At least one more US soldier has been killed in Iraq.
For what? The neo-con wet dream of a Three Stooges
Reich...There are 31 days to go until the Electoral
Uprising...Forget about asking your fellow citizens if
they are better off than four years ago? The answer,
of course, is NO. Forget about even asking your fellow
citizens if they are safer than they were four years
ago. Again, the answer, of course, is NO. Now you
should ask "Can you really afford four more years of
the Bush abomination? Can you really afford four more
years of the most illegitimate, corrupt and
incompetent regime in modern American history? Can
the republic afford four more years of this failed
regime -- economically, environmentally,
strategically, militarily? Can the world afford four
more years of the Bush abomination?"
Here are SEVEN stories that should dominate the
airwaves and capture headlines above the fold, but
they won't. The Triad ( i.e. the Bush cabal itself,
its wholly-owned-subsidiary-formerly-known-as-the-Republican-Party and their sponsors, in the US regimestream news media) will make sure that they don't…Please read them and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. And, please, remember that the USregimestream news media does not want to inform you about this presidential campaign, it wants to DISinform you…FRODO LIVES!
Win Back Respect: A group of women calling themselves the "Band of Sisters," whose loved ones are currently deployed or were killed in Iraq, are featured in a new advertisement airing today that sharply questions George Bush's version of reality during last night's candidate debate. The ad may be viewed at: http://www.sistersspeakout.com
The ad was produced by Win Back Respect, a new campaign group formed to rapidly respond to Republican assertions on Iraq and national security in the final weeks of the campaign. The group has financial support from George Soros and Moveon.org, and its advisors include foreign policy experts such as Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.
Responding to the president's assertion last night that he 'has a plan' for Iraq, Brook Campbell of Atlanta, Ga. ads, "If he had a plan for progress (in Iraq), my brother might still be alive."
The ad will air beginning today in the Washington, D.C. area, and it will air beginning early next week in key markets in Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico. These states have high military family populations, who have been especially affected by George Bush's war in Iraq.
Win Back Respect is sponsoring a national tour headlined by the Band of Sisters and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. The tour was launched on Sept. 14 in Green Bay, Wis., and it will intensify through election day, visiting key battleground states with military bases and high military family populations. Win Back Respect is airing television advertisements in conjunction with the tour. General Clark said that he was proud to be joined by the Band of Sisters for these events:
"These courageous women and all of our military families are right to feel uneasy about the direction of our foreign policy. It is time for Americans to hear how this administration's failed policies have impacted our military families. I look forward to a real discussion about the costs of this administration's policies and the alternatives."
Reuters: Angered by President Bush's policy in Iraq, a group of military families whose relatives died there is targeting the president in new television ads to be aired ahead of the Nov. 2 election.
"I think the American people need to know that we have been betrayed in this rush to war," said Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey is among more than 1,000 U.S. troops who died in Iraq.
Sheehan joined a small group of military families at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday to launch new political ads by an interest group called RealVoices.org, which supports Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's White House bid.
The first ads are set to run next week nationally and in battleground cities of Las Vegas, Orlando and Albuquerque.
Nadia McCaffrey, a French-American whose son Patrick was killed in an ambush in Iraq on June 22, held up a picture of her only child clutching flowers given to him by Iraqi children about half an hour before he died.
"Can somebody tell me why my son had to die? We need some changes in this country. Strong, positive changes. We need to see things the way they are, not the way we are told. And yes, there is nothing I can do to replace my son," she said.
Another ad shows Raphael Zappala, whose brother Sgt. Sherwood Baker was killed on April 26 in Iraq while searching for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The threat of such weapons was given by Bush as the key reason for going into Iraq but no such weapons were found.
"The war was based on false stories and bad information. As the truth comes out, we know that the president was withholding information (about Iraq)," said Zappala, who also criticized the president for not providing all troops with body armor.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis): Relatives of a Minnesota Marine who was killed in Iraq lashed out Wednesday against the war and the Bush administration's conduct in waging it.
Across the street from the Lake Elmo restaurant where Vice President Dick Cheney had finished speaking an hour earlier, the grandmother of Levi Angell spoke of "my precious grandson I lost to this useless, needless fix we're in."
Lila Angell said the war "is crazy. It's just wrong." Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry "certainly would do better" in Iraq than President Bush. "He couldn't do any worse."
Levi Angell, a 20-year-old Marine from Cloquet, was killed April 8 when his Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
His father, Gordon, said he never received a condolence call from any member of the administration. "Bush was giving a speech 20 miles away [from Cloquet] and he never bothered to pick up the damned telephone and say 'I'm sorry about your son,' " he said. "From now on, I'm a Democrat after the way they treated us."
He said he got just such a call from John Kerry. "The only ones who seem to care about this whole terrible tragedy are Democrats," he said at the news conference arranged by the Kerry campaign.
David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, Washington Monthly: Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade. It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with respected figures around the world.
All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of whom were eager to see him succeed.
By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge...
JOEL CONNELLY, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER: Kitty Kelley is a tell-all biographer of the prominent and powerful, but has never forgