7  As Kwitny noted, “many of these deposits were made on the specific condition that the S&Ls would lend money out to borrowers Renda would recommend, who turned out to be local Mafia people or strangers from out-of-state.”8  

The Bush family’s dealings illustrate some of the ways this S&L loot was extracted.  In some loan transactions, money was simply siphoned out fraudulently to outsiders under lucrative arrangements with bank directors; Neil Bush’s record illustrates these type of transactions.  In other instances, as exemplified by Jeb’s S&L dealings, loans were made for speculative investments or ventures without attempts to secure repayment if they were not profitable.  Political connections often helped protect S&L misconduct;9 in the Bush’s case, George senior’s record demonstrated laxity toward the perpetrators, several of whom were in his own social circles.

CONTINUED...

http://www.campaignwatch.org/more1.htm

[Octafish]

45. Iran-Contra -- Guns, Drugs, Martial Law

The neo-cons like the fascist Michael Ledeen and his buddies in the arms trade Munacher Ghorbanifar and Adnan Khashoggi (once employer of Theresa "Butterfly Ballot" LePore) bend over backward to sell arms the Ayatollah and use the profits to arm the terrorist Contras. Some foreign policy brainstorm that -- they wanted to do an "end run" around Congress. Oh ... for the old days.

Guns-to-the-Iranians makes me furious because the Ayatollah held those 52 Americans hostage and a few years later helped kill 241 US service members at the Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983. The Ayatollah also probably ordered the destruction of the US transport plane that killed 248 service men (and eight crew) outside Gander, Newfoundland in 1985.

Which brings me back to Iran-Contra. This episode should have landed Pruneface, Poppy, Weinberger, Shultz, Poindexter, McFarlane and most of the bloody players in prison, but, thanks to Poppy’s pardon of Cap the Knife, they remained free to roam the streets, let alone corridors of power, and continue the terror today. While he's been kicked who-knows-where upstairs, here's a bit on how un-admirable Poindexter later made out:

No more Mr Scrupulous Guy

How one of the two brains behind the Iran-Contra scandal this week became one of America's most powerful men

John Sutherland
Monday February 18, 2002
The Guardian

EXCERPT...

The agency which (John) Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with "instant" analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage. You want to test it out? Text-message any American friend, "Bmb OK. Allah gr8".

SNIP...

Poindexter is frighteningly smart and very unscrupulous. He graduated top of his class at the Naval Academy in 1958 and went on to a PhD in physics at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to uniform as America's best-educated sailor. He wasn't a desk warrior. Poindexter commanded missile destroyers. He won medals to hang alongside his academic diplomas. He is the model for Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan.

After the assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981, Poindexter was called in to review White House security. Reagan was impressed and appointed him a national security adviser, in 1983, with the rank of vice-admiral.

At this point, things started to go wrong. He and Oliver North were found to be up to their necks in the Iran-Contra (guns for hostages) scam, which blew up in 1986. Poindexter was charged and found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence in 1990; this was overturned on appeal the following year. The case against them was that they meticulously wiped out 5,000 incriminating emails - but forgot about the back-up tapes. Even smart guys goof sometimes.

Poindexter was also accused by a Costa Rican government commission of being involved in cocaine trafficking to raise funds for the contras, though this was never proved (you can find details in the Guardian, July 22 1989).

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4358017-103680,00.html

[Octafish]

47. Gulf War 1 -- April Glaspie Gives Green Light

Ever wonder why John Kerry voted against Gulf War 1? Seems the Senator understood who was giving the old what's for to whom and why. Here's stuff you won't see on TV, America...

The short story: Saddam was angry Kuwait was slant-drilling under the border to grab his country's oil. He warned them to stop, but no. So he massed his army along the border with Kuwait to show he meant business. Bush send Acting Ambassador April Glaspie to talk to Saddam and she says the U.S. has no position on Arab-Arab border disputes. That signal serves as a greenlight to Saddam who pushes into Kuwait and takes over the whole bloody country.

In the meantime, Bush lies to Congress and the American people, stating Saddam was marshalling his troops to attack Saudi Arabia. He even offered phony satellite photos that showed tanks and everything in the desert. Odd that. Never happened.

No wonder Saddam felt betrayed when Cheney ordered the extermination of tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi conscripts heading north on the “Highway of Death.”

Meanwhile, Poppy’s ultra-rich friends become ultra-ultra-ultra rich and we got to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, the same bases Osama bin Laden got so angry about he helped kill 3,000 innocent people.

Here's a bit on what we know about April Glaspie:

April Glaspie - Saddam Hussein meeting transcript

EXCERPT...

Saddam Hussein - As you know, for years now I have made every effort to reach a settlement on our dispute with Kuwait. There is to be a meeting in two days; I am prepared to give negotiations only this one more brief chance. (pause) When we (the Iraqis) meet (with the Kuwaitis) and we see there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death.

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - What solutions would be acceptab le?

Saddam Hussein - If we could keep the whole of the Shatt al Arab - our strategic goal in our war with Iran - we will make concessions (to the Kuwaitis). But, if we are forced to choose between keeping half of the Shatt and the whole of Iraq (i.e., in Saddam s view, including Kuwait ) then we will give up all of the Shatt to defend our claims on Kuwait to keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be. (pause) What is the United States' opinion on this?

U.S. Ambassador Glaspie - We have no opinion on your Arab - Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960's, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. (Saddam smiles)

CONTINUED...

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE5/april.html

Here's a bit on the phony satellite photos:

Fake Satellite Photos

In early January, Hussein’s troops began to withdraw from Kuwait, but the Pentagon claimed to have satellite photographs showing an enormous buildup of Iraqi forces and weapons, 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1500 tanks massing in the desert for their impending attack on Saudi Arabia. This announcement stunned the anti-war protesters, and world opinion gradually shifted, although no one saw the alleged photos, which were, of course, classified.

Jean Heller, an ace journalist from the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, persuaded her editors to buy two photos from the Russian commercial satellite, the Soyuz Karta, taken September 11 and September 13. The photos proved that the entire Iraqi airforce was parked in Riyadh and that Iraqi troops were nowhere to be found massing in the desert. The editors asked two former Defense Intelligence Agency analysts to examine the photos. They, too, were surprised that the pictures showed American jets arrayed on the Saudi Arabian border but no troops at all on the Kuwaiti border.

Peter Zimmerman, a satellite expert at George Washington University, said, "We could see clearly the main road leading right through Kuwait, south to Saudi Arabia, but it was covered with sand banks from the wind and it was clear that no army had moved over it. We could see empty barracks where you would have expected these thousands of troops to be billeted, but they were deserted as well."

Then a strange thing happened. Major news organizations, including Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, and ABC, perused the photos but decided not to publish a story that would contradict the government’s information. The Iraqi military buildup, which did not exist, was Bush’s justification for dispatching troops, yet the American media refused to expose the government’s lie. The only honest American journalists were in St. Petersburg, Florida.

SNIP...

The alleged Pentagon satellite photos are still classified.

CONTINUED...

http://www.new-enlightenment.com/like_son.htm

[Octafish]

49. Selection 2000 Shreds US Constitution

Long ago, a DUer wrote: "You don't steal elections to do good things." How true and how profound. Here' what Vince Bugliosi wrote on the subject in The Nation:

NONE DARE CALL IT TREASON

EXCERPT...

The lack of any valid legal basis for their decision and, most important, the fact that it is inconceivable they would have ruled the way they did for Gore, proves, on its face, that the five conservative Republican Justices were up to no good. Therefore, not one stitch of circumstantial evidence beyond this is really necessary to demonstrate their felonious conduct and state of mind. (The fact that O'Connor, per the Wall Street Journal, said before the election that she wanted to retire but did not want to do so if a Democrat would be selecting her successor, that Thomas's wife is working for the conservative Heritage Foundation to help handle the Bush transition and that Scalia's two sons work for law firms representing Bush is all unneeded trivia. We already know, without this, exactly what happened.) But for those who want more, let me point out that there is no surer way to find out what parties meant than to see what they have done. And like typical criminals, the felonious five left their incriminating fingerprints everywhere, showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt on their part.

SNIP...

As Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in opposing the stay, Bush "failed to carry the heavy burden" of showing a likelihood of irreparable harm if the recount continued. In other words, the Court never even had the legal right to grant the stay. "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm," Stevens said. "On the other hand, there is a danger that a stay may cause irreparable harm to the respondent and, more importantly, the public at large because of the risk that the entry of the stay would be tantamount to a decision on the merits in favor of the applicant. Preventing the recount from being completed will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election." Stevens added what even the felonious five knew but decided to ignore: that it is a "basic principle inherent in our Constitution that every legal vote should be counted." From the wrongful granting of the stay alone, the handwriting was on the wall. Gore was about as safe as a cow in a Chicago stockyard.

SNIP...

What could be more infuriating than Chief Justice Rehnquist, who knew he was setting up a straw man as counterfeit as the decision he supported, writing that the recount "could not possibly be completed" in the two hours remaining on December 12? The Supreme Court improperly stops the recounting of the votes from Saturday afternoon to Tuesday, December 12, at 10 pm, then has the barefaced audacity to say that Gore ran out of time? This type of maddening sophistry is enough, as the expression goes, to piss off a saint. How dare these five pompous asses do what they did?

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20010205&c=1&s=bugliosi

BTW: Here's an excellent resource, chock full o' links on how Bush's govmint of traitors has used the last four years to shred the Constitution of the United States...

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/articlesrepublic

[Octafish]

53. Tax Cuts for Ultra Rich

With tax cuts and illegal wars and a balance of trade that would make Mao blush, the Little Turd from Crawford is taking the entire country down the crapper with him. The reason? Chimpageddon -- America declares bankruptcy on its debt, what remains of the middle class is penured and forced to sell homes pennies on the dollar, and the richie riches of the world become the super rich ruling class. Voila! The New Feudalism. Read, while there's still time, what the crazy monkey is doing to us...

Stroke the rich

IRS has become a subsidy system for super-wealthy Americans

IRS winks at rich deadbeats

David Cay Johnston
Sunday, April 11, 2004

The federal tax system that millions of Americans are forced to deal with before April 15 is not at all what you think it is. Congress has changed it in recent decades from a progressive system in which the more one earns the more one pays in income taxes. It has become a subsidy system for the super rich.

Through explicit policies, as well as tax laws never reported in the news, Congress now literally takes money from those making $30,000 to $500,000 per year and funnels it in subtle ways to the super rich -- the top 1/100th of 1 percent of Americans.

People making $60,000 paid a larger share of their 2001 income in federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes than a family making $25 million, the latest Internal Revenue Service data show. And in income taxes alone, people making $400,000 paid a larger share of their incomes than the 7,000 households who made $10 million or more.

While millions of Americans in the last quarter-century debated about who shot J.R. and scurried for news about who would be Jennifer Lopez's next lover, Congress quietly passed tax laws that shift the tax burden from the 28,000 Americans in households with incomes of $8 million per year or more.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/11/INGV560VO41.DTL

What does it mean for the future? Well one smart former GOP theorist says somethings gonnna happen...

The Politics of Rich and Poor--Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath

Kevin Phillips
262 pp., Random House, 1990

Brett Crow
Mathematics
Eastern Montana College

As the debate over the U.S. budget raged in Washington during the autumn of 1990 and repeatedly stuck on the point of how to distribute tax increases, scarcely a week went by when the difference between poor, middle class, and wealthy Americans was not a media topic. If you happened to wonder why this particular topic was suddenly so important, author Kevin Phillips has the answer and a great deal more in his latest book, The Politics of Rich and Poor--Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. Phillips, an author with extensive experience in broadcast and print media and in the political arena (as chief political analyst for the 1968 Republican presidential campaign) has done an excellent job of analyzing the national and international economic effects of decisions made during the Reagan presidency and of charting their historical roots. If anything, "aftermath" is too mild a term to describe these changes, even given their historical precedents.

The Politics of Rich and Poor is a well-written, extensively documented, and easily understood portrayal of fundamental changes in the internal financial make-up and external standing of the United States due to political decisions made during the Reagan years. Phillips has provided both hard data and anecdotal evidence to confirm what many may not know or have perhaps only suspected. Internally, wealth has become more and more concentrated at the upper end of the economic spectrum, especially for the wealthiest one percent or so of U.S. taxpayers, while middle and lower income Americans now hold a much smaller share of the nation's total wealth. Externally, the United States has become a net debtor nation for the first time since World War I and has first mortgaged, then sold large amounts of the nation's assets to foreign investors. The net effect is that for most measures of wealth from the individual level (say, the number of billionaires per capita relative to total population) to the international level (like international bank assets) the United States has surrendered its position of economic leadership while decreasing the economic opportunities of most of its own citizens.

Phillips does an excellent job of tracing these developments through the web of changes in fiscal and monetary policy implemented during the 1980s, both in terms of economic principles and in terms of specific results. Some readers may find the wealth of economic statistics excessive, although Phillips has chosen his data well, presenting data sufficient to make and defend his main points. The numerous tables, charts, and graphs are clear and uncluttered, even occasionally stunning when one considers the magnitude of change wrought in the span of a decade. Phillips exposes the flaws in opposing or apparently contradictory economic information, without being an apologist or an advocate of the political decisions themselves. Liberally oriented readers expecting an evaluation of the moral implications of Reagan's economic policies will be disappointed as will conservatives expecting to read about the obvious benefits of those same policies.

Yet the strongest feature of the book is not the economic analysis, but Phillips's comparison of the Reagan years to the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century and to the Roaring Twenties, two previous episodes of what he terms "heyday capitalism." these times have all been characterized by Republican administrations which have emphasized a reduced governmental role, tax reductions, and the reduction of inflation through tight monetary policy. They have also seen, as direct results, large scale economic restructuring, increases in debt and speculation, labor unrest, and the production of a two-tier economy with great wealth concentration. Most worrisome to the thoughtful reader, though, is that these periods have then ended in what Phillips terms a "speculative implosion," as one or more economic events precipitate a dramatic reversal. Part of Phillips's emphasis is that we may again be on the verge of such a reversal, given the appropriate economic impetus (a thought which makes the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the potential recession loom even larger).

The second part of Phillips's thesis is that such economic reversals bring with them similar reversals in the political thinking and voting of the American public, as the Republican administrations and policies are blamed for the economic changes. Phillips believes that the United States is on the verge of such a political reversal, lacking only an economic catalyst and an effective Democratic attack. He makes it quite clear that avoiding this problem presents a challenge to the Bush administration, one known to the Republican strategists and the President. (In fact, he sees the President's 1988 campaign slogan of "a kinder, gentler nation" as a strategy specifically designed to get around mounting public awareness about the concentration of American wealth. Had Michael Dukakis been willing and able to attack this Republican weak spot, the 1988 election might have ended quite differently.) Left unanswered, however, is the question of why the Democratic party at large has not mounted a full-scale assault. Is there such disarray within the Democratic ranks that the forces cannot be gathered, or perhaps such costs or benefits to leading Democratic politicians that the desire to conduct such an attack does not exist?

CONTINUED...

http://mtprof.msun.edu/Win1991/polrev.html

[Octafish]

54. Criminal Justice Department

Something's been very wrong with Justice since 22 November 1963. Unfortunately, Corporate McPravda has no interest in History or the Truth. So, to do the presstitutes' work for them, let's look back from the present. Here's a more-modern rundown.

Misconduct by FBI and other Justice Department employees that repeatedly blocked efforts to halt terrorist and other criminal activities

These include, for instance:

* Misconduct related to suitcase nuclear bombs. Retaliation against a counter-terrorism expert who was seeking to report to the Defense Department information about Russian suitcase nuclear bombs being smuggled from Russian arsenals and sold to terrorists groups. The FBI retaliation halted the efforts to determine the logistics of the smuggling operation and blocked efforts to determine what terrorist groups had already received the suitcase nuclear devices. Thee retaliation also halted efforts to discover the traitors in the FBI that provided highly sensitive information to Russia's KGB and which resulted in several US sources being assassinated. (Details in E-book format of Drugging America.)

* Halting efforts by multi-agency task force targeting terrorists who subsequently bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. By filing sham criminal charges against the respected head of a multi-agency drug task force, Justice Department prosecutors halted the efforts focusing on the drug money sources for the Jersey City terrorists who subsequently bombed the World Trade Center (and of others who escaped and played a role in planning to place bombs on 11 U.S. airliners and later became involved in the September 11, 2001, scheme). (Details in third edition of Defrauding America.)

* Acted in a manner that caused dozens of surface-to-air missiles to be acquired by terrorist groups. These missiles were offered to the United States at no cost in 1995 by Afghan General Rashid Dostum. The FBI-CIA personnel involved in the Los Angeles meetings refused the offer, which (a) made the missiles available to terrorist groups, and (b) forfeited the opportunity to engage General Dostum in efforts against Al Qaeda operating in Afghanistan.

* Filed false charges against an FBI agent  when the agent continued to report drug smuggling into the United States by the CIA acting with organized crime. That highly decorated Vietnam War veteran was one of many who fought for his country and then had his life destroyed by corrupt Justice Department officials. (Details in Defrauding America and Drugging America.)

* Retaliated against former federal air safety inspector for attempting to report criminal and subversive activities that must be reported under the federal crime reporting statute, Title 18 U.S.C. § 4. Justice Department prosecutors, in unison with federal judges (who were also heavily implicated in blocking the reports) charged Rodney Stich with criminal contempt of court when Stich filed papers in the U.S. district court at Sacramento, California, seeking to report the criminal activities. Details in third edition of Defrauding America, and in various links within this Internet site.

* Blocked a counter-terrorism expert, who had personal contacts in Russia and Lithuania, from exposing FBI and CIA agents working secretly for Russia. (Details in the E-book format of Drugging America.)

* Filing false charges against undercover agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency for preparing an affidavit showing how the bomb was placed on board Pan Am Flight 103 that exploded over Lockerbie, the people who actually placed the bomb on board, and why the bomb was placed. (Details in third edition of Defrauding America.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.defraudingamerica.com/witness_list.html

BTW: The website's chock full o' info-n-links.

[bobthedrummer]

55. Blowback from the J. Edgar Hoover daze

communications with CIA were merely formal, everything else virtually prohibited by Hoover.

[Octafish]

58. Frank Costello's buddy at the track...

... remember what Anthony Summers wrote: The mob had Hoover in their back pocket with those photos of Jedgar and Clyde in flagrante delicto. Seems James Jesus Angleton had glossy copies, as well. Must've been a hoot at parties..."Cock tales, anyone?"

Bob: Have you read Joseph Trento's "Secret History of the CIA"? the author interviewed Angleton and several other old-guard spooks. Many of whom left their papers to the guy after they passed. What's most shocking is how easily Dulles and the Wall Street crowd made friends with the slimiest NAZIs and then did all they could to hide the fact that they had been compromised by the COMMIES who knew about the NAZIs.

Stanislaw Lem, the author of "Solaris," also wrote "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub." Set in the future, a space probe brings back a virus that wipes out paper on the earth. The only files left are buried deep within the seventh-generation Pentagon and the (Soviet's) seventh-generation Kremlin. The story follows a guy who sets out to a meeting with someone down inside one of the facilities. It's not clear if he ever finds the person, but it is revealed that everyone working in our Pentagon really was a spy for the commies and everyone working in the Kremlin was really a spy for our side.

It probably is not too far from the truth.

[seemslikeadream]

60. hey buddy here's some cookies and milk for ya,

You've been working so hard!



Flies all green and buzzin’
In this dungeon of despair
Prisoners grumblin
Piss they clothes
Scratch their matted hair
A tiny light from a window-hole
Hundred yards away
That all they ever get to know
’bout the regular life in the day
’bout the regular life in the day

Slime and rot and rats and snuck
Vomit on the floor
Fifty ugly soldier men
Holdin’ spears by the iron door
Stinks so bad, stones are chokin’
Weepin’ greenish drops
In the den where
The giant fire puffer woiks
And the torture never stops
The torture never stops, torture
The torture never stops
The torture never stops

Flies all green and buzzin’
In this dungeon of despair
An evil prince eats a steamin’ pig
In a tumbers right near there
In the chambers right near there
He eats de snouts an trotters first!
The loins and the groins are then dispersed
His carvin style is well rehearsed
He stands and shouts
All men be cursed (4x)
And disagree it, well no one durst
He the best of cause of all the woist
Best of cause of all the woist

He stinks so bad his stones been chokin’
Weepin’ greenish drops
In the room with the iron maiden
And the torture never stops, torture
Torture never stops
Torture never stops, torture
Torture never stops

Flies all green and buzzin’
In dungeon of despair
Who are’ll those people
That is shut away down there
Are they crazy
Are they sainted
Are they heroes someone painted
Someone painted
Are they -isms
Later ornated
Once they come they have been tainted
Once they come they have been tainted
Never been explained
Since at first it was created
But a dungeon and his kin’
Require naught but lockin’ in
Of any anything thats been
Could be a her but it’s probly a him
Could be a her but it’s probly a him
Its what’s the deal were dealin’ in
Its what’s the deal were dealin’ in
An he stinks so bad it’s hurt
To the pearl and the piles of blast
Any dungeon have a trailer
Were the torture never stops, torture
Torture never stops
Torture never stops, torture
Torture never stops
Torture never stops, talkin’ to you
Torture never stops

Frank zappa

[Octafish]

66. Thanks, seemslikeadream! My favorite foods!

Dear Mr. Fantasy

Dear Mister Fantasy play us a tune
Something to make us all happy
Do anything take us out of this gloom
Sing a song, play guitar
Make it snappy
You are the one who can make us all laugh
But doing that you break out in tears
Please don't be sad if it was a straight mind you had
We wouldn't have known you all these years

-- Traffic

[bobthedrummer]

61. Yes, I read Trento's book and btw we preferred the subtitled "Solaris"

[Octafish]

63. Tarkovsky rules the cinematic universe layer.

The original, of course.

[bobthedrummer]

64. Excellent work, surreal at times as well as COSMIC!

[Octafish]

56. Suicidal Environmental Policy

BFEE Final Solution: Environmental Degradation

Through their enablers, the Bush Organized Crime Family, the Fourth Reich plans to implement their Final Solution. It will not come through a militaristic or police-state holocaust, but through the subtle and “natural” means of environmental degradation.

Consider the planet is quickly becoming uninhabitable. The oceans are dying, fishing stocks are 90-percent depleted. Arable farmlands are depleted through urbanization and over-use. The planet’s rainforests are being destroyed. Clean water is becoming a rarity for the majority of the earth’s people. Global Warming only makes things worse, meaning disaster unimagined awaits. And all this is happening within OUR lifetimes.

This is no joke. We must ask ourselves “Why?” would the modern neo-conservative hold the socio-economic perspective of Darwinism? The answer: To rid them of their enemies: Political, Social, and Military. And save the earth’s dwindling life-support capabilities for themselves.

Just like George Herbert Walker Bush and his Dim Son — Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini wanted Total and Absolute Power. Consider how the fascist leaders in World War 2 worked to destroy their enemies. They applied the day's manpower, science and technology through direct violence and were opposed and defeated by a united humanity.

As wars declared and undeclared haven’t worked for fascism, it seems today's Fourth Reich is trying something new. This approach is a governmental policy of sustained environmental degradation.

Their environmental destruction plan works across cultural and physical borders of the third-, second-, and first-worlds. And like the frog in slowly boiling water, most people will not notice until it is too late to do something about it.

So, one all-too-soon day, the earth won’t be able to sustain humanity. And the vast majority will die out. Being a fascistic model, not everbody will suffer. The GOP-NAZI-Secret Government and Ruling Elite will find security in their sancturaries in Paraguay or the Swiss Alps and in their underground and secret facilities around the world.

The unfortunate Outsiders — the world’s Untermenschen and the “unwashed masses" and the intellectuals and Liberals and those who are True Democrats who believe that “All men are created equal” — they will be left to fend for themselves for the diminishing scraps of water, food and air. In the process, the neo-fascists hope the survivors manage to take each other’s lives.

Only after the mass of humanity is gone will the BFEE-NAZI-GOP-CIA-MI-Complex-Mafia Super Elite emerge from their secure luxury survival condominiums and secret redoubts in Paraguay and Switzerland to re-inhabit the earth, like modern Adamants and Evabrauns. They’ll join in ruling the earth their brethren, the cockroaches. May they all choke along the way.

— Octafish

For those interested in science more than angry 8-Yu:

STUDY FINDS EARTH’S ECOSYSTEM ON VERGE OF SUDDEN COLLAPSE

from “Nature” — October 11, 2001

(The following is a summary of news reports about the study published on October 11, 2001 in the journal NATURE, followed by the complete text of the NATURE article <“Catastrophic Shifts In Ecosystems,” Marten Scheffer, Steve Carpenter, Jonathan A. Foley, Carl Folke, and Brian Walker, NATURE #413, 10/11/01, pp. 591-596>. Links to sources provided at end.)

A shocking and groundbreaking new scientific study by an international consortium of scientists has concluded that humanity’s assault on the environment has left many ecosystems — from coral reefs and tropical forests to lakes and coastal waters — in such a fragile state that the slightest disturbance, from a dry spell to a fire or flood, may push them into a catastrophic collapse.

The study, published in the prestigious journal NATURE, found that human impacts on many of the world’s ecosystems could cause them to abruptly shift with little or no warning from their apparently stable natural condition to very different, diminished conditions far less able to support diversity of life, including human.

“Models have predicted this, but only in recent years has enough evidence accumulated to tell us that resilience of many important ecosystems has become undermined to the point that even the slightest disturbance can make them collapse,” said Marten Scheffer, an ecologist at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study.

Conventional scientific and conservation thinking has been that ecosystems such as lakes, oceans, coral reefs, woodlands or deserts respond slowly and steadily to climate change, nutrient pollution, habitat degradation and other human environmental impacts. But the new study shatters this paradigm, finding instead that, after decades of continuous change imposed by human activity, many of the world’s natural ecosystems are now susceptible to sudden catastrophic change. In dramatic contrast to conventional environmental thinking, the investigators paint a picture of unexpectedly sudden, drastic switches of state, from lush, lake-dotted forests teeming with plants and animals to scorching, parched deserts devoid of all but the hardiest of lifeforms, for example.

http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/ecosystm.htm

My question: Why would Bush INTENTIONALLY want to hasten the collapse of the ecoysystem? Duh! Same reason he started an illegal war... It's what NAZIs do..

[Octafish]

59. ENRON Energy Policy

Seems Bush and Cheney did all they could to help ENRON, even if it meant bankrupting the State of California and millions of its residents. But, that's not the worst of it. Seems Smirk-n-Sneer even started a war or two for their old fiend Kenny Boy Lay...


Enron: What Dick Cheney Knew

by John Nichols

In the spring of 2001 the severity of the California energy emergency had inspired demands for government action, and Enron had a problem. Officials in California were arguing that federal price caps on wholesale energy sales would prevent profiteering and stabilize wildly fluctuating energy markets, and even some Republicans were saying that caps made sense. But the caps would cost Enron--which had come to dominate energy markets by taking advantage of deregulation--a fortune.

Enron CEO Kenneth Lay knew he needed high-level help. So he arranged to meet with a man who had headed a corporation with extensive business ties to Enron and who had been a prime recipient of Enron's political largesse. Vice President Dick Cheney cleared his calendar for an April 17 private meeting with Lay regarding what aides described as "energy policy matters" and "the energy crisis in California." At the meeting Lay handed Cheney a memo that read in part: "The administration should reject any attempt to re-regulate wholesale power markets by adopting price caps...."

The day after he met with Lay, Cheney gave a rare phone interview to the Los Angeles Times that had one recurrent theme: Price caps were out of the question. Dismissing the strategy as "short-term political relief for the politicians," Cheney bluntly declared, "I don't see that as a possibility."

Cheney's prognosis was flawed; within days, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission agreed to price caps and the markets calmed down. But Cheney was undeterred in his drive to deliver for Enron. The Houston-based firm enjoyed a level of vice-presidential attention during the Bush/Cheney team's first year that included explicit support of Enron's choices for key regulatory positions, intervention in the affairs of a foreign government and the structuring of an energy policy task force to allow Enron and other corporations to effectively set policy. Indeed, so close was the Cheney-Enron relationship that it is entirely reasonable to ask whether ethical and legal lines were crossed. That possibility offers the most realistic explanation for Cheney's refusal to disclose details of his Enron contacts to Congress. "Cheney says he is refusing to provide information to the Congress as a matter of principle. He told the Today show that he wants to 'protect the ability of the President and the Vice President to get unvarnished information advice from any source we want,'" notes former White House counsel John Dean. "That sounds all too familiar to me. I worked for Richard Nixon."

Less than ten days after he became Vice President--promising that a Bush/Cheney Administration would "restore decency and integrity to the Oval Office"--Cheney took charge of the Administration's energy policy task force, the National Energy Policy Development Group. No initiative interested Enron more, and Cheney welcomed the company's active participation in its deliberations. Cheney was hardly a stranger to the company. He had chaired Halliburton, a Texas-based oil services and construction conglomerate whose subsidiary, Brown & Root, helped build Houston's Enron Field, and his return to politics--after he selected himself to be Bush's running mate--benefited from Enron-linked contributions that paid for the Bush/Cheney campaign, the Florida recount fight fund and the inauguration. Cheney and his aides met at least six times with Lay and other Enron officials while preparing the group's report, which is the basis for the Administration's energy policy proposals. Additionally, Cheney's staff met with an Enron-sponsored lobbying organization, the "Clean Power Group."

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=20020415&s=nichols

[Octafish]

62. 9-11 Criminal Negligence, at best; Treason, most likely

No matter what Condescenda or Smirk say, BUSH KNEW 9-11 WAS COMING. Bush ignored warnings from:

Outgoing President Bill Clinton
Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger
Counterterror Chief Richard Clarke
Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet
more than a few Generals and topshelf, longtime NSC staffers...

And while the Little Turd from Crawford was clearing "bush" from the ranch in August 2001, he ignoresda report titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.

” A month later, 3,000 innocent people are murdered.

Well, he knew it was coming. Here, in the form of stories from the G8 summit where the smirking coward from Crawford was too frightened to sleep in a hotel so he slept off his hangovers aboard a US warship offshore -- This is PROOF BUSH KNEW:

Published on Wednesday, July 11, 2001 in the Guardian of London

G-8 Meets in Genoa July 20-22
Missiles to Protect Summit Leaders

by Rory Carroll in Rome
 
Italy has installed a missile defense system at Genoa's airport to deter airborne attacks during next week's G8 summit, fueling hysteria about looming violence.

A land-based battery of rockets with a range of nine miles and an altitude of 5,000 feet has been positioned in the latest security measure against perceived threats from terrorists and protesters.

Unidentified planes, helicopters and balloons risk being shot down should they drift too close to the heads of state from the group of seven leading industrialized nations and Russia.

Colonel Alberto Battaglini, of the ministry of defense, said the precaution was not excessive. "The measure, which was planned by the previous government, may seem open to criticism, but in reality it is merely to act as a deterrent against any aerial incursion during the summit.

"They are little missiles ... which only have a deterrent function to discourage any aerial-led attack and they do not present any danger to the residents of the city," he said.

SNIP...

The millionaire terrorist, Osama bin Laden, has been linked to an alleged plot to assassinate the US president, George Bush.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0711-04.htm

Genoa braces for G8 summit

July 18, 2001 Posted: 6:29 AM EDT (1029 GMT)

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Italian security forces are on heightened alert after a bomb attack in Genoa, where the world's top leaders are to gather for the latest G8 meeting of industrialised nations.

SNIP...

Police will be fully equipped with riot gear and armed with live and rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannon and batons during the summit this weekend. Army and navy personnel will also be on call, as will snipers, bomb disposal units and armoured vehicles.

The Italian authorities' security measures also include the positioning of surface-to-air missiles at Genoa's Christopher Columbus airport. Dubbed the SPADA, the land-based system consists of missiles capable of a range of 15 kilometres (9.3 miles).

The ministry said the decision to install the missiles is not excessive.

"There's no excessive precaution," military spokesman Colonel Alberto Battaglini told Reuters. "The measure, which was planned by the previous government, may seem open to criticism, but in reality it is merely to act as a deterrent against any aerial incursion during the summit."

CONTINUED...

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/07/17/genoa.security/


Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

By James Hatfield

Editor's note: In light of last week's horrific events and the Bush administration's reaction to them, we are reprising the following from the last column Jim Hatfield wrote for Online Journal prior to his tragic death on July 18:

July 3, 2001—There may be fireworks in Genoa, Italy, this month, too.

A plot by Saudi master terrorist, Osama bin Laden, to assassinate Dubya during the July 20 economic summit of world leaders, was uncovered after dozens of suspected Islamic militants linked to bin Laden's international terror network were arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, and Milan, Italy, in April.

German intelligence services have stated that bin Laden is covertly financing neo-Nazi skinhead groups throughout Europe to launch another terrorist attack at a high-profile American target—his first since the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen last October.

According to counter-terrorism experts quoted in Germany's largest newspaper, the attack on Dubya might be a James Bond-like aerial strike in the form of remote-controlled airplanes packed with plastic explosives.

Why would Osama bi Laden want to kill, Dubya, his former business partner?

CONTINUED...

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html

[Octafish]

71. Illegal Iraq Invasion

A picture really is worth a thousand words...



From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum: This image depicts Hitler as the Anti-Christ. In Christian prophetic literature, the Anti-Christ—the terrible enemy of Jesus and mankind—was expected to appear before the end of the world and lead Satan’s forces in the final struggle between good and evil. In writings dating back to ancient Rome, the figure was often identified with a particular individual. Here (artist Arthur) Szyk portrays Hitler as the personification of evil, under whose twisted cross Jews and non-Jews are enslaved and murdered. While many of Szyk’s ideas and messages are visual, there are two sentences in the illustration. The dictator’s hair hides the Latin phrase, Væ victis—Woe to the Vanquished. The banner in the top left-hand corner reads, “Today Europe, Tomorrow the World.”

http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/szyk/wartime/93866.htm

Smirk, Sneer, Tenet and most of “the bureaucracy” made a case for going to war, stating there are clear-cut connections between 9-11 and Saddam Hussein, who planned to use his arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons on America. The only bioweapon used on America was Anthrax that came from a US Army lab grown from a batch of the University of Iowa Strain. Now, it's a crime to attack an innocent nation. That's what Hitler and all the other Anti-Christs throughout history have done.

9/11 and US-Led Neo-Fascism

by Ed Rippy

www.globalresearch.ca 17 August 2003

The "War on Terrorism" and legislation such as the "PATRIOT" Act are the latest phase of a plan for US-led global neo-fascism which has been in the works for decades at least. Powerful elements in the US government wanted to take over Afghanistan and the surrounding area, with its oil, natural gas, minerals, and opium, to further worldwide US military and economic dominance. The terrorist attacks on 9/11/01 are reminiscent of previous "arranged" attacks including the Boston Massacre, Pearl Harbor, and the Gulf of Tonkin "incident."

Of course, this is not the "classic" fascism of the 1930s; history never repeats itself exactly. There is no need for the Brown Shirts and the Black Shirts of the ‘30s, since there is no longer any strong Communist movement to defeat. Overt racism is out these days; "Islamic fundamentalists" (patiently built up by the US and allies) fill the bill now. But the essential elements (as identified by Prof. Bertram Gross1) of big business-big government cooperation, authoritarianism, and militarism are still there.

Powerful elements in US business, political, and military circles have wanted a global fascist order for a long time. (For example, in the mid-1930s, vice-president of General Motors Graeme K. Howard wrote a book titled America and a New World Order.) IBM, ITT, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford, General Motors, The Chase Bank, the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank/Citigroup), and other US businesses and banks funded Hitler before and during World War II.2 (Prescott Bush, G. W. Bush’s grandfather, funneled money to the Nazis from New York.3) They also supplied trucks, oil, aircraft engines, communications equipment, transportation, and propaganda to the fascist powers.

Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, who later became head of the CIA and Secretary of State respectively, were heavily involved in this collaboration. Some of these fascists actually plotted a military coup against President Roosevelt, but it was discovered.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/RIP308A.html

[Octafish]

72. Paperless Selection 2004

Gee. In the states there's a paper trail, the exit polls match the machine totals. In no-paper trail states, the final tallies do not match the machine totals. Go figure.

Big Media's Democracy Double Standards

By Robert Parry
November 23, 2004

The Washington Post and other leading American newspapers are up in arms about the legitimacy of a presidential election where exit polls showed the challenger winning but where the incumbent party came out on top, amid complaints about heavy-handed election-day tactics and possibly rigged vote tallies.

In a lead editorial, the Post cited the divergent exit polls, along with voter claims about ballot irregularities, as prime reasons for overturning the official results. For its part, the New York Times cited reports of “suspiciously, even fantastically, high turnouts in regions that supported” the government candidate. The U.S. news media is making clear that the truth about these electoral anomalies must be told.

Of course, the election in question occurred in the Ukraine.

In the United States – where exit polls showed John Kerry winning on Nov. 2, where Republican tactics discouraged African-American voting in Democratic precincts, and where George W. Bush’s vote totals in many counties were eyebrow-raising – the Post, the Times and other top news outlets mocked anyone who questioned the results.

For instance, when we noted Bush’s surprising performance in Dade, Broward and other Florida counties, a Washington Post article termed us “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists.” Meanwhile, the New York Times accepted unsupported explanations for why the U.S. exit polls were so wrong, including the theory that Kerry supporters were chattier than Bush voters.

CONTINUED wid da links...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/112304.html

This also makes good reading...

http://www.votefraud.org/

[hannah]

5. bfee

I believe all of it. I only have one wish, Please someone expose the vast right wing conspiracy. And if the Bfee is guilty of crimes, they should serve time, or at least one should be impeached and the other Gov run out of office. And what about the Carlyle
group?

[Octafish]

7. Richard Mellon Scaife: BFEE Moneybag

Scaife: Funding Father of the Right

By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1
First of two articles

One August day in 1994, while gossiping about politics over lunch on Nantucket, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh billionaire and patron of conservative causes, made a prediction. "We're going to get Clinton," Joan Bingham, a New York publisher present at the lunch, remembers him saying. "And you'll be much happier," he said to Bingham and another Democrat at the table, "because Al Gore will be president."

Bingham was startled at the time, but in the years since – as Clinton has struggled with an onslaught from political enemies – Scaife's assertion came to seem less and less far-fetched.

Scaife did get involved in numerous anti-Clinton activities. He gave $2.3 million to the American Spectator magazine to dig up dirt on Clinton and supported other conservative groups that harassed the president and his administration. The White House and its allies responded by fingering Scaife as the central figure in "a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president," as Hillary Rodham Clinton described it. James Carville, Clinton's former campaign aide and rabid defender, called Scaife "the archconservative godfather in heavily funded war against the president."

But people who know him well say that although Scaife is fond of conspiracy theories of many kinds, he is incapable of managing any sort of grand conspiracy himself. And months of reporting produced no evidence of his orchestrating any effort to "get" Clinton beyond his financial support. Indeed, focusing on his role in the crusade against Clinton can obscure the 66-year-old philanthropist's real importance, which is not based on his opposition or support for any individual politicians (though he once gave Richard M. Nixon $1 million). His biggest contribution has been to help fund the creation of the modern conservative movement in America.

By compiling a computerized record of nearly all his contributions over the last four decades, The Washington Post found that Scaife and his family's charitable entities have given at least $340 million to conservative causes and institutions – about $620 million in current dollars, adjusted for inflation. The total of Scaife's giving – to conservatives as well as many other beneficiaries – exceeds $600 million, or $1.4 billion in current dollars, much more than any previous estimate.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaifemain050299.htm

RESOURCES...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/scaife050299.htm

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, hannah! Spread the word and take good care! America needs more like you.

[Octafish]

14. Carlyle Group - Where Policymakers Pocket the Profits

A most disgusting group, demonstrating that corruption is bi-partisan and the cultural norm in Washington, DC. You should see people's jaws drop when they find out that bin Laden and Poppy and W were in business on 9-11. Bonus points for freaking them out by bringing up James R Bath...


Carlyle's way

Making a mint inside "the iron triangle" of defense, government, and industry.

January 8, 2002

EXCERPT...

Perhaps even more disconcerting than Carlyle's ties to the Pentagon are its connections within the White House itself. Aside from signing up George Bush Sr. shortly after his presidential term ended, Carlyle gave George W. Bush a job on the board of Texas-based airline food caterer Caterair International back in 1991. Since Bush the younger took office this year, a number of events have raised eyebrows.

Shortly after George W. Bush was sworn in as president, he broke off talks with North Korea regarding long-range ballistic missiles, claiming there was no way to ensure North Korea would comply with any guidelines that were developed. The news came as a shock to South Korean officials, who had spent years negotiating with the North, assisted by the Clinton administration. By June, Mr. Bush had reopened negotiations with North Korea, but only at the urging of his own father. According to reports, the former president sent his son a memo persuasively arguing the need to work with the North Korean government. It was the first time the nation had seen the influence of the father on the son in office.

But what has been overlooked was Carlyle's business interest in Korea. The senior Bush had spearheaded the group's successful entrance into the South Korean market, paving the way for buyouts of Korea's KorAm Bank and Mercury, a telecommunications equipment company. For the business to be successful, stability between North and South Korea is critical. And though there is no direct evidence linking the senior Bush's business dealings in Korea with the change in policy, it is the appearance of impropriety that excites the watchdogs. "We are clearly aware that former President Bush has weighed in on policy toward South Korea and we note that U.S. policy changed after those communications," says Peter Eisner, managing director at the Center for Public Integrity, a watchdog group in Washington, D.C., which has an active file on the Carlyle Group. "We know that former President Bush receives remuneration for his work with Carlyle and that he is capable of advising the current president, but how much further it goes, we don't know."

SNIP...

And the controversy is expected only to increase as Carlyle's investments in Saudi Arabia are scrutinized during the war on terrorism. Mr. Eisner says that very little is known about Carlyle's involvements in Saudi Arabia, except that the firm has been making close to $50 million a year training the Saudi Arabian National Guard, troops that are sworn to protect the monarchy. Carlyle also advises the Saudi royal family on the Economic Offset Program, a system that is designed to encourage foreign businesses to open shop in Saudi Arabia and uses re-investment incentives to keep those businesses' proceeds in the country.

But the money flowing out of Saudi Arabia and into the Carlyle Group is of even more interest. Immediately after the September 11 attacks, reports surfaced of Carlyle's involvement with the Saudi Binladin Group, the $5 billion construction business run by Osama's half-brother Bakr. The bin Laden family invested $2 million in the Carlyle Partners II fund, which includes in its portfolio United Defense and other defense and aerospace companies. On October 26, the Carlyle Group severed its relationship with the bin Laden family in what officials termed a mutual decision. Mr. Bush Sr. and Mr. Major have been to Saudi Arabia on behalf of Carlyle as recently as last year, and according to reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently looking into the flow of money from the bin Laden family. Carlyle officials declined to answer any questions regarding their activities in Saudi Arabia.

CONTINUED...

http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=6793&hed=Carlyle's+Way

[Octafish]

15. Before Carlyle, Bushes Siphoned Petrodollars through JAMES R BATH

James R Bath served in the Texas Air National Guard with George W Bush. After they both got grounded on the same day for refusing to take physicals (read "Drug Test"), they found alternate career paths. Bush took the lazy man's way to fame and fortune (follow in Poppy's greasy footsteps), Bath took the middle road of using other people's money to grease his own path. Funny the looks on people's faces who don't know these stories...


THE GW BUSH--OSAMA BIN LADIN CONNECTION

James R. Bath, friend and neighbor of George W. Bush, was used as a cash funnel from Osama bin Laden's rich father, Sheikh bin Laden, to set George W. Bush up in business, according to reputable sources from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The connection between GW Bush, the bin Laden family, and the Bank Commerce Credit International (BCCI) is well documented. The excerpts from the books and news articles are supplemented by the links at the bottom of the page to the cash flow charts of the bin Laden-backed BCCI money which was funneled into the Bush family in return for favors. Just click on the links at the bottom of the page to see the flow charts and use the back and forward keys on the screen to return to this page where you can then access the next flow chart link.

"Bath--who made his fortune by investing money for Mahfouz and another BCCI-connected Saudi, Sheikh bin-Laden--...was an original investor in George Bush Jr.'s oil exploration company..." from The Outlaw Bank, page 229.

"Bath provided financing to George W. Bush, the future president's eldest son, when he went into the oil business..." from False Profits, page 365.

SNIP...

"During George Bush's tenure as CIA director, the agency was allegedly involved in a very curious business deal with James R. Bath, a Texas businessman who is a friend and sometime financial backer of one of Bush's sons (George Bush, Jr.). Bath was also a business associate of Khalid bin Mafouze and an important BCCI insider." from http://www.freerepublic.com/forum.a1000396.htm

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

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

CONTINUED...

http://www.g-vision.com/newsletter/connection.shtml

[kk897]

10. Completely.

Agree.

I was thinking the other day, what if Danny Cassolaro had DU? Would he still be with us? And would we be in the mess we're in today?

Also, don't miss the documentary Horns & Halos.

(And don't get suicided. Or heart attacked.)

My hope is that with this huge number of folks waking up to the truth these days, it won't happen that way any more.

[Carl Brennan]

12. Call me a wishful thinker, but I think that we are giving the

fascists trouble. It's just hard to gauge what it will take via alternative media like the Internet to break through the media lockdown. It looks like BushCo is circling the wagons.

[Octafish]

38. With DU, Danny Casolaro and others wouldn't have been so alone.

The guy was braver than brave. Here's a post on him and a few other researchers into The Octopus.

BFEE Frightens DEM Leadership

Same goes with the American Press. With good reason. Seems all who oppose these turds end up in a bad way.
Here are a few journalists who actually had the guts to investigate the Bush Family Evil Empire:

Daniel “Danny” Casolaro — Researched BCCI and the Inslaw/PROMIS Affair, found that George HW Bush had ties going around the world and back through Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, the October Surprise, Watergate, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs and Dallas. A “suicide.”

http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/91/6/octopus.asp


Abbie Hoffman — Yippie of the 60s turned into an investigative reporter in the 80s, researched and wrote about “October Surprise” allegations involving George HW Bush, Bill Casey and Robert Gates doing a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini to delay the release of the hostages in 1980. The pretty good overview appeared in Playboy in 1992. A “suicide.”

http://www.democracyunbound.com/playboy1088.html


Steve Kangas — Researcher and writer who started “Liberal Resurgent” web site dedicated to naming names like Richard Mellon Scaife and telling the truth about what was happening to America. Wrote the seminal “The Origins of the Overclass” which detailed the role of the CIA in preserving the privileged positions of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. A “suicide.”

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html


Jim Hatifield — Researcher and writer who penned “Fortunate Son,” an unauthorized biography of George W Bush that included allegations of cocaine use, planted by Karl Rove, who knew that Hatfield, an ex-con would be discredited. The last thing Hatfield wrote “Why Would Osama Want to Kill His Ex-Business Partner?” that detailed bin Laden threatening to crash a plane loaded with explosives into the G-8 summit in Genoa Italy in July 2001. Bush slept offshore aboard a US warship and the meeting was guarded by SAMs. A “suicide.”

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html


Mark Lombardi — Artist and researcher who developed “Global Networks” or “Social Network Diagrams” which illustrated and chronicled the relationships between many of our day’s shadiest characters, institutions and treasons. One of his works graphically charted Osama bin Laden, Sheik Salim bin Laden, James R Bath, Texas Gov George W Bush and HARKEN Energy. A “suicide.”

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=1012&page=2


There are many more examples of brave journalists who’ve investigated the Octopus and turned up “suicided.” Sticking together and getting the word out is the only way to stay protected. Spreading the TRUTH about the BFEE is also the only way we’ll ever beat these traitors.



There are others named on the original DU thread:

BFEE Frightens DEM Leadership

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2720808

Thank you for your kind reply, kk897. Much obliged!

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU. Keep one eye open when you go to sleep. There's stuff we gotta watch.

[kk897]

46. Ah, Mark Lombardi...

http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardi.html

Octafish, you might want to take a look at this DU thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=203&topic_id=78323

or this one:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x76758

(the first post recreates a very long and somewhat acrimonious thread that was "accidentally" deleted.)

I myself am working on a Sovereign Citizens angle to the fraud...

Thanks for the welcome, and thanks for posting such great stuff!

[seemslikeadream]

11. The crimes hidden behind "national security" must be prosecuted.

as our friend bobthedrummer would say

Kissinger Watch #5 - 03

Explanatory note regarding legal proceedings sparked by Kissinger’s visit to London

by ICAI

The expected arrival of Henry Kissinger in London to attend a conference on 24 April 2002 sparked several legal proceedings concerning his actions during his tenure as U.S. National Security Advisor and then U.S. Secretary of State in the Nixon administration. Two judges from Spain and France requested permission to question him in connection with cases brought against Augusto Pinochet in their countries. A British activist attempted to have him arrested for crimes allegedly committed in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam some 30 years ago. All of these attempts failed to bring Kissinger before the courts, but some may have nonetheless made progress in other ways.

In particular, the attempt to have Kissinger arrested clarified procedures for initiating a case against him in England, and demonstrated how seriously at least one judge takes the matter. On Monday, 22 April 2002, Peter Tatchell, a British human rights advocate, asked an English court to issue an arrest warrant for Kissinger, who was expected to be in London the coming Wednesday. Judge Nicholas Evans of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, who had issued the first warrant for Pinochet, rejected Tatchell’s application two days later. While this prevented an arrest, the decision, provided below, included several potentially important points:

- Proceedings under the UK’s Geneva Conventions Act 1957 for war crimes committed prior to 1 September 2001 can be instituted only "by or on behalf of the Director of Public Prosecutions".

"… I am satisfied that proceedings can only be instituted by or on behalf of the DPP."

- However, the Court has a right to issue an arrest warrant for such offences, even when the DPP does not intend to bring proceedings. No consent is required from anyone but the judge.

"Thus, in the context of this application, it is within the power of this court to issue a warrant for Mr. Kissinger’s arrest for an offence said to be contrary to section 1 of the 1957 Act even though proceedings for such an offence shall not be instituted except by or on behalf of the DPP."

- The Court left open the possibility of issuing an arrest warrant in the future, if presented with sufficient evidence, even when the DPP refuses to initiate proceedings. It, however, doubted the utility of doing so.

First the Judge rejected the application on the ground that the DPP’s refusal to bring proceedings rendered an arrest useless, even if legal: "…in light of the DDP’s letter…, in which the Director says ‘ I do not intend to institute proceedings for a prosecution in this case’ it would seem quite pointless my issuing a warrant even if I were so minded."

He then explained that he had to refuse the application in this particular instance because he had not been presented with sufficient evidence, yet, importantly, implied that he might have done so had the evidence been adequate: "The material provided by Mr. Tatchell makes generalised allegations and suggests possible sources of potentially admissible evidence. I have serious misgivings concerning Mr. Tatchell’s ability to actually obtain such admissible evidence. I ought not to issue any summons/warrant unless I can draft a suitably precise charge. I can not presently do this on the information provided."

- Furthermore, this Judge recognised the need of victims, witnesses and others for justice in this matter.

"I do not doubt the strength of feeling in him and many others that justice requires that Mr. Kissinger should face the allegations made against him in a court of law."

Understanding these points could facilitate the ability of advocates and victims to bring future proceedings in England under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957, be they against Kissinger or others who have allegedly committed war crimes. It could also spark further research into the consistency of the consent requirement for initiating proceedings with the rights enshrined in the European Convention of human rights, including the right to an effective remedy, among others. Finally, the supportive words of the judge may even strengthen the efforts of those affected by the crimes in question to obtain justice.


OVERVIEW - Kissinger Watch #5

1. 'WAR CRIMES' CLAIMS: Kissinger begins to stoop under the weight of legal scrutiny opinion bears down Pinochet judge leaves the way open for charge against Kissinger Court rejects application to arrest Nixon's right-hand man over covert CIA activities in the 1970's

2. Kissinger admits possible errors on Vietnam

3. Explanatory note regarding legal proceedings sparked by Kissinger’s visit to London

4. APPLICATION FOR A WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF HENRY ALFRED KISSINGER

5. REASONS for refusing the issue of a warrant

6. Why Milosevic, but not Kissinger?

7. Kissinger testimony pleas refused

8. Chile/UK: UK shirks its obligation to cooperate in human rights investigation

9. The government of the United Kingdom DID approve its request to question Henry Kissinger

10. Statement: Regarding the Spanish court’s request to question Mr. Henry Kissinger / J. Garces & M. Murillo

11. Spanish superjudge asks USA for permission to quiz Kissinger


fair use
http://www.icai-online.org/56474,46136.htm




Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Iraqi ambassador pick grilled on hand-over

By Steven Weisman
The New York Times

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee for ambassador to Iraq on Tuesday defended the limits that would be placed on Iraqi self-rule, particularly those on control over security forces, asserting that after June 30 Iraqis will have "a lot more sovereignty than they have right now."
Facing skeptical questions about the new constraints emerging in the long-planned transfer of power before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the nominee, John Negroponte, said he saw his major challenge as trying to avert conflicts if the new Iraqi government objected to U.S. military actions. "These are the kinds of questions that I think our diplomacy is going to have to deal with," said Negroponte, who is now ambassador to the United Nations.
The toughest questions came from Democrats, but all the senators said they would support Negroponte's confirmation, which the committee could approve on Thursday. Senate aides said Negroponte could be confirmed by the full Senate as early as next week.
Negroponte said that any decisions on whether to attack rebel strongholds, as the United States is threatening now in Fallujah and Najaf, would require "great political sensitivity" even though American s will nominally be in charge of such decisions.

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04282004/nation_w/161439.asp


Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Dems Ignore Negroponte's Death Squad Past, Look to Confirm Iraq Appointmen

As Negroponte, responded to Hagel, he was interrupted by an activist, Andres Conteris of Non-violence International.

Andres Conteris, is program director for Latin America and the Caribbean for the human rights group Non-violence International. He disrupted yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on John Negroponte's appointment as US ambassador to Iraq.

As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US covert aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. In a 1995 series, the Baltimore Sun detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 3-16, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

A former official who served under Negroponte says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. During Negroponte's tenure, US military aid to Honduras skyrocketed from $3.9 million to over $77 million. Much of this went to ensure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against popular movements throughout Central America.

http://www.pacifica.org/programs/dn/040428.html


Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq

Negroponte's "embassy" in Baghdad will, according to press reports, constitute the largest US "embassy staff" in the world with some 3000 employees, including up to 1,000 Americans.


Yet according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military.

Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html
In a cruel irony, the Bush administration has appointed a bona fide "terrorist" to wage its "war on terrorism" in Iraq.

It should come as no surprise that "on the day he was appointed to Iraq, Honduras decided to bring its troops in Iraq home." (Financial Times, April 21, 2004)

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=1189


Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors

On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980's." This report was partly declassified on Oct. 22, 1998, in response to demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. Opponents of Negroponte are demanding that all Senators read the full report before voting on his nomination.

Reich, unlike Negroponte, is primarily a lobbyist and anti-Castro activist rather than a diplomat. He is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba and works for some of America's favorite industries: liquor (Bacardi), tobacco (British-American Tobacco), and weapons (Lockheed Martin). He also serves as vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry-backed group characterized by union activists as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.

In the 1980s, he headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit, staffed with CIA and Pentagon psychological warfare specialists, reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to win support for administration policy in Central America. They wrote op-eds under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders and attacked those who differed with Reagan's policies. The Congressional investigation of the Iran-contra scandal identified numerous illegalities which led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.

Reich followed up these activities by serving as ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination.

While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Ironically, he will be overseeing the Helms-Burton Act, which he helped to draft, which the administration has just decided not to carry into effect.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/ROF111A.html


NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?

The widespread use of American aerial surveillance to direct the Contra murderers to villages where only women and children were present to be killed, the routine use of torture, the encouragement of drug-smuggling into the U.S. to provide funding for the U.S.-backed forces all were revealed only after Negroponte had left his post as U.S. Ambassador to the Honduras. And who could forget the Honduran Anti-communist Liberation Army's ever popular practice of dropping victims from helicopters while they were in flight?

Make no mistake about it -- both Iraqi rebels and Al Qaeda terrorists see Negroponte's appointment as the first stage in implementing a policy of covert violence against their right to sovereignty and will effectively use it to recruit and incite radicals to commit more acts of violence against us. It's no coincidence that our Office of Homeland Security issued a heightened security alert just as Bush announced his plans for Negroponte.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04178.html


US Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
October 28, 2003
By TONI SOLO

US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4

In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting. But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality, the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York Times, to that paper's eternal shame.

Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran government with support from the United States administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition, the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while caught up in a violent civil war.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship. Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.

Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.

Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes were made possible because the United States government consistently tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program of regional deceit.

http://www.counterpunch.org/solo10282003.html

[Octafish]

17. Some fine traitors, there. And that's exactly what they are -- TRAITORS!

Americans don't kill innocent people - even in the name of national security. Fascists do that sort of thing to unarmed civilians and even lesser-defended countries, like Ethiopia or Poland. That's also why Grover Norquist can't wait for the last of the "Greatest Generation" to pass on. He doesn't want to be ratted out for the greasy NAZI turds he and the BFEE are.


Some Hateful Ideas
And Their Legacy in the Conservative Right*

Sometimes it only takes a little time for even the most hateful ideas to catch on. With enough power and money‹especially money--the most heinous ideas can become "acceptable" and appear "respectable" to some. Such are the ideas of white male racial superiority and the implied right to power over all others. This includes the additional implied right to "phase out" of existence others who are held to be inferior. These ideas and their underlying rationale were the basis of Hitler's National Socialism. Though Allied Forces put an end to Hitler and his Third Reich over fifty years ago, ideas of Nazism are still very much alive. They are still wreaking pain, suffering, and death on those whom the Powerful decide are unfit to live.

Historically, National Socialism--termed ŒNazism'(1) --was Hitler's Conservative political creed of racial and cultural "purity." It was also a genocidal program of hatred directed specifically against Jews. Hitler's Nazism was based on the twin myths of racial and cultural "purity" of so-called Aryans (the Whites) and the "diseased and dirty" race and culture of so-called non-Aryans (the non-Whites), particularly the Jews. National Socialism became the foundational creed of a genocidal eugenics political program to "cleanse" the world of the "dirty" Jews and their "diseased" cultural influence. Hitler envisioned his Third Reich as the beginning of a New World Order that would put Ayran Whites back in their "natural" place of Superiority and Power over all others. It was also intended to rid the world of those whom he claimed had usurped Aryans of their "rightful" Power and Superior Position in the first place. Aryans had to be put back in to their natural place of superiority over others, Hitler held, because a powerful and deceitful Jewish cabal had over many years conspired through devious financial and cultural manipulation, to displace them.

In Hitler's view, the only real solution to the so-called "Jewish problem" was a Final Solution to rid the world of them, a world that had to be "cleansed" of Jews and their influence. At the end of WWII, the world learned of the efficient machinery of death built and operated by Hitler's SS to do just that. Throughout Europe, millions of Jews and entire populations of other "diseased and dirty" so-called "non-Aryans" were shipped in train cars to multiple concentration camps and murdered.

A Dramatic Shift to the Conservative Right in America

Since the end of WWII, but especially over the last 35 years or so, the political landscape in the U.S. --as well as other parts of the world--has shifted dramatically to the Conservative Right. That shift has largely gone unnoticed by those not old enough or not historically sensitive enough to place the Conservative Right political ideology and agenda in historical perspective. Many do not realize that the inherently racist, homophobic, and misogynist ideology now passed off by some Conservative Right politicians such as George W. Bush as acceptable and even respectable, was part of the reason the U.S. entered WW II. Millions of American soldiers died fighting against that hateful ideology that many on the Conservative Right‹in varying degrees-- are now trumpeting as a kind of "final solution" to socioeconomic and other problems they claim have been created by the U.S. Government and by the "Liberals" of the 1960's.

Certainly, American G.I.s returning from the ravages left by Hitler's Third Reich at the end of WWII probably could not have conceived the possibility that the United States might one day have its own Nazi Party. But in the 1950's, while the world was still coming to terms with the Holocaust and fighting Cold War Communism, George Lincoln Rockwell, born March 9, 1918 in Bloomington, Illinois, was engendering the idea of the American Nazi Party (ANP).

CONTINUED...

http://www.feminista.com/archives/v3n10/estep.html

BTW: Sure am glad there are so many good Americans left, on DU and throughout the country. Also appreciate and am gladdened to know there are so many good people worldwide.

[nolabels]

43. Our buddy Henry again

This link has a whole caste of fun characters :-)

http://www.fpif.org/republicanrule/officials_body.html

The central interloper thru his inter-mediators Mr Henry :crazy:

This thread a while back brings up forgotten memories (man is there something rotten smelling or what?)

Is Henry Kissinger a war criminal, fascist or just misunderstood
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=345935

[seemslikeadream]

94. Kissing up to Kissinger The reporters who loved Henry and what they said.

By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Oct. 4, 2004, at 5:23 PM PT

....

All this love did not go unreciprocated as we now learn: Kissinger instructed his secretaries and aides to secretly listen in on his telephone conversations and take notes. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, transcripts of 3,568 conversations between Kissinger and President Nixon, U.S. politicians, world leaders, ambassadors, Hollywood stars, and a score of journalists are now available at the State Department Electronic Reading Room.
....

The most devoted members of the Kissinger press cult, based on the phone transcripts, were CBS News Chief Diplomatic Correspondent Marvin Kalb, former New York Times Washington editor and columnist James "Scotty" Reston, and Time magazine's Hugh Sidey. But other figures tossed kisses to Kissinger from afar, including political columnist Stewart Alsop, former Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler, William Randolph Hearst Jr., and former Washington Star owner—and soon to be ex-Riggs Bank proprietor—Joseph L. Albritton.

Kalb sends an FTD-sized bouquet down the line to Kissinger on the evening of Sept. 22, 1973, the day he became secretary of state.

… I did wish you well from the bottom of my heart, the wisdom and the grace and the tolerance that are going to be so necessary to success because I very much have the feeling in the long sweep of history perhaps that your tenure is going to prove to be larger than simply something that has to do with diplomacy. There's a human and a psychological component here which has to be vindicated in a major way and I feel that very strongly and I wish you towering good luck.

.....

Marvin Kalb, Nov. 19, 1975:

The only reason for this call was to tell you that despite all appearances to the contrary in this city you still have some friends. I count myself among them. …

I think there is a terrible viciousness around these days. Even if 20 per cent justified, the 80 per cent is not. …

There are a bunch of bastards running around town, not taking anything into account but personal ambitions. They don't think from one day to the next. They have no idea where they want to go—anything malicious is glorified. I was reading the papers. You do have friends around town and I hope that you will stick with the long picture and not the short one.

more
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107745/

:hi: nolabels
seen any clowns lately? hehe

[MsConduct]

13. I still haven't recovered from the document shredding, treasonous,

traitor Oliver North. Which leads to Reagan, with leads to GHW Bush.
Though out history, the rotten apples don't fall too far from the tree. How did they all get away with that one? What Nixon did amounts to toilet papering a house compared to that act of treason.

Just my humble opinion and 2 cents worth.

[Octafish]

39. GOP Judge and Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh: 'FIREWALL'

Walsh said the idea of building a firewall was to shield Ronnie Reagan. Don't think that Pruneface was the only one shielded, the real presnut, for instance: George Herbert Walker Bush.

Firewall: Inside the Iran-Contra Cover-up

By Robert Parry

EXCERPT...

According to Firewall, the cover-up conspiracy took formal shape at a meeting of Reagan and his top advisers in the Situation Room at the White House on Nov. 24, 1986. The meeting's principal point of concern was how to handle the troublesome fact that Reagan had approved illegal arms sales to Iran in fall 1985, before any covert-action finding had been signed. The act was a clear felony -- a violation of the Arms Export Control Act -- and possibly an impeachable offense.

Though virtually everyone at the meeting knew that Reagan had approved those shipments through Israel, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced what would become the cover story. According to Walsh's narrative, Meese "told the group that although McFarlane had informed Shultz of the planned shipment, McFarlane had not informed the president. ...

" Regan, who had heard McFarlane inform the president and who had heard the president admit to Shultz that he knew of the shipment of Hawk missiles, said nothing. Shultz and Weinberger, who had protested the shipment before it took place, said nothing. Bush, who had been told of the shipment in advance by McFarlane, said nothing. Casey, who requested that the president sign the retroactive finding to authorize the CIA-facilitated delivery, said nothing. Poindexter, who had torn up the finding, said nothing. Meese asked whether anyone knew anything else that hadn't been revealed. No one spoke."

When Shultz returned to the State Department, he dictated a note to his aide, Charles Hill, who wrote down that Reagan's men were "rearranging the record." They were trying to protect the president through a "carefully thought out strategy" that would "blame it on Bud" McFarlane.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story34.html



Here's another excellent read on the subject:

The Prosecution Never Rests
The inextinguishable Lawrence Walsh.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Wednesday, June 4, 1997, at 12:30 AM PT

There is no such thing as eternal life in politics--unless, that is, one is lucky enough to secure appointment as an independent counsel. In that case, a lawyer is free to investigate more or less whatever catches his fancy, for as long as he likes, spending as much of the public's money as he deems necessary. The passing of a petty scandal, the resignation of a target, even a change in administrations is no obstacle, as we know from the many barnacle-encrusted investigators still hanging on. Kenneth Starr, who has been poking into Whitewater for three years, is the least of them. One special prosecutor is still deciding whether to prosecute Henry Cisneros, the former housing secretary, for understating payments to an ex-mistress. Another has spent four years trying to nail long-departed Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy for accepting free football tickets from a poultry company. There's even a counsel, holed up somewhere in Washington, who is still on the verge of cracking the Department of Housing and Urban Development scandal, which dates from two administrations and more than 10 years ago.

Independent counsels go on forever because they can--no one has the power to fire them--and because they have strong incentives to do so. An ordinary prosecutor may decide to forgo charges so that he can devote his energies to a case that is more important and easier to win. But, for the independent counsel, there is no other case. Were he to announce that his scandal didn't justify criminal proceedings after all, he would be declaring himself a failure who had wasted the public's time and money. After he returned to his law practice in the sticks, no one would ever hear from him again. Much better to keep digging, declare that indictments are just around the corner, and hold off on releasing that final report just a few months longer.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that combining these structural pressures with the lugubrious personality of Lawrence Walsh was a recipe for zombification. Coming out of semiretirement in Oklahoma City, Judge Walsh was 75 years old when he was handed responsibility for bringing to justice the perpetrators in the Iran-Contra scandal. For an ambitious man who had been frustrated in his career, the appointment was a heaven-sent extra chance, and it appeared at first to be a bit of brilliant casting. In his three-piece suits and high, starched collars, Walsh looked like a 19th century Presbyterian minister, radiating an unflinching, humorless rectitude. He was the perfect foil for Marine cowboy Oliver North. The problem is that the image was too close to reality. Walsh was a maddening plodder and a stickler for detail, with no ability to play politics or work the media. Faced with a public-relations challenge that might have daunted the most seasoned Washington operator, he responded the only way he knew how, by trudging onward. Like a pit bull on Prozac, he clung to the trousers long after the leg was gone.

The leaden account Walsh has produced more than a decade later reflects in microcosm most of the foibles that afflicted his investigation. As a piece of writing, it is repetitive, unfocused, and confusing. It feels like it goes on for seven years. There are no surprises and no original ideas. Walsh's theory of the Iran-Contra scandal--that some members of the Reagan administration tried to do an end run around the Constitution--is not very novel. But rather than presenting his case to the reader, Walsh remains obsessed with the minutiae of what went wrong when he tried to make his case in court. Matters of subdoctoral interest, such as his office's battle for Iranian arms dealer Albert Hakim's Swiss-bank-account records, fill chapter upon chapter. In his litigious thickets, Walsh loses sight of the question of why anyone should still care.

Walsh quite rightly points out that his investigation was undermined at the outset by the congressional Iran-Contra committee's decision to grant immunity to Oliver North and White House National Security Adviser John Poindexter who, along with the conveniently deceased CIA Director William Casey, appear to have been the chief conspirators in the plot. Despite the extraordinary efforts of Walsh and his staff to insulate themselves from the immunized testimony, the unavoidable tainting of the prosecution's case provided a basis for the U.S. Court of Appeals to throw out North's and Poindexter's convictions. Walsh's first mistake, which he acknowledges, was not pitching a fit to try to prevent Congress from granting immunity to the chief protagonists. His second mistake, which he does not acknowledge, was failing to admit defeat after the grants of immunity predictably ruined his case. Once the North and Poindexter convictions were thrown out, there was little point in his trying to lock up other officials whose behavior, while far from exemplary, was neither venal nor as outrageous as that of the ringleaders going free.

CONTINUED...

http://slate.msn.com/id/2988/

BTW: Really appreciate your opinion and thougths, MsConduct! Really like the name and names.

[goclark]

16. Go Octafish! Go Go Go!

[Octafish]

75. Thanks, goclark! Haveyaheardaboud 'ToppleBUSH.com'?

Much to my chagrin, I hadn't until recently. But I like what they are doing.

http://www.topplebush.com/businessdealings.shtml

Lets arm ourselves with the best ammuniction -- good informational resources -- which goes into our Top Weapon: The Truth.

Bush Family Values

by Stephen Pizzo
Sept/October 1992, Mother Jones

Although a handful of good reporters for the New York Times, LA Times, Village Voice, and Wall Street Journal have diligently been digging through business records for months, something has been missing: an overview that "connects the dots" in the myriad deals that have been examined, making it clear that cashing in on influence has become a pattern of behavior extending through the first family.

Instead of criticizing reporters, the president might more wisely begin listening to those in government who have watched his sons with mounting worry. A year ago, I sat across a desk from a Secret Service agent who had been assigned to Bush-family security. I rattled off the names of a half-dozen questionable characters who had found their way into business deals with the Bush boys. How had these characters been allowed to get even close to the president's sons?

The agent slumped back in his chair and sighed. "We warn them," he said in a whisper. "But that's all we can do. We can't stop these kids from associating with someone they want to be with. All we can do after warning them is to sweep these guys with metal detectors when they come around."

What follows is a sourcebook of concerns about the president's three sons.

http://www.topplebush.com/article9_busdeal.shtml

[DireStrike]

18. Have you seen this?

http://wholeworldiswatching.blogspot.com/

Tactics And Strategy: A Total Battle Plan For Democrats To Take Back America From The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy

[gordianot]

25. Interesting article.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Kerry had called Bush a liar during the debates.

[Octafish]

77. I like it. Here's some ammo to help in the fight.

It scares the fascists like nothing else, save the light of God. It's called Truth. And you can be sure God uses it to spot these turds of the BFEE.

A Timeline of CIA Atrocities

By Steve Kangas

The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)

CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.

This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.

The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."

The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.

CONTINUED...

http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/CIAtimeline.html

The timeline's a must-have. These are what the CIA considers successes. You should SEE what they don't want anybody to know about.

The rest of the site is a must-have, as well. The guy who created it gave his life fighting the BFEE.

[goforit]

29. Ahhh...haaaa....Osama Bin Ladin is GHWB's long lost son (by blood)???

I've always been so suspicious of GHWB's love for S.Arabia.
Could he of had a mysterious mistress.....that had a son???

Do you ever wonder why OBL is so tall????

GHWB is much taller than his first born U.S. son, eh???

LOL!!!!!........THIS IS SO FAR OUT of a TINFOIL HATTER!!!

Well it certainly makes for good humor.

[Octafish]

81. It all FITS together now! Yow!

Too bad the Crawford villiage idiot couldn't put a few dots together, though. Here's a couple of FBI guys who've been gagged. Their crime? Telling the truth regarding a case they were working on that tied Osama to terror fund-raising. Of couse, Bush shut them down shortly after taking office. I wonder why?



FBI agents Vincent (left) and Wright (right)

FBI agents Robert Wright and John Vincent are tracking a terrorist cell in Chicago, but are told to simply follow suspects around town and file reports. The two agents believe some of the money used to finance the 1998 US embassy bombings (see August 7, 1998) leads back to Chicago and Saudi multimillionaire businessman Yassin al-Qadi (see also March 21, 2000, Late January 2001, October 12, 2001, August 15, 2002, August 25, 2002, , and December 5, 2002). Supervisors try, but temporarily fail, to halt the investigation into al-Qadi's possible terrorist connections. However, at this time, a supervisor prohibits Wright and Vincent from making any arrests connected to the bombings, or opening new criminal investigations. Even though they believe their case is growing stronger, in January 2001 Wright is told that the Chicago case is being closed and that “it's just better to let sleeping dogs lie”(see Late January 2001). Wright tells ABC: “Those dogs weren't sleeping, they were training, they were getting ready. … September the 11th is a direct result of the incompetence of the FBI's International Terrorism Unit. … Absolutely no doubt about that.” Chicago federal prosecutor Mark Flessner, also working on the case, says there “were powers bigger than I was in the Justice Department and within the FBI that simply were not going to let happen.” Wright will write an internal FBI memo slamming the FBI in June 2001 (see June 9, 2001, and also May 30, 2002and August 9, 2002 (C)). Al-Qadi is named in a March 2000 affidavit as a source of terrorist funds in Chicago. He is also on secret US and UN lists of major al-Qaeda financiers (see ). His charity, the Muwafaq Foundation, is allegedly an al-Qaeda front which transferred $820,000 to the Palestinian group Hamas through a Muslim foundation called the Quranic Literacy Institute; the date of the transfer has not been released. Al-Qadi says he shut down Muwafaq in 1996, but the charity has received money from the United Nations since then.

SOURCE:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&theme=saudi
          

[lenidog]

115. With all the Bin Ladens there are

Its possible that they are related to the Bushes. Osama has something like 40 brothers and sisters. I hate to think about how many cousins there are. ;-)

[Cleita]

31. Bump

:kick:

[Octafish]

83. Friends like you make me sure I was born under a Good Sign, Cleita!

From the Nag Hamadi Text, "The Gospel of Thomas":

BLATZ

(106) Jesus said: When you make the two one, you will become sons of man, and when you say: Mountain, move away, it will move away.

LAYTON

(106) Jesus said, "when you (plur.) make the two into one you will become sons of man, and when you say, 'O mountain, go elsewhere!' it will go elsewhere."

DORESSE

110 <106>. Jesus says: "When you make the two one, you will become sons of Man and if you say: 'Mountain, move!', it will move."

http://www.gospelthomas.com/gospelthomas106.html

[sandnsea]

32. Prescott Bush,

Brown Brothers, Harriman, goes WAY back me thinks. Scoundrels, the lot of them.

[Octafish]

85. NAZI scoundrels who still shame America.

These BFEE turds helped arm Hitler, get American into World War II, made money off the war, let the Commies take over eastern Europe after the war, continued the Cold War when they could've blown down the commies, waged war around the world for power and profit, killed the one President who stood up to them, and continue to wage war around the world for power and profit. These are shameless murderers and traitors.

How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president.

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
Saturday September 25, 2004
The Guardian

George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

[m berst]

33. great work Octafish

Don't have much to add, but thought I would kick the thread and make two observations.

Has there ever been a family in history with so many bizarre "coincidences" connected with it?

Do you think that the current Bush administration is pushing things to far, and that things will blow up for the BFEE with the result that much of this will come into public awareness?

Nixon went too far, then tried to cover up a little of what he was up to with the result that a LOT came out eventually.

[Octafish]

87. The Family Conspiratorial

DU Friend, it's hard to find a family closer to more of the criminality that clouds the face of our nation. It's easy to understand why the Bushes are so secretive. If the Truth were known, they might have to answer questions from a Federal Prosecutor.

We knew back then, but few tried to take them on. Anyway, Corporate McPravda refused to cover the story when the did.

Will they get caught? One can only hope -- and work like hell to see their criminality exposed, pursued and prosecuted. We should use Inslaw PROMIS -- this caseload is so big, and the number of players so many, and the crimes so vast, we will need the best technology money can buy.



Have I mentioned how Cheney screws everything up?

The Curse of Dick Cheney

The veep's career has been marred by one disaster after another
By T.D. ALLMAN

Should George W. Bush win this election, it will give him the distinction of being the first occupant of the White House to have survived naming Dick Cheney to a post in his administration. The Cheney jinx first manifested itself at the presidential level back in 1969, when Richard Nixon appointed him to his first job in the executive branch. It surfaced again in 1975, when Gerald Ford made Cheney his chief of staff and then -- with Cheney's help -- lost the 1976 election. George H.W. Bush, having named Cheney secretary of defense, was defeated for re-election in 1992. The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office.

This pattern of misplaced confidence in Cheney, followed by disastrous results, runs throughout his life -- from his days as a dropout at Yale to the geopolitical chaos he has helped create in Baghdad. Once you get to know his history, the cycle becomes clear: First, Cheney impresses someone rich or powerful, who causes unearned wealth and power to be conferred on him. Then, when things go wrong, he blames others and moves on to a new situation even more advantageous to himself.

"Cheney's manner and authority of voice far outstrip his true abilities," says Chas Freeman, who served under Bush's father as ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "It was clear from the start that Bush required adult supervision -- but it turns out Cheney has even worse instincts. He does not understand that when you act recklessly, your mistakes will come back and bite you on the ass."

SNIP...

Nixon's resignation opened the way for Cheney's first truly astonishing inside move up. When Gerald Ford succeeded to the presidency, he needed experienced loyalists by his side who were untainted by the Nixon scandal, so he named Rumsfeld his chief of staff. Rumsfeld brought Cheney right along with him into the Oval Office.

The period between August 1974 and November 1976, when Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter, is essential to understanding George W. Bush's disastrous misjudgments -- and Dick Cheney's role in them. In both cases, Cheney and Rumsfeld played the key role in turning opportunity into chaos. Ford, like Bush later, hadn't been elected president. As he entered office, he was overshadowed by a secretary of state (Kissinger then, Powell later) who was considered incontestably his better. Ford was caught as flat-footed by the fall of Saigon in April 1975 as Bush was by the September 2001 attacks. A better president, with more astute advisers, might have arranged a more orderly ending to the long and divisive war. But instead of heeding the country's desire for honesty and reconciliation, Rumsfeld and Cheney convinced Ford that the way to turn himself into a real president was to stir up crises in

CONTINUED...

[Hotler]

40. Hollywood couldn't make this shit up!

And they're not the only rich/powerful family involved in sucking the life out of democracy. They're just the ones in front of the public eye so to speak.

[Octafish]

89. From the time this thread started, things have only gotten worse.

Found some numbers on US wealth distribution.



Total Net Worth in U.S.: $42.3892 trillion ($42,389,200,000,000)

Source: Arthur B. Kennickell, "A Rolling Tide: Changes in the Distribution of Wealth in the U.S., 1989-2001," Table 10. (Levy Economics Institute: November, 2003)

http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html

Breakdown for 1998, Berkeley:

http://tiger.berkeley.edu/sohrab/politics/wealthdist.html

Things have only gotten worse in 2004, with fiscal policy decided by the Crawford village idiot.

[Gloria]

41. As for the Enron branch....complete with

plots to screw California, privatize water supplies....I think a guy was "suicided" early on...shot in the head in some undoable way.....

Kick this whole stickin' pile.....

[Octafish]

90. Clifford Baxter, All-American.

ENRON nearly bankrupted California and the elderly on fixed incomes. It didn't matter to the BFEE. It cost a good man his job as governor and got a new ENRON-connected governor into office.

They say Baxter was an honest man and was going to tell the truth about what he knew and who knew it. And he loved his family and countryh. Gee. This case is so ghastly, that even Reed Irvine weighed in with the righteous...

Cracks In Cliff Baxter Case

By Reed Irvine
Accuracy in Media, www.aim.org
May 16, 2002

Carol Baxter may regret having fought so hard to keep the police from releasing the suicide note allegedly written by her husband, Cliff Baxter, the former Enron Vice Chairman. The note was released in spite of her efforts to keep it secret, and copies were published in papers around the country. Dan Nagao, who became friends with Baxter when they were students at Columbia University, saw a copy of the note, and his suspicions about the cause of death were immediately aroused.

He could not visualize Cliff Baxter printing a note like that entirely in block letters, including his name at the end. Nagao had received letters from Baxter at Christmas time every year until last year. He said that all those letters had been written in longhand. He was not the only one who found it hard to believe that a graduate of the Columbia University School of Business Management would block print his handwritten notes and letters. This may explain why Mrs. Baxter did not want the note made public. The expensive lawyers she hired to block its release had argued that it contained "intimate, personal family facts" that should be kept private. That turned out to be false, leaving the possibility that the note was forged as a plausible explanation of why anyone would spend a lot of money to have it suppressed.

After releasing the note, the Sugar Land police closed the Baxter case, declaring his death a suicide. That means they think Baxter wrote it. If Baxter customarily wrote notes and letters in cursive, the police should not have authenticated the suicide note solely by comparing it with a known sample of Baxter's block letters, which would be easy to copy. His fingerprints have to be on the note, and good and writing experts should be consulted.

The police and the medical examiner who performed the autopsy have overlooked an even more critical clue than the note. That is the quantity of Ambien, a hypnotic drug found in Baxter's blood and stomach. Dr. Joye Carter, the chief medical examiner for Harris County, ruled Baxter's death a suicide before the toxicology report was completed. Nearly all the news media began calling Baxter's death a suicide with no evidence to support it. When the toxicology report was issued on February 1, it didn't get the attention it deserved.  (The toxicology report and my comments on it are posted here, ED)

CONTINUED...

http://www.jerrypippin.com/Cliff%20Baxter.htm

[Gloria]

42. Mike Malloy should get a copy of this thread...

He could do shows on this until the end of time...
BUSH CRIME FAMILY....I think he's the only one on the radio who as the courage to say it out loud.....

This is your baby, Octafish....you should do the honors...I'm sure Mike would be grateful to get it...

[Octafish]

91. Thanks, Gloria!

Do as I do. Don't avert your eyes, plagiarize. Please use, borrow, send, recommend, lift as needed. There's a weakness I have concerning self-promotion, though, so if you want to forward, feel free...



The important thing is that this stuff is true and needs to be known. If I had the time, I'd write a book or two that highlights the Crime Line. Seeing how the stuff is so important -- I don't mind if anyone takes this and runs. Every day the BFEE gets stronger and our Democracy, Republic and Constitution fall deeper in peril.

eDit: a bit warn't write.

[Beam Me Up]

44. KICK for one AMAZING THREAD

Thanks for all the hard work Octafish!! This is why I love DU. This information will be seen by a lot of eyes.

[Octafish]

95. Bonus Treason: BFEE Controls Big Money...like AIG

And the American Insurance Group had to pay a Big Fine for corrupt accounting practices. But, that's OK. He's one of "us," an investor in ENRON, like Bushler...

Maurice 'Hank' R. Greenberg

President, American Insurance Group

The first President Bush took big-donor insurance magnate Maurice “Hank” Greenberg along with him on his 1992 trade mission to Asia. Aided by this access, the largest U.S. insurer expanded sales in Japan and became the first foreigner to sell insurance in China. When the U.S. supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 1999, its negotiators secured a concession that exempted AIG (see also Ned Cloonan) alone from limits on foreign investments in Chinese insurance companies. After the September 11th attacks, Greenberg led a lobbying blitz to get taxpayers to bail out terrorism-related insurance losses. At Greenberg’s request, a handwritten amendment was added to a 2001 bill granting war-risk insurance to airlines. The addendum extends the coverage to insurers that lease planes to airlines, namely AIG. Greenberg and Pioneer Robert O’Connell also pressed Bush and Pioneer Commerce Secretary Don Evans to cap insurers’ overall terrorism liability. Bush promoted the plan, which died in the Senate. Clamoring for limits on class-action lawsuits in a 2004 speech, Greenberg denounced plaintiff lawyers as “terrorists.” AIG helped Enron cook its books by investing in its notorious LJM2 partnership along with Merrill Lynch (see Stanley O’Neal) and J.P. Morgan (see Alan Buckwalter). AIG paid $10 million in 2003 to settle Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges that it helped a struggling mobile phone company pad its earnings by selling it a phony, back-dated, insurance policy. Sitting on the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Greenberg helped approve the obscene $187 million retirement package that prompted the ouster of NYSE Chair Dick Grasso. Around that time, Greenberg got Grasso to pressure NYSE buyers to prop up AIG’s stock price. Greenberg was one of 22 wealthy business leaders whom President Bush invited to lunch in 2001 to discuss his tax cut for the wealthy. When a member of the Heritage Foundation (see Elaine Chao) urged Congress in 2000 to postpone a vote on normalizing trade with China, Greenberg threatened to cut off funding and the think tank quickly rethunk its position, issuing a new report entitled, “How Trade With China Benefits Americans.” When Democrat Howard Dean was governor of Vermont, he and AIG urged corporations to dodge taxes by establishing bogus insurance subsidiaries there, which AIG managed. AIG had $619,000 in federal contracts in fiscal 2002, mainly with the Air Force. With estimated net worths of $3 billion each, Greenberg and Pioneer Jack Taylor were tied at No. 56 on the 2003 “Forbes 400 Richest Americans” list.

SOURCE:

http://www.whitehouseforsale.org/ContributorsAndPaybacks/pioneer_profile.cfm?pioneer_ID=79

Here's the "fine" print...

AIG will pay Feds $126 million fine to settle PNC

November 25, 2004

NEW YORK -- American International Group, one of the biggest U.S. insurance companies, said today it would pay $126 million to settle allegations by federal authorities that it helped two customer companies commit accounting fraud.

Under an agreement awaiting Securities and Exchange Commission approval, AIG, New York, will pay a $46 million fine to the watchdog agency to settle issues surrounding transactions that helped regional bank PNC Financial Services Group pump up its earnings. AIG will also submit to an independent monitor who will examine transactions by the company between 2000 and 2004 to determine whether any third parties violated accounting rules to achieve certain results.

AIG will pay another $80 million to the Justice Department to settle a related investigation and avoid prosecution. The tentative deal to wrap up those investigations came as the Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors in New York are investigating whether AIG Chairman Maurice ''Hank'' Greenberg manipulated the huge insurance company's share price in 2001 to save money on a big acquisition.

The U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan is looking into whether Greenberg illegally interfered with his company's share price just before AIG's acquisition of insurer American General in August 2001, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

CONTINUED...

http://www.suntimes.com/output/business/cst-fin-aig25.html

[Octafish]

96. Forgot most important part: "You're welcome, Beam Me Up!"

Truly appreciate your kind words.

If I had the time and resources, I'd turn this info into a book. Perhaps someone else can use it. Our country needs to know about the BFEE ASAFP.



Our Leader.

[Beam Me Up]

99. A book is a GREAT idea. What makes you think you

couldn't write it? Looks to me like you have the resources necessary. If you think you haven't the talent to write it, I would probably disagree. Your little introductions to the posts above are helpful.

An exposé of this kind need not be "conventional." In fact, it might be more useful if it took the form of a compendium pointing to other sources without a lot of commentary. I've already taken this thread and edited it somewhat for eamiling out to my list (with full links in tact). It could be made into a MSWord file and/or PDF file for easy electronic delivery and print-out as well.

Good day.

[bobthedrummer]

48. More TREASON, potpourri style

1997 Taliban in Texas
http://www.rememberjohn.com/talibantexas.html
Enron in Uzbekistan 2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=18022002-115043-2827r
Skull and Bones Connects to Yale Stock/Talisman Energy 2002
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=8535&forum=3&start=0
Afghanistan Oil Plans
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/TAL111A.html
Iraqgate: The Teicher Documents
http://www.webcom.com/~lpease/collections/hidden/teicher.htm
Exxon in Kuwait
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/020114/n14219053-1.html
Republican Iraq Support
http://www.populist.com/02.17.burns.html
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin111402/chin111402.html
Saudis/BCCI funding OBL
http://cryptome.org/soil/soiled-dove2.htm
Carlyle Group acquired government IT market (Federal Data Corp) sells to Northrop Grumman on 9-11-2000!
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2000/0911/news-fdc-09-11-00.asp

There's so much more, thanks for starting this thread, Octafish!

[Carl Brennan]

50. Thanks for that.

[bobthedrummer]

51. Anytime, Carl!

:hi:

[bobthedrummer]

52. "Drugs, the CIA, and Faustian Alliances" by John Stanton

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/STA406B.html

Thugs and criminals. The BFEE utilizes assassins.

[seemslikeadream]

57. "Heroin, Al Qaeda and the Florida Flight School"

"Heroin, Al Qaeda and the Florida Flight School"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1294206
DOJ Asked FBI Translator To Change Pre 9-11 Intercepts
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=442067&mesg_id=442067
Explosive new Sibel Edmonds interview
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=1555133&mesg_id=1555133
State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=610235&mesg_id=610235


:hi:

[seemslikeadream]

73. Balkans, drugs, bin Laden and friends

Funny eh, how US military policy seems bent on protecting the drug routes as much as those of oil. And funny how often the two are the same.

The overnight rise of heroin trafficking through Kosovo -- now the most important Balkan route between Southeast Asia and Europe after Turkey -- helped also to fund terrorist activity directly associated with al Qaeda and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Opium poppies, which barely existed in the Balkans before 1995, have become the No. 1 drug cultivated in the Balkans after marijuana. Operatives of two al Qaeda-sponsored Islamist cells who were arrested in Bosnia on Oct. 23 were linked to the heroin trade, underscoring the narco-jihad culture of today´s post-war Balkans.

http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/nov01/hed4304.shtml
From "Osamagate" by Michel Chossudovsky:

According to Frank Ciluffo of the Globalized Organised Crime Program, in a testimony presented to the House of Representatives Judicial Committee:

"What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the 'Balkan Route' that links the 'Golden Crescent' of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe."

...

Another link to bin Laden is the fact that the brother of a leader in an Egyptian Jihad organization and also a military commander of Osama bin Laden, was leading an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict.

...

While the various Congressional reports confirmed that the US government had been working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, this did not prevent the Clinton and later the Bush Administration from arming and equipping the KLA. The Congressional documents also confirm that members of the Senate and the House knew the relationship of the Administration to international terrorism. To quote the statement of Rep. John Kasich of the House Armed Services Committee: "We connected ourselves with the KLA, which was the staging point for bin Laden...."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO110A.html

Meanwhile, back in Turkey:

Huseyin Basbasin, arrested in 1995 in Holland for smuggling drugs on board of the Lucky-S, claims he smuggled drugs together with Yunus Agar and Yalcin Akcadag (Mehmet Agar's uncle) under the cover of the oil business. Baybasin stated they were transporting oil from Libya, took drugs on board on route, shipping it to Holland. Baybasin further said: "Nobody was allowed near the ship by the police. The police president Suleyman Basgol was there as well. Nobody can claim to have seen nothing. It was all controlled by the Istanbul police." According to Baybasin, Mehmet Agar makes $500.000 a month and he demands that Agar should give an explanation where all his wealth came from.
http://eagle.westnet.gr/~cgian/triangle.htm



thanks MB for the links

[Octafish]

97. I'll take 'RACIST GOP BASTARDS' for 500, Alex!

A: Strom Thurmond and William Rehnquist.

Q: What two major political figures who played central roles in the Clinton impeachment are known racists?

From a friend of Liberty in Ireland:

Fintan O'Toole

Opinion from The Irish Times

One of the problems with the US is that too few people have a sense of the grotesque. I was there last week when the Senate formally opened the impeachment trial of President William Jefferson Clinton. The epic moment, full of seriousness and formal gravity, began with the Senate's oldest member and president, Strom Thurmond, a Republican from South Carolina, presiding.

Thurmond then handed over the chair to the Chief Justice, William Rehnquist. All the talk was of law and justice and history. However, it would be hard to find in any liberal democracy a pair of high officials whose eminent presence at such an occasion was such a transparent charade.

Bill Clinton's crimes, such as they are, are about the alleged undermining of public trust in the administration of justice. The idea of a lawbound society has been tested severely throughout the short history of the US. But undoubtedly the biggest test was the survival of institutionalised racial discrimination, especially in the old south, for a full century after the Civil War had supposedly inaugurated an era of racial equality.

Segregation, oppression, humiliation and the denial of basic political rights were the lot of millions of US citizens. Those conditions were imposed on them because of the colour of their skin. Two of the many white intellectuals who upheld and argued for that system in the old south were Thurmond and Rehnquist.

SNIP....

Nor can this be written off as a folly of youth. Rehnquist went on to work as the Republican Party's director of what was euphemistically called "ballot security" operations for elections in Phoenix, Arizona (home base of Goldwater), between 1958 and 1962. This was before the civil rights movement had secured the Voting Rights Act, and when white racists were still able to use "legal" devices to stop blacks from voting.

CONTINUED MUST-READ, IMO...

http://flag.blackened.net/daver/misc/thurmond.html

[jmowreader]

65. You need to go back a lot farther than you did

Start during World War I, when Dubya's great grandfather Samuel Prescott Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board. Samuel P. Bush's previous experience was in making railroad parts as the president of Buckeye Steel Castings. In his position, Bush liaised with such firms as Remington and Vickers--who were known for talking governments into going to war then selling them the guns necessary to fight it.

In World War II, Prescott Bush was an officer of the Union Bank, an organization the United States seized in 1942. Its crime: bankrolling the Nazis. Prescott Bush went on to found the United Services Organization (the organization charged with maintaining the morale and welfare of the American fighting man) and his son George Herbert Walker Bush joined the Navy as an Avenger pilot.

There is evidence the Bushes were doing Bad Things between the end of World War II and the start of the Kennedy Administration, but I don't have time to write a comprehensive litany of Bush atrocities and you don't have time to read it.

But I think you're on the right track--nothing good and much bad can be said about this family.

[seemslikeadream]

67. Senator Harry Truman

when investigating the national defense program, as committee chairman told newsmen before Farish testified: "I think this approaches treason. Farish began breaking apart at these hearings. He shouted his "indignation" at the senators, and claimed he was not "disloyal."After the March-April hearings ended, more dirt came gushing out of the Justice Department and the Congress on Farish and Standard Oil. Farish had deceived the US Navy to prevent the Navy from acquiring certain patents, while supplying them to the Nazi war machine; meanwhile he was supplying gasoline and tetraethyl lead to Germany's submarines and air force.
Communications between Standard and I.G. Farben from the outbreak of World War II were released to the Senate, showing that tFarish's organization had arranged to deceive the U.S. government into passing over Nazi-owned assets: They would nominally buy I.G.'s share in certain patents because "in the event of war between ourselves and Germany .. .it would certainly be very undesirable to have this 20 percent Standard-I.G pass to an alien property custodian of the U.S. who might sell it to an unfriendly interest.
In August, Farish was brought back for more testimony. He was now frequently accused of lying. Farish was crushed under the intense, public grilling; he became morose, ashen. While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on November 29, 1942.
The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later. With this double death the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William...overlapping the intelligence and financial worlds-The Bush Farish axis started George Bush's career.

A Senate investigating committee under Senator (later US President Harry Truman of Missouri had called Arnold to testify at hearings on corporations' collaboration with the Nazi. The Senators expressed outrage at the cynical way Farish was continuing an alliance with the Hitler regime that begun back in 1933, when Farish became chief of Jersey Standard. Didn't he know there was a war on?


http://lists.village.virginia.edu/listservs/spoons/woodco-greens.archive/woodco-greens.0006

[bobthedrummer]

68. He helped the Nazis kill Americans and made a handsome profit while

at it.
:mad:

[seemslikeadream]

74. US Ambassador to England Inherited "Auschwitz" money (Farish)

from Unknown Known

US Ambassador to England Inherited "Auschwitz" money (Farish)


If you do not know about William Farish III, there is a reason. The man is VERY private and most Americans have never heard of him. Yet, his power is immense and his fortunes from his grandfather are tied directly to the bushes, as well as the Nazi party.

Unfortunately, only the print edition of the NYT shows his picture standing in the middle of GWB and Prince Charles as an introducer. This is the NYT article related to this most recent incident...

Lost in all the white ties and tails, cavalry parades and antiwar protests of President Bush's trip to London last week was a reticent multimillionaire American racehorse breeder, William S. Farish. His day job is the United States ambassador to Britain, and his credentials include very close ties to the Bush family.

How close? Well, not only did Mr. Farish manage the elder George Bush's blind trusts when he became vice president, but he gave him his springer spaniel, Millie, and Mr. Farish later had her mated at his lush Kentucky horse farm. Among the puppies was Spot, the 13-year-old dog of the current President Bush.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/24/politics/24LETT.html

More importantly, however, is background history of the Farish family. As Prescott Bush escaped penalty for his treason, William Farish, Sr. did not. Here is some background info, but a thorough reading of these Nazi sympathizers is mandatory to understanding what we are up against.

When George Bush was elected Vice President in 1980, Texas mystery man William (`` Will '') Stamps Farish III took over management of all of George Bush's personal wealth in a `` blind trust. '' Known as one of the richest men in Texas, Will Farish keeps his business affairs under the most intense secrecy. Only the source of his immense wealth is known, not its employment.@s3

Will Farish has long been Bush's closest friend and confidante. He is also the unique private host to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II: Farish owns and boards the studs which mate with the Queen's mares. That is her public rationale when she comes to America and stays in Farish's house. It is a vital link in the mind of our Anglophile President.

President Bush can count on Will Farish not to betray the violent secrets surrounding the Bush family money. For Farish's own family fortune was made in the same Hitler project, in a nightmarish partnership with George Bush's father.

Indeed, Farish's (the grandfather), activities in supplying patents to the Nazis while withholding the same patents from US govt, were described by Senator Truman as, `` I think this approaches treason. ''@s1@s7
http://www.tarpley.net/bush3.htm

And the rest is history...

While Prescott Bush escaped publicity when the government seized his Nazi banking organization in October, Farish had been nailed. He collapsed and died of a heart attack on Nov. 29, 1942.

The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later.@s2@s0

With this double death, the fortune comprising much of Standard Oil's profits from Texas and Nazi Germany was now to be settled upon the little four-year-old grandson, William (`` Will '') Stamps Farish III. Will Farish grew up a recluse, the most secretive multi-millionaire in Texas, with investments of `` that money '' in a multitude of foreign countries, and a host of exotic contacts overlapping the intelligence and financial worlds--particularly in Britain.

http://www.tarpley.net/bush3.htm

[seemslikeadream]

76. William Farish, Jr. died in a "training accident"

more from Unknown Known

Please note - William Farish, Jr. died in a "training accident"

The Farish family was devastated by the exposure. Son William Stamps Farish, Jr., a lieutenant in the Army Air Force, was humiliated by the public knowledge that his father was fueling the enemy's aircraft; he died in a training accident in Texas six months later.@s2@s0

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm! In Texas, no less!


and from starroute

More on Farish

I did some investigation of his family several months ago and found a number of very interesting connections.

Farish's wife is the former Sarah Sharp, daughter of Bayard Sharp (1913-2002), a close friend of George H.W. and Barbara Bush. Bayard's mother was Isabella Mathieu du Pont, whose three brothers successively headed E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company between 1915 and 1940. They were admirers of Hitler, funded multiple fascist organizations in the US, and were behind the plot to overthrow FDR in 1934.

Farish's mother was Mary Wood, daughter of General Robert E. Wood, who was chairman of the isolationist America First Committee in 1940 and became a prominent figure in the extreme right after World War II. Wood corresponded extensively with Senator Joseph McCarthy and supported many right-wing groups, particularly in Texas. He was also in touch with a group of revisionist historians who were pushing the notion that Roosevelt had sold out to the Soviet Union and that the State Department had deliberately handed China over to the communists.

Farish's aunt, Martha Botts Farish, was married to Edward Harriman Gerry, nephew of Averell Harriman and brother of Elbridge Gerry, who was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Company. That marriage seems to have been a major factor in bringing the Farishes and the Bushes together, although they were already acquainted through the oil industry.

Farish's grandmother, the wife of William Stamps Farish, Sr., was Libbie Botts Rice. That's Botts as in the lawfirm of Baker and Botts, of which her grandfather was a co-founder, and Rice as in Rice University, which in the century since its founding has persistently been tied in with Houston oil interests. (In recent years, Rice was closely entangled with Enron.)

Libbie's sister, Ella Botts Rice, was briefly married to Howard Hughes in the 1920's, just after he had inherited the rights to a drill bit which his father had invented and which was essential to the oil industry. While Hughes was a minor, his assets were controlled by the Rice Board of Directors.

And, for what it's worth, the elder Farish's great-grandmother was the sister of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Altogether, a very strange and powerful family.

[Octafish]

79. That's German, er -- Gold, Oil & Power.

That is most interesting information on Farish and their connections to the Bush family. Money begats money, they always say.

Small world. Salem bin Laden and his dad got killed in flying accidents in Texas, too. Such is doing business with the BFEE.

Firesign Theatre said the South won the Civil War. To that we can add: The NAZIs World War II.

What's next: The BFEE is working to create, like in Haiti, a New Feudalism. The turds probably will use the survivors of World War III as slaves. Of course, by then, the herd will have been culled.

How else to explain their LYING regarding 9-11? Here's what Ambassador William Stamps Farish had to say regarding Richard Clarke's observations regarding Smirk's inability to focus on Osama bin Laden:


U.S. Embassy

Speeches & Remarks

AMBASSADOR WILLIAM S. FARISH

25-03-04 Op-Ed on Richard Clarke's Recent Assertions

The following op-ed by Ambassador William S. Farish was published in The Independent newspaper, March 25, 2004
American film director Billy Wilder once said, "Hindsight is always twenty-twenty." But Richard Clarke's recent assertions show that even hindsight can be woefully off the mark.

Who is Richard Clarke? For thirty years, he was a civil servant in the United States Government. When President Bush assumed office, he kept Dick Clarke on as his principal counterterrorism expert. In return, Clarke has written a new book giving his view of events. He has accompanied its release with an orchestrated array of books and self-promotion interviews, to launch a political attack on President Bush and his administration in the hothouse atmosphere of a presidential campaign season. This is a good atmosphere to sell books, perhaps, but not one designed for a cold examination of the facts.

SNIP...

Clarke's interviews may lead one to conclude his advice was ignored. This is simply untrue. As the President's principal counterterrorism expert, if he had asked to brief the President on any counterterrorism issue, Dick Clarke could have done so. He never did. The only time he asked to brief the President was during the height of the terrorism threat spike in June 2001. And then he asked to brief the President not on al-Qaeda, but on cybersecurity. Per his request, the briefing took place.

SNIP...

Given these facts, and all that has been written on the subject, can anyone give credence to the suggestion that President Bush didn't take seriously the threat of terrorism? Groucho Marx was once quoted as saying, "Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?" A glance at President Bush's statements, and his actions, clearly demonstrate that he has given more attention to the threat of terrorism - and done more to defeat it - than any other president. One may like and support President Bush's policies, or take issue with them - but the President's record on terrorism is clear and convincing.

SOURCE:

http://www.usembassy.org.uk/ukamb/farish25.html

[Carl Brennan]

108. Another Farish quit his post in London in June 2004.

6/20/04 Farish quits London post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=632508&mesg_id=632508


US Ambassador relinquishes his post to breed racehorses
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor

THE race was on last night for a highly coveted post in the American diplomatic service, after William Farish, the US Ambassador to Britain, announced that he was stepping down after less than three years in the job.

In an article in The Times today, the envoy says that he decided to “conclude my tenure here and turn my attention to my family and business”.

Mr Farish, a businessman with close ties to the Bush family and a personal friend of the Queen, is expected to return to Kentucky in July where he is a leading racehorse breeder.

More:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1150560,0...

[seemslikeadream]

109. Prince of a Guy or Al-Qaida Spy?

Amid allegations, horsemen, Saudi royals rise to defend late racing magnate Prince Ahmed
By John Eisenberg

Two years ago, the Preakness Stakes spotlight shone brightly on Prince Ahmed bin Salman, an affable, highly Westernized member of the ruling family of Saudi Arabia.

A familiar face in thoroughbred racing circles, he was in Baltimore as the owner of War Emblem, winner of the Kentucky Derby. He stayed at the Harbor Court Hotel, attended the post position draw at the ESPN Zone and went to Pimlico Race Course to watch his horse gallop.

"He was as genuinely excited and enthusiastic as any Preakness owner I've ever seen," Pimlico president and chief executive officer Joe De Francis said.

Some six weeks earlier, a high-ranking al-Qaida operative captured in Pakistan reportedly had named him as a go-between linking the terrorist organization and the Saudi royal family.

...

Three weeks later, War Emblem disappointed in a bid to win the Triple Crown, finishing eighth in the Belmont Stakes. The prince was strangely absent, on business in Saudi Arabia, his racing associates said.

A month after that, the prince was dead at age 43. News accounts said he succumbed to a heart attack in Saudi Arabia.

....

http://www.saudi-american-forum.org/Newsletters2004/SAF_Item_Of_Interest_2004_06_09.htm

....

He was on the bin Laden evacuation flight, after he concluded his business buying horses on 9/12/01 in KY. But I don't see direct links to Farish or the above horse farm. Bet we know where he banked however.

....

Somebody quoting Posner:

THE ABU ZUBAYDAH CASE. Abu Zubaydah was one of the most wanted Al Qaeda operatives. According to Gerald Posner (Why America Slept), the CIA, FBI, and United States leaders missed numerous clues over 10 years to nab Zubaydah before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Zubaydah was wanted for the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000 as well as the 9-11 attacks.

According to Posner, “two government (unnamed) sources,” Zubaydah was captured on March 28, 2002, American military team stormed a Pakistan safe house and arrested Zubaydah along with 62 other suspects. United States interrogators used drugs, including Sodium Pentothal, to coerce him to talk. But the Americans were stalled. They flew Zubaydah to an Afghan complex that resembled a Saudi jail chamber, where “two Arab-Americans, now with Special Forces,” pretending to be Saudi inquisitors, used drugs and threats to scare him into more confessions.

According to Posner, the American ploy backfired. When Zubaydah was confronted by American interrogators posing as Saudis, “his reaction was not fear, but utter relief.” Zubaydah was happy to see the “Saudis” and gave them telephone numbers for a senior member of the royal family who would, said “tell you what to do.” One such member was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a Westernized nephew of King Fahd. Aziz’s horse had won the Kentucky Derby in 2002. Not only did the phone numbers provided by Zubaydah prove to be true, but he also provided the Americans the Saudi-Pakistani-bin Laden triangle. (Gerald Posner, Why America Slept)

Zubaydah said the Saudi connection ran through Prince Turki al-Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, the kingdom’s longtime intelligence chief. Zubaydah said Bin Laden “personally” told him of a 1991 meeting at which Turki agreed to let Bin Laden leave Saudi Arabia and to provide him with secret funds as long as al-Qaeda refrained from promoting jihad in the kingdom. Zubaydah also implicated the Pakistanis. He said he had attended a meeting with Pakistan’s high-ranking air force officer Mushaf Ali Mir in 1996.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:EyNpNoCD_QAJ:www.a...

The reporting of Dan Hopsicker (Madcowprod.com, 12-26-2001), delves deeply into what a Tampa Tribune headline called, “The Phantom Flight from Florida,” wherein a Saudi prince - the son of the nation’s defense minister - as well as the son of a Saudi army commander took off in a twin-engine Lear jet just two days after the September 11 attacks, when every other plane in the United States was grounded. Moreover, Hopsicker made a special point that the Federal Government said the flight never happened despite the Tribune’s glaring headline. Meanwhile no one has even asked why the princes were in Tampa on 9/11!

The two Saudi princes flew to Lexington, Kentucky where other Saudi princes were purchasing racehorses; and from there, they flew a private 747 jet out of the country. But two armed bodyguards hired by the Saudis to get the princes out of Florida told Hopsicker that the Saudi plane took off from a private hanger at Raytheon Airport Services in Tampa.

Hopsicker’s report ultimately traced the ownership of the Lear Jet to Wally Hilliard, who is a partner of Rudi Dekkers, owner of the Venice, Florida flight school where most of the Saudi terrorists developed their airplane hijacking skills. Hopsicker added that the local police had collected all the files detailing Dekkers’ relationships and business with the hijackers - including the Alghamdi terrorists.

But according to one local law enforcement official, “The FBI took all our files, everything.” Then he added that, “they loaded two Ryder trucks right outside that (police station) window, then drove them right onto a C130 military cargo plane at Sarasota airport which flew out with Jeb Bush aboard.” Is Hopsicker striking a presidential nerve?
http://tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=25

Saudi horseracing connection: Farish involved in syndicates
with the late Prince Fahd Salman and Prince Ahmed Salman (nephews of King Fahd bin Abdel-Aziz al-Saud) who both died unexpectedly in 2001 and 2002 respectively: Salman accused of terrorism and some conspiracy specialists reckon he was murdered. His father is Governor of Riyadh and a full brother to King Fahd.


Official Obit:
07/25/2001
Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz dies in Riyadh

The Royal Court today announced the death of His Royal Highness Prince Fahd bin Salman bin Abdulaziz of heart failure. He was 46. Prince Fahd is the son of the Governor of Riyadh Province Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz. Funeral prayers will be held at the Turki bin Abdullah Mosque in Riyadh following regular afternoon prayer today. Prince Salman will receive condolences at his palace at Al-Maazar district in Riyadh.

After graduating from King Saud University in Riyadh, Prince Fahd studied business administration in the United States. On his return to the Kingdom, he joined the Ministry of Interior, and served as Deputy Governor of the Eastern Province from 1406-1412 H <1986 to 1991>. From then until his death he was in private business, and also served as Secretary-General of the charitable association for kidney failure patients.

from:
http://www.saudiembassy.net/2001News/News/OthDetail.asp?cIndex=3106

Salman with his brothers owned Thoroughbred Racing Corporation and along with Farish chummy Paul Mellon (also RIP) invested in Far East breeding syndicates, selling mostly to Japan, Argentina and Canada.

Fahd Salman murdered? Check this:

There was a lot of news about Prince Salman (Thoroughbred Corporation) being involved in terrorism---one report says one of Al Qaeda gave up two memorized phone numbers, and both were for cell phones belonging to the Prince. He was only 45, and the news reports says he died of a heart attack, even though he did not have a history of this kind. Anybody around the tracks hear anything about this, or if this is being covered up?



I believe the worst of bin Salman's offenses was passively allowing the papers he owned to be sympathetic to anti-americanism, nothing more. No one has produced any documents of substance linking him to terrorism, he has a brother who is currently working hard to clear bin Salman's name

More:
http://www.thoroughbredtimes.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_...

Prince Ahmed Salman, Fahd's younger brother, also died unexpectedly early in 2002:

Ahmed's Obit:

Prince Ahmed bin Salman 1958 - 2002


Date: 07/22/02

On Monday, July 22, 2002, the racing world was stunned by the announcement of the death of 43-year-old Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, the principal partner of the Thoroughbred Corporation, from a heart attack. His green and white striped silks are well-recognized worldwide, most recently in his four consecutive Triple Crown victories with Point Given taking the Preakness and Belmont last year and War Emblem capturing the Kentucky Derby and Preakness this year.

The nephew of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd was born on November 17, 1958. After studying in both the military and the University of California at Irvine he went into business, eventually becoming chairman of Saudi Arabia's Research and Marketing Group, a publishing company with offices in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and also in London, England.

With his college friend Richard Mulhall as trainer, he got into the racing business initially as Universal Stable. In 1994 when the operation resurfaced as The Thoroughbred Corporation, with Mulhall retiring as a trainer and taking on the job of racing manager. Mulhall is currently the president of the operation.

Prince Ahmed celebrates War Emblem's win in the Preakness
The pair would go on to racing greatness, both with sales purchases and homebreds. The Thoroughbred Corp.'s roster reads like a who's who of racing in the past decade, with such greats as Sharp Cat, Lear Fan, Jewel Princess, Windsharp, Military, Royal Anthem, Anees, Officer, Habibti, Spain, 2001 Horse of the Year Point Given, and this year's dual classic winner War Emblem. The Prince also had success in Europe, starting with his very first horse, Hays, who won the Mill Reef Stakes and Oath who won the Epsom Derby. Currently Thoroughbred Corp. has approximately 60 horses in training mostly stabled with Bob Baffert, D. Wayne Lukas, and John Shireffs, along with 45 broodmares, mostly at Mill Ridge Farm in Lexington.

His name will always be associated with War Emblem, his one Kentucky Derby winner, which he quipped was "one of the best investments I ever made in my life, besides buying oil in Saudi Arabia," after he won the Preakness. He bought a 90% share in the colt just three weeks before the Derby, and with the win, became the first Arab owner to capture the Roses.

Bob Baffert, who trained Point Given and War Emblem, said, "When you go through a Triple Crown together you get really close. He was like family. His passion for horses was incredible -- he lived and breathed them." Point Given's regular rider Gary Stevens said, "We were very close friends outside of racing. He was a guy who loved to laugh and loved a good time. He had major flair and loved the game and was continuing to grow in the sport. At 43, everybody was looking forward to him having a long, long career in the industry and he was definitely a boost to thoroughbred racing." Churchill Downs president Tom Meeker said, "The horses he campaigned proved themselves champions on and off the track, and their star power generated much positive attention for our sport. The prince's commitment to racing was unwavering, and his infectious enthusiasm for the game will be greatly missed. Prince Salman held the Kentucky Derby in the highest esteem -- he loved and appreciated the Derby's legacy as much as we do. Churchill Downs -- and all of racing -- has lost a remarkable horsemen and true fan." He is survived by his wife Princess Lamia, four daughters, and one son.

Prince Ahmed with Spain after she won the Louisville Breeders' Cup Handicap to become the richest mare in history.
War Emblem winning the Kentucky Derby.

Point Given won the Preakness, Belmont, Haskell, and Travers but didn't run well in the Kentucky Derby.
Prince Ahmed's first Breeders' Cup winner, Jewel Princess in the 1996 Distaff.

Sharp Cat, who Prince Ahmed referred to as his other daughter, won over $2 million in her career.
Anees was an upset winner of the Breeders' Cup Juvenile for Prince Ahmed.

Habibti was a top 2-year-old filly and has had some success as a 3-year-old this year, finishing second in the Kentucky Oaks.
Officer was another brilliant 2-year-old trained by Bob Baffert for Prince Ahmed.

More about Prince Ahmed:

Bio with stats from NTRA
Mill Ridge Farm - where most of his broodmares were kept
Thoroughbred Corporation - his racing syndicate

Obit from the Blood Horse
Profile from the Blood Horse
Obit from Thoroughbred Times
Obit from ESPN
Reactions to his death from ESPN
LA Times story by Bill Christine, "What He Couldn't Buy Was Americans' Love"
Obit from Modbee.com
AP wire story obit from Las Vegas Sun
Obit from ProLog
Obit from Newsday
All photos ©2002 Cindy Pierson Dulay

Back to Horse-Races.Net main page

From:
http://www.horse-races.net/library/aa072202.htm

Also of interest:

"Understanding the Bormann organization is essential to comprehending the concept of “the Underground Reich.”) A brutal irony about the name of a prize racehorse gives this program its title. Owned by Prince Ahmed—one of the members of the Saudi royal family allowed to leave the U.S. right after the 9/11 attacks without being adequately interrogated—War Emblem won two thirds of horse racing’s famed Triple Crown. In the spring of 2002, War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes, and Mr. Emory noted at the time that the horse’s name was ironic in light of documented support by wealthy Saudis for Al Qaeda. This program highlights allegations that Prince Ahmed was one of three members of the Saudi royal family who functioned as liaison personnel to Al Qaeda. This information was allegedly disclosed during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah—a key Bin Laden aide.

Program Highlights Include: The precipitous deaths of all three members of the Saudi Royal family (named by Zubaydah) over the space of eight days in 2002; the suspicious air crash that took the life of the head of the Pakistani air force—also alleged by Abu Zubaydah to be in the pay of Bin Laden; the unusual interrogation methods allegedly employed by the CIA to obtain the information provided by Abu Zubaydah."

and

"2. Among the other evacuees was Prince Ahmad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz—the owner of War Emblem, the horse that won two thirds of horseracing’s triple crown in 2002. (Obviously, that horse is the subject of the program’s title.) “There is nothing to connect the two Alhazmis directly. But the hijacker Nawaf had already been connected in press stories to the Saudi royal family, as the recipient of funds coming indirectly from the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. ‘Scandal struck again in November 2002 and touched Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington (and nephew of Prince Nayef). It was learned that money had gone from her purse to the pockets of two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, by way of two Saudi intermediaries, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan (Stephen Schwartz, Weekly Standard, 8/12/03). On the flight was the noted horse breeder Prince Ahmad bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of the Kentucky Derby winner War Emblem. After returning to Saudi Arabia, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 43, his cousin, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah, aged 41, was killed in a car accident the next day, on his way to Prince Ahmad’s funeral. . . .” (Idem.)"

and:


8. More about Zubaydah’s fingering of Prince Ahmed (War Emblem’s owner) and his role as contact person for Al Qaeda on behalf of the royal family: “The name Zubaydah gave came as a complete surprise to the CIA. It was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, the owner of many legendary racehorses and one of the most westernized members of the royal family. On September 16, 2001, Prince Ahmed, of course, had boarded the flight in Lexington as part of the evacuation plan approved by the Bush White House.” (Idem.)

9. “Prince Ahmed was well known not just in Saudi Arabia, but also in publishing circles in London and horse-racing circles in Kentucky. He was such an unlikely name that the interrogators immediately assumed Zubaydah was lying to buy time. . . .The interrogators then keep their prisoner on a ‘bare minimum’ of pain medication and interrupted his sleep with bright lights for hour after hour before restarting the Sodium Pentothal drip.” (Ibid.; pp. 265-266.)

and:

13. After discussing Prince Ahmed’s purchase of War Emblem, the horse’s success in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, and the awkward presence at the Derby of New York firefighters who had lost many of their co-workers on 9/11, the program highlights Prince Ahmed’s curious absence from the U.S. when War Emblem was running in the Belmont Stakes. Prince Ahmed then died on 7/22/2002, allegedly of a heart attack. “ . . . But on June 8, Prince Ahmed did not even show up at the Belmont Stakes, the third part of the Triple Crown. ‘I’m disappointed the prince wasn’t here,’ said trainer Bob Baffeert. Ahmed was said to be tending to family obligations in Riyadh. An associate said that he did not know the nature of the obligations. In any case, War Emblem stumbled as he came out of the starting gate and came in eighth. About six weeks later, on July 22, Prince Ahmed was dead. News reports said the forty-three-year-old nephew of King Fahd had died in his sleep due to a heart attack.” (Ibid.; p. 268.)

14. Within eight days of Ahmed’s death, the two other members of the royal family alleged by Zubaydah to have served as liaison agents between Al Qaeda and the house of Saud had died under odd circumstances. “ . . . Ahmed was not the only person named by Zubaydah to suffer ill. The next day, July 23, Ahmed’s cousin, Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, was killed in a one-car crash while en route to Ahmed’s funeral. A week later, on July 30, Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, a third member of the royal family who had been named by Zubaydah, was found in the desert having apparently died of thirst.” (Ibid.; pp. 268-269.)

from:
http://www.spitfirelist.com/f460.html

[Octafish]

122. "Did he leave a will?"

Great post, as always, seemslikeadream. Posner's where the horsie people hang out. I prefer fish folk.

[Octafish]

84. Grover Norquist wishes NAZIs had killed more of "The Greatest Generation."

Norquist the talking turd said so. From DailyKos:

Norquist: The Greatest Generation is anti-American

by ManfromMiddletown
Mon Sep 20th, 2004 at 19:42:23 PST
(From the diaries -- kos)

Just when you think that Grover Norquist can sink no lower, he opens his mouth.  In an interview with Spanish paper El Mundo, Norquist hit a new low. When asked about if he thought Democratic Party was coming to an end Norquist told Pablo Pardo of El Mundo:

"Yes, because in addition their demographic base is shrinking.  Each year, 2 million people who fought in the Second World War and lived through the Great Depression die. This generation has been an exeception in American history, because it has defended anti-American policies.  They voted for the creation of the welfare state and obligatory military service. They are the base of the Democratic Party. And they are dying. And, at the same time, all the time more Americans have stocks. That makes them defend the interests of business, because it is their own interest. Because of that, it's impossible to bring to the fore policies of social hate, of class warfare."

That's right, the Bush camp is cheering on the death of America's Greatest Generation. Are they trying to channel the spirit of Joseph McCarthy?

Have they no sense of shame?

SOURCE:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/9/20/212529/479

[kk897]

69. or even further, when 19th C. robber barons,

including Bush decendants, made their fortunes in the opium trade...

[Octafish]

105. There's a lot to that.

The English have waged war to protect their opium trade. So, it's not so odd that Bush and his clan have gone out of their way to establish their genealogical ties to the blueblood NAZIs who run Pommyland. For 30-plus years now, Bush and his secret team have been waging war on America, "The War on Drugs."

Have you heard of Celerino Castillo? He saw guys working directly to OIiver North offload planes filled with weapons and then saw the same planes loaded up with dope.



Dope. Felon. Traitor. Nutjob... Dope. Felon. Traitor. Nutjob....

CONTRA-INTELLIGENCE
ON OLIVER L. NORTH

By Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd
Former Federal Drug Agent and Author of:
Powderburns- Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War
posted at DrugWar.com
May 12, 2004

EXCERPT...

At the height of the Contra war, I was stationed in Central America for 5 years as the lead DEA agent in El Salvador. It was there that I came face to face with the contradictions of my assignments. I started to record intelligence on how known drug traffickers, with multiple DEA files, were utilizing hangars 4 and 5 at Illopango airbase in El Salvador, to transport monies and drugs. Those hangars were owned and operated by the CIA and NSC. The Contra supply operations utilized the most readily available capabilities: drug-smugglers, who had the planes and pilots to conduct clandestine flights from South and Central America to all parts of the United States. "Guns down, drugs back," was the formula.

During that period, I was warned several times by the DEA and the State Department to shut down my Contra investigations but not to close the files. The reason was that if I did not close the investigation, then the committees would not be able to have excess to the files under the Freedom of Information Act. However, I continued to file my reports on the Contras to DEA HQS. These reports on members of the Contra operators went on for several years.

During the 1980s, Felix Rodriguez was in charge of the Contras' supply network in El Salvador for Oliver North. In addition, Rodriguez hired a Cuban terrorist by the name of Luis Posada Carriles to help him run the operation. On October 1976, after an explosion sent a Cuban jetliner plummeting into the sea off Barbados, it was revealed that the mastermind behind the bombing was no other then Luis Posada. In late 2000, Posada was arrested in a plot to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro.

The July 9, 1984 entry in North's diary obligingly published by Senator John Kerry, states, in Ollie's own hand, "Wanted aircraft to go to Bolivia to pick up paste, want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos."

CONTINUED w LINK CITY...

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonorthmay1104.shtm

[Octafish]

102. George Bush: World Class Monster

Totally agree: These turds of the BFEE go a ways back. Now here's a bit of deep background many may not know. I disagree in calling anyone a monster, especially since de-humanizing a person by that label masks the personal responsibility for criminality, no matter how utterly monstrous.

Still, it's a good word. And, if the shoe fits....

George Bush:

World Class Monster

“George Bush is a satanic, sadistic, brutal monster.
Compared to George Bush, Adolf Hitler was a true gentleman.”
- Michael Boren Williams, former Campaign Manager for Senator Gary Hart and Bush murder attempt victim

“For the record, if I had my choice as to which one of the two (Clinton or Bush) represented the greater evil, I would say George Bush - in the blink of an eye....”
- Michael Ruppert, former LAPD Narcotics detective

True evil does not develop in a vacuum.

Evil is arrogant. It has no conscience. It is utterly self-serving. It hides from the light and will attack, even destroy others to preserve its own demented delusions. It is an unrestrained sociopath, wallowing in the murky darkness of its own psychosis while endlessly rationalizing its terrible deeds. It infiltrates the weak-minded and subverts the weak of character.

Evil... creates a world of shadows - shadow play - shadow government. It lives by the lie.

“The Big Lie,” once thought to be the exclusive purview of the Nazis, has become canonized in our form of government. And it is growing more perverse—more insidious. Like the Nazis before the fall of the Third Reich, we are a nation wallowing in the murky darkness of our own psychosis.

I can think of no contemporary American family more twisted and evil than the Bush dynasty.

The Bush family’s rapacious greed and depravity can trace its lineage to New England’s Pierce family. Both George Herbert Walker Bush and his wife Barbara Pierce (of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner and Smith), as was President Franklin Pierce, are descended from this same family. Originally the powerful Percy family, they changed their name to Pierce and quickly emigrated to America when Thomas Percy’s involvement in the Gun Powder Plot to assassinate King James I was revealed.<*>
as also known as the Brotherhood of Death....”<1>

SNIP...

“...During the past one hundred years any theory of history or historical evidence that falls outside a pattern established by the American Historical Association and the major foundations with their grant making power has been attacked or rejected—not on the basis of any evidence presented, but on the basis of the acceptability of the argument of the so-called Eastern Liberal Establishment and its official historical line. There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy. They can never result from premeditated planned group action. An excellent example is the Kennedy assassination when, within 9 hours of the Dallas tragedy, TV networks announced the shooting was not a conspiracy regardless of the fact that a negative proposition can never be proven and that the investigation had barely begun.”<4>

CONTINUED...

http://www.voxfux.com/features/bush_world_class_criminal.html

VoxFux does a very good job of finding things that people should know that the major news media seem to miss. Wish there were more real journalists.

[bobthedrummer]

70. Kick.

:dem::kick:

[Octafish]

103. You know these bastards really are NAZIs, right?

George Herbert Walker Bush was friends with "White Russian" George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harve Oswald's "best friend" in Dallas, Texas. How interesting that other friends of these fellahs include Allen Dulles and Igor Orlov and Martin Bormann.

The NAZI Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination

EXCERPT...

"Treason for My Daily Bread" -- Argentina and Martin Bormann

    In August 1971, a French paper headlined a news story, "Martin Bormann behind the Kennedy murders." It listed an international band of killers that was located in Texas. They carried out the two assassinations at the German command.

SNIP...

    Buddy Walters, murdered January 10, 1969, picked up a .45 slug in Dealey Plaza and gave it to the Dallas Police.

SNIP...

    Otto Skorzeny's CIA and Reinhard Gehlen death squads, with headquarters in Madrid, were funded by Martin Bormann when the Evita Peron funds were shared after 1952.

    Lebedev mentions "Ruth," David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, and Colonel Orlov.

    The very first day George de Mohrenschildt visited Marina Oswald she was alone and Lee was working. He brought with him a "Colonel Orlov."

CONTINUED...

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Nazi%20Connection%20to%20JFK%20Assass.html

This may be history. But, we're living it.

[lenidog]

113. So Borman had Kennedy killed

I guess that nixes the theory that Borman was a spy for the NKVD.

[Octafish]

114. Don't know. Just seems like the NAZIs benefited the most.

Don't you think?

[seemslikeadream]

78. Hugo Chavez - Bush's Nemesis- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

from my friend Tinoire

The Revolution will NOT be Televised. Required Viewing
Required viewing for all Progressive DUers!!!! (yeah, yeah, so sayeth I for the first time ever!))

Absolutely amazing from a cinematographic/artistic point of view and the story! -I just can't say enough! You MUST see it!

On April 12th 2002 the world awoke ((Remember Older DUers??)) to the news that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had been removed from office and had been replaced by a new interim government. What had in fact taken place was the first Latin American coup of the 21st century, and the world's first media coup...
The violence was sparked by a Supreme Court decision
---


The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Documentary Feature
Screening in Special Screenings
US Premiere
"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a feature length documentary on Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela. Over the course of 7 months, from January to July 2002, the filmmakers secured unprecedented access to film Chavez in his daily life. During this time, there was a coup and the filmmakers were the only crew inside the presidential palace at the time. They were also the first there for his triumphant return some 48 hours later. On the 11th April 2002, the world awoke to the news that President Hugo Chavez had been removed from office and had been replaced by a new self-appointed "interim" government. News report after news report carried stories of the mayhem in Caracas, where 11 people had been killed in what were alleged to have been bloody street battles between Chavez supporters and an opposition march. Viewers all over the world were led to believe that Chavez had ordered the killings, and had therefore been forced to resign. What had in fact took place was the first coup of the twenty first century, and the world's first media coup. "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" is a thrilling insight into President Chavez and the power of globalized media.

Total program length: 74 mins
http://www.sxsw.com/film/screenings/index.php?dvsearch= ...




SYNOPSIS

IN THEATRES: NOVEMBER 5, 2003 (NY)

"Don't be poisoned by their lies," says Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in the last line of THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED, referring to the way that the media corrupts the truth for the purpose of political persuasion. And thus the immediacy of this documentary--which consists of fast-moving footage captured during a two-day period in April 2002 when Chavez was kidnapped from the presidential palace in Caracas and the media announced a successful coup--serves simply as a good example of media manipulation. Using television news clips, the film shows how the privately owned Venezuelan media attacks Chavez, comparing him to Fidel Castro and accusing him of mental instability. Washington chimes in, accusing Chavez of being in cahoots with Columbian narco-terrorists. But the documentary also establishes Chavez's position as the people's president. He put in place a democratic constitution and promised to redistribute the nation's significant wealth--Venezuela is the world's fourth largest exporter of oil--to benefit the poor, who represent 80 percent of the population. And from there, the media reports against him sound like cards being played in the oil game.

The Irish filmmakers, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Brian, were inside the palace making a routine documentary about Chavez when the coup began. Meanwhile, a million Chavez supporters gathered in the streets outside demanding that their leader be restored. Within 48 hours, their pleas were answered and Chavez was president again. THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED offers a fascinating inside perspective on both Chavez's popularity and the way that media can bastardize the truth for political gain.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/revolution_will_not_be_televised/about.php?rtp=1

The Banff Rockie Awards 2003 were announced in Canada last night and the Global Television Grand Prize / Grand Prix Global was awarded to Chavez - Inside the Coup, Power Pictures Ltd. in association with RTÉ/ The Irish Film Board/BBC/ZDF/ARTE/NPS/CoBo/ YLE.


The documentary, which depicted the overthrow and return to power of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in a coup in 2002, was directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain and produced by David Power of the Galway-based independent company. The company had secured unique access to President Chavez for an observational documentary and were with him in the Presidential Palace in Caracas when the coup took place.

http://www.chavezthefilm.com/html/film/banff_release.htm

----
<snip / good info re oil & Venezuela>

Washington's hostility towards Venezuela became more pronounced, with senior officials questioning President Chavez' 'commitment to democracy' – this from a US administration that required the intervention of the Supreme Court to enjoy 'electoral' success!


Nonetheless, President Chavez' domestic opponents - driven by the kleptocracy that ran PDVSA - had found new friends abroad.
After the coup, it would emerge that the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an agency of the US government, had quadrupled its funding for Venezuelan 'democrats' (the opposition) in the year leading up to the coup. NED funding of the opposition totalled $877,000.

<snip / oil>

US Oil Supply Threatened
But it was events in the Middle East that may well have compelled the coup plotters to act when they did. Israeli actions in Occupied Palestine, during the early months of 2002, resulted in widespread international condemnation and anger. Attention focused on the United States – Israel's chief source of financial and political support.

<snip / oil>

http://www.chavezthefilm.com/html/backgrd/oil.htm


US officials have been glaringly faint in their praise for Chavez's triumphant return. Condoleezza Rice, US national security adviser, expressed her hope that Chavez "takes this opportunity to right his own ship which has, quite frankly, been moving in the wrong direction for some time."
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gamal15.html


---

Of course, a US state department official is trained to hear the sound of an oil well tap turning from several thousand miles away. Chavez is no friend to the US. He went on television to denounce the US bombing of civilians in Afghanistan, brandishing pictures of dead children. He is a public friend to Fidel Castro. It wasn't mentioned here, but he has had his meetings with Saddam Hussein and Gadafy. In Bush's list of those "either with us or against us", he's with the axis of irritants. "We are concerned with some of the things said by President Chavez, and his understanding of what a democratic system is about," said Colin Powell, with the hemmed in anger of a boss who has an employee he wants to sack, but the union won't let him.

<snip>

The world's press carried reports that could have been written by the coup leaders themselves, and, because they were based on these pictures, to a certain extent they were. This film punctured every lie. The world accused the pro-Chavez crowd of carrying out the shootings; O'Briain and Bartley's camera proved it wasn't so, filming the victims almost before they hit the ground. The coup leader Pedro Carmona's speech about this "profoundly democratic process" and Colin Powell's parroting of Carmona's lie was inter-cut with film of the police shooting at protestors. As Carmona was on CNN declaring that the "the country is in a state of total normality", the camera was in the palace from which he had just been ousted. It followed the palace guard as they moved to strategic positions, took the building back and reinstated Chavez.

<snip>

http://www.chavezthefilm.com/html/film/review.htm

Hours after Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez had been ushered from his office into military detention, his successor, Pedor Carmona Estanga, a former oil executive and head of the country’s largest business organization, committed a series of monumentally authoritarian acts. With the stroke of a pen, without a mandate from the public, backed only by the authority vested in him by the country’s generals, Carmona dissolved the congress, disbanded the Supreme Court, closed the Attorney-General’s and comptroller's offices, repealed 48 laws that shifted some of the country’s wealth from the elite and oligarchs to the country’s poor, and ripped up the constitution. Were there ever a model for autocratic rule, this was it.
President George W. Bush remarked, "Now the situation will be one of tranquility and democracy." The New York Times, doing its best to mimic the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984, declared, "With yesterday’s resignation of President Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be-dictator."

<snip>

In November, the US foreign policy establishment convoked a meeting to decide what to do about Chavez. He had chastised Washington for fighting terrorism with terrorism, cozied up to Cuba, refused to cooperate in the US war on Colombian guerillas, and committed a monumental heresy: He resisted the IMF, and wondered why a country with the Western hemisphere’s largest oil reserves, should be teeming with poor. The IMF let it be known that it would support a transitional government.

<snip>

With the stroke of a pen, Carmona, a man no one elected, cancelled land reform, cancelled free health care and education up to university, and cancelled a constitution that had taken away the oligarchs’ power to dominate the country at the expense of the majority, 80 percent of whom live in poverty, the country’s massive oil wealth beyond their reach.
<snip>

Before the generals ousted Chavez, US Secretary of State Colin Powell demanded Chavez correct "his understanding of what a democracy is." Apparently, democracy isn’t rule by the people.
http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans49.html

<snip>

Venezuela is the fourth largest producer of oil, and the corporate elites whose political power runs unfettered in the Bush/Cheney oligarchy appear interested in privatizing Venezuela's oil industry. Furthermore, the establishment might be concerned that Chavez's `barter deals' with 12 Latin American countries and Cuba are effectively cutting the U.S. dollar out of the vital oil transaction currency cycle. Commodities are being traded among these countries in exchange for Venezuela's oil, thereby reducing reliance on fiat dollars. If these unique oil transactions proliferate, they could create more devaluation pressure on the dollar. Continuing attempts by the CIA to remove Hugo Chavez appear likely.

<snip of really excellent article>

http://www.mediamonitors.net/williamclark1.html

Here is a list of BBC articles from that period:

http://www.fightthebias.com/Resources/Rec_Read/Dictator_In_The_Making.htm

For the past few years, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has been meeting with the enemies of the United States including Libya and Iraq. His behavior otherwise is disturbing as well. Below is a small timeline of recent events in Venezuela.


Here is a complete, albeit Anglo, rendition of the happening…..

For the past few years, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has been meeting with the enemies of the United States including Libya and Iraq. His behavior otherwise is disturbing as well. Below is a small timeline of recent events in Venezuela.





Hugo Chavez
2003

for all working links below see this thread
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1020531

01/04/2003 Two shot dead in Venezuela clashes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2625997.stm
01/04/2003 In pictures: Venezuela strike chaos
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2555283.stm
01/03/2003 Country profile: Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/country_profi...

2002
12/24/2002 Venezuela strikers reject \'truce\' offer
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2602777.stm
12/21/2002 Britons warned to leave Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2597371.stm
12/16/2002 Violence flares in Venezuela protests
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2581805.stm
12/15/2002 Chavez opponents mass on streets
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2576561.stm
12/12/2002 Venezuelans living on the brink
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2568267.stm
12/11/2002 In pictures: Venezuela panic
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2565727.stm
12/11/2002 Venezuela crisis deepens
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2563981.stm
12/06/2002 Strikes threaten to cripple Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2548509.stm
12/05/2002 In pictures: Venezuela on strike
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2547619.stm
11/30/2002 Venezuelan dissident generals sacked
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2529905.stm
11/19/2002 Troops disperse Venezuela protest
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2493171.stm
11/07/2002 Chavez fights referendum plans
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2413563.stm
11/05/2002 Dozens injured in Caracas clashes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2402717.stm
10/23/2002 Army officers urge Venezuela rebellion
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2348217.stm
10/20/2002 Chavez \'foils assassination plot\'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2344973.stm
10/06/2002 Another Venezuela coup attempt \'foiled\'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2303199.stm
09/08/2002 Chavez pushes through oil for Cuba
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2245333.stm
08/19/2002 Chavez vows to fight opposition
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2204144.stm
08/03/2002 Street clashes engulf Venezuela\'s capital
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2169623.stm
07/10/2002 Carter\'s Venezuela bid fails
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2120064.stm
06/25/2002 Chavez warns against more coup plots
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2061680.stm
06/21/2002 Chavez defiant in face of protests
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2056090.stm
05/27/2002 Venezuelan coup leader given asylum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2009907.stm
05/12/2002 Venezuelans march against Chavez
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1982275.stm
05/07/2002 Rift in Venezuelan society
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_corr...
05/06/2002 Venezuela president names new cabinet
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1970022.stm
05/03/2002 Venezuela minister warns of new coup
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1965230.stm
04/20/2002 New boss for Venezuela\'s oil giant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1940672.stm
04/17/2002 Chavez opposition sceptical of change
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1934304.stm
04/15/2002 Currency plunges on Chavez return
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1930481.stm
04/14/2002 Analysis: After the would-be coup
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1929498.stm
04/14/2002 Analysis: Venezuela\'s crippled economy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1925514.stm
04/14/2002 In pictures: Chavez defies opponents
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1925248.stm
04/14/2002 Chavez poised for comeback
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1928700.stm
04/14/2002 Venezuela interim president resigns
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1928700.stm
04/13/2002 Latin America ambivalent over ouster
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1927390.stm
04/12/2002 Venezuela press condemns \'autocrat\' Chavez
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_repor...
04/12/2002 Venezuela\'s political disarray
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1926185.stm
04/12/2002 Analysis: Venezuela\'s crippled economy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business/newsid_192500... /
04/12/2002 Venezuela president forced out
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1925161.stm
04/12/2002 Venezuela military challenge president
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1924864.stm
04/07/2002 Venezuela president sacks oil executives
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1916181.stm
03/21/2002 Clashes erupt on Venezuela streets
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1884700.stm
02/27/2002 Venezuela divided over Chavez
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1845680.stm
02/14/2002 Venezuela\'s currency in freefall
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1818558.stm

2001
12/16/2001 Chavez forces capitulation of banks
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1713761.stm
12/10/2001 Venezuela\'s Chavez faces labour wrath
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/1701778.stm
08/12/2001 Castro visits Venezuelan ally
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1486212.stm
08/11/2001 Castro visits Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1486150.stm
05/25/2001 China urges stronger ties with Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1349795.s...
04/17/2001 Venezuela backs China in US/China aircraft collision
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1280995.stm
04/16/2001 Venezuela supports China\'s human rights record
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1280094.s...
04/15/2001 Venezuela welcomes Chinese President Jiang
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/1279440.s...

2000
12/05/2000 US looking into alleged Chavez mischief
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1056878.stm
10/26/2000 Castro arrives in Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/991921.stm
10/15/2000 Army general named as head of Venezuelan federal oil company
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/973614.stm
09/29/2000 Iran-Iraq talks in Caracas
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/948985.stm
09/21/2000 Chavez seeks more power
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/935580.stm
09/03/2000 Chavez supports Bolivia against Chile
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/858999.stm
08/19/2000 Venezuela\'s Chavez sworn in again
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/885063.stm
07/31/2000 Cuba delighted at Chavez victory
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/860320.stm
07/15/2000 Chavez military critic arrested
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/834545.stm
03/01/2000 Retired Venezuelan military officers denounce Chavez\' political use of military forces
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/662871.stm
02/02/2000 Chavez demands international respect for Venezuela as a sovereign country
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/628687.stm
01/14/2000 Venezuela rejects US military aid after disaster
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/603235.stm

1999
12/23/1999 In pictures: Venezuela\'s devastation
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/576821.stm
12/19/1999 In pictures: Venezuela\'s flood chaos
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/571928.stm
12/16/1999 Venezuela backs new constitution. - Opponents say authoritarianism on it\'s way
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/566096.stm
12/13/1999 Venezuela Cardinal says Chavez is \'\'like Mussolini\'\'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/564002.stm
11/11/1999 Venezuela suspends scores of allegedly corrupt judges
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/515303.stm
11/05/1999 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/431320.stm
10/25/1999 Venezuela\'s Chavez defends his reforms. Critics say he is too powerful
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/505490.stm
08/27/1999 Venezuela\'s Congress vows defiance after being stripped of power
08/03/1999 Constitutional rewrite begins in Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/411029.stm
07/12/1999 Cuban foreign minister visits Venezuela
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/392688.stm
02/05/1999 Venezuela\'s Chavez wants coup officers reinstated
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/272659.stm

1998
10/01/1998 Anti-Chavez alliance in Venezuela fails
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/183949.stm
06/17/1998 Venezuela jails are worst in world
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/114405.stm

[Carl Brennan]

93. Kick

[burythehatchet]

107. Octafish, you're doing a good deed

in keeping this info out front as often as possible. You've built a good reference library and a critical mass of people may learn the truth some day, due to the efforts of people like you. Unfortunately, the Wrong people are still in charge of what "history" is placed in the public domain.

[Octafish]

117. Thank Gore for the Internets. We can ALL be Winston Smiths...

... Except we correct the official record with the TRUTH. And it's what the BFEE fears the most.

Thank you for the kind words, burythehatchet! Much obliged.

Oh yeah. Here's another thread from a ways back that had a few dandies, courtesy of the good folk on DU...

The Bush Organized Crime Family

... A/K/A...

Bush Inc
The Bush Crime Syndicate
The Bush Family Evil Empire
The Secret Team
The Humongous Transnational Criminal Enterprise
The Shadow Government
The Octopus.


Whatever name it uses, the BFEE operates to:

• Command the world's mightiest military for personal gain.
• Control the physical and intellectual property of the United States.
• Manipulate the American public through fear and intimidation.
• Penure the nation's middle class to the benefit of the wealthiest individuals and powerful corporations.
• Rob the mineral resources of the world's nations.
• Enslave the world's free peoples.
• Kill those who oppose them.
• Destroy the Constitution of the United States of America.

Fun thread filled with fact to make “Them” furious. Ha!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=875102

[govegan]

118. More discussion and where do we go from here?

So much information. Great compilation.

I have really been studying the books edited by Dr. James H. Fetzer about some of the latest work on the JFK assassination, Murder in Dealey Plaza and The Great Zapruder Film Hoax. Some of his work can be linked to at www.assassinationscience.com.

Realizing the scope and work of the JFK cover up, one would have to be shortsighted and foolish not to see the scope and work of the elections frauds of the tweny-first century in the US.

Some have seen this time on the horizon. As Scott Nearing, the great homesteading pioneer and lifetime political radical, wrote in 1972 (in his autobiography aptly titled The Making of a Radical, A Political Autobiography):

"Another consequence of natural and social forces operating through the agency of change is the rat race for wealth, prestige, and power which is the central motive of western civilization. At the individual level the wealth-power rat race is carried on by those who devote their talents and energies to getting ahead and keeping ahead. They are not satisfied merely to survive. They strive for recognition, for prestige. Their declared aim is security. Their real goal is the exercise of power. Hunger for power animates them, corrupts them, and finally consumes them. They lead the rat race, enjoy its honors, grow paunchy with its rewards.

The most successful of the rat race leaders constitute a wealth-prestige-power oligarchy, a self-selected minority which initiates policy and directs the appartus of exploitation. The oligarchs aim to gain and keep a monopoly of wealth, prestige, and power and from this vantage point to get a monopolist's share of available goods and services.

Where possible the oligarchy seeks to perpetuate itself, handing wealth and power from father to son, generation after generation, thus converting a ruling group into a ruling, exploiting class, controlling and operating a state apparatus designed to safeguard and extend its wealth and power. Yesterday the process was a rat race, today it is a class dictatorship. If it survives until tomorrow it will have consolidated its position and have become a caste structure, perpetuationg the privileges and prerogatives of those who enjoy privileges and wield power. "

Exactly why John Kerry seemed to be an inappropriate candidate for a true opposition party. Whether we are now a class dictatorship or a caste structure, I find that Kerry's credentials place him on the opposite side of the equation as myself and opposite to those who would oppose the dissolution of democracy. This has very much to do with why he could not wage an aggressive campaign or engage in meaningful debate. Like Tony Blair and others, his life is imbued with that with which it works, like the dyer's hand, as Shakespeare would say.

I supported the old boy, but reluctantly so. He had no fire for confrontation, no living and breathing passion for social justice. I would be glad to be wrong, and still would prefer his hands on a portion of the reins of power.


.........................

Also from Nearing in 1972:

"The apparatus for waging and winning war is part of the institutional equipment of states. When the war-making apparatus becomes dominant, a civil state becomes a warfare state. In a warfare state waging war is a standard aspect of state policy as periodic war becomes permanent. Warfare states minimize persuasion and accept armed violence as the chief instrument for enforcing policy."

This is an apt description of the neo-fascist game plan, permanent war (aka "war on terror") and armed violence as the chief instrument for enforcing policy. How far these neo-fascists go with this remains to be seen, but the dominance of the war-making apparatus can hardly be denied.

Writing about fascism in the first half of the 20th century, Nearing had this to say:

"Fascism is the reaction of the propertied and privileged to the general crisis in capitalist imperialism. War, economic collapse, colonial revolt and proletarian revolution are all aspects of the general crisis, and in that sense only they are all responsible for fascism. Even were there no working class movement, the propertied and privileged would be compelled to retreat to fascism as the superstructure of capitalist imperialism comes tumbling down about their ears. The suppression of the communist movement does not prevent the rise of fascism. It merely destroys the militant and aggressive leadership of the proletarian revolution."

One motivation for the propertied and privileged to have consolidated their position under neo-fascist ideology in the twenty-first century is their craven need to support the "superstructure of capitalist imperialism." And as Nearing also wrote of fascism: "The necessity for preserving an established institution such as private property, makes the Fascist movement essentially opportunistic. It can have no great ideal. Its driving force is the desire to keep. It is necessarily a narrow, restrictive movement."

......................

As Thoreau concluded his Civil Disobedience essay he wrote: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor."

I think that there is a lot of truth in what is compiled here. As many knew, the 2004 election in the US was only the beginning of a larger struggle.

Perhaps it is the lack of any "great ideals" that will prove the undoing of the BFEE and their bedfellows. Many still believe that the State should be just to all men.

[Octafish]

123. Your entire analysis is outstanding. Disagree about Kerry...

... he may be "of" the upper-class, but he's always been willing to put his life on the line for the country and his fellow man --my opinion based on past performance.

To what you, Nearing and Throreau said: Hear! Hear!

Just one thing to add: What Gandhi said:

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - Think of it, ALWAYS.

Regarding what to do about "Them," there's the traditional solution their ilk deserve. I prefer we take the "enlightened" approach and realise that the rich are part of the big picture, as well, and deserve a spot in it. The line is drawn where they believe that they have -- or deserve -- greater political value than another human. Under our Constitution, we ALL are equals in rights and under the Law.

Here's the kind of upper-class Joe I'm talking about, from a truly great DU thread...

milkyway: Notes from the great Robert Kennedy, Jr's appearance in NYC Monday night.

He was at the Union Square Barnes & Noble for a discussion of his "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy." I had already read the book and found it to be the most powerful indictment against the bush administration that I have read.

Kennedy spoke for about half an hour and then took some questions from the audience. When he began speaking he wasted very little time in presenting a blistering case against bush. His passion and bluntness is reminiscent of Howard Dean. I wrote down some of his quotes, with occasional paraphrasing.

--Kennedy said that protecting the environment is not a partisan issue. 80% of both parties are in favor of strong environmental laws. "This means that 80% of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on."

--He spoke of how the Clinton administration was prosecuting the biggest polluters in the country who had broken the law for years. bush killed the lawsuits. "A Presidential candidate took money from criminals targeted for prosecution, then dropped the lawsuits when he took office."

--Kennedy has been tested by a doctor who found that he had three times the acceptable mercury level in his body. "I was told that a woman with my mercury level would give birth to children with cognitive disabilities. I said to the doctor, 'You mean might.' The doctor said, 'No, not might, she would'."

--Kennedy talked about how people in many states can no longer eat the fish they catch. "Kids can't go fishing with their Dads anymore because somebody gave money to a politician."

--"bush wants us to treat the planet as a business in liquidation."

--Kennedy spoke at length about free market capitalism and how he is a strong supporter of free markets. He said companies get the public to pay their costs of bringing their product to market. "Most pollution comes not from a free market, but from the suspension of free market rules."

-- He talked about the rapid disappearance of the family farm in American agriculture and the takeover by corporate farms. "There is no free market anymore in American agriculture."
--"I am more frightened by corporate farmers than by Osama bin Laden. When I said this in front of 1200 farmers I got a ten minute standing ovation."

--"When corporations run our government they don't run it for democracy, they run it for plunder." Kennedy talked about Mussolini describing fascism as corporatism, the merger of state power and corporate power.

--"There are five billion people on earth who hate America now."

--"The bush administration has taken the 'conserve' out of conservation."

--"God talks to us through Nature...all prophets came from the wilderness."

--Kennedy was asked by an audience member about the Kerry campaign and environmental issues. "Kerry has told me he 'cannot get traction in the press on these issues'...All the media cares about is the fist fight...The White House press corps are stenographers."

--Kennedy talked at length about the mainstream media. He said six multinationals control most of the media in America. Local news no longer worries about serving the community. "Local news is for extracting profit."

--"We are in the humiliating position of the nation that invented the free press having to go to the BBC to get foreign news."
--Disagreeing with the bush administration's claim that we can only have environmental protections during times of prosperity, Kennedy said, "The biggest environmental advances were made by FDR during the Depression."

--"The world hates our country and this president, but not the American people. If we re-elect bush, they'll hate the American people too."

--When asked about Christie Whitman's EPA reporting that the air was safe immediately after 9/11, Kennedy said, "The reports were a rank deception. The EPA was actively lying to the people of New York...the levels were so high that if we visited a Superfund site with those levels we would have to wear moonsuits." He spoke of Whitman's husband's ties with Citigroup and Traveler's Insurance. "Traveler's Insurance saved at least half billion dollars by Whitman's pronouncements (because they wouldn't have to pay housing costs for the displaced)."

Robert Kennedy, Jr. has become known as one of our nation's foremost environmental lawyers. But in this discussion he moved far beyond environmental issues to bring together many ideas--corporate cronyism, the plundering of our public commons, media consolidation, the corporate takeover of our democracy and its connection to people's increasing health problems, the damage to our reputation abroad, the growing spiritual disconnect between ourselves and Nature, and the degradation of our nation's values and character. Not only did he present an overwhelming case for the removal of george bush from office, he also offered a humane, just path to the future. His might be the most powerful voice today speaking truth to corporate power. He speaks with great passion and pulls no punches. There were several audience members near tears, including myself, as he offered us a glimpse of what could have been and what still could be. They killed his uncle, and then they killed his father. In the age of bush, Robert Kennedy, Jr. offers us hope that we might one day find our way out of this enveloping darkness.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2381029

[govegan]

126. Gandhi is a wonderful inspiration.

As he said: "I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and nonviolence are as old as the hills."


Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a great and tireless advocate for environmental sanity and justice. I heard him describe how both the Kerry and Gore campaigns had told him the same story about not being able to get traction on their environmental platforms in the media. Yet, I wonder if they (the campaigns) tried as hard as they might have. The corporate owned press will not willingly cut any slack for liberal causes, but I believe that ways must exist to make them do more than they now do. Bonnie Anderson recently wrote a book Newsflash which gives an insider's view on the transition of the major media, particularly television, to "infotainment." She had twenty years of experience at CNN and NBC as a correspondent and reporter. It is even soft on the news folks, in my opinion, but still paints a grim picture of control of major news reporting.

as quoted above: "bush wants us to treat the planet as a business in liquidation."

Kennedy's father remains a great inspiration as well.

"Too much and too long we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values to the mere accumulation of material things. The gross national product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America, except whether we are proud to be Americans." (Address, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968)

[Frank Rose]

120. Kick, I'm tired, went 3 days without electricity, found out I'm

a junkie to the man with the kilowatt plan, missed all here greatly. This is the core of our fight, from JFK to JFK, our cause has been met with a giant corporate resistance, The bullet in Dallas, the October Surprise, Willie Horton, the blue dress, swift boat liars for bush*, different symptoms of the same disease: bush. Keep the candle burning Octafish, we'll get a light from you, and pass it around, thanks.

[Octafish]

125. Good thing it's only fall. When the hawk comes...

... no electricity can be a real drag.

Good to read ya, Frank! You're welcome and thank you for the kind words.

One time I went around the corner by a new building in the loop and dthe wind swirled around and picked me up and put me back down about a step behind where I started. I kid you not -- a guy in a navy mohair coat witnessed it and laughed with me. Or at me, now that I think of it!

[Melodybe]

128. kick! They are involved in basically every bad thing that has happened in

the last 70 years, from Hitler to the stolen election, they are the epitome of evil!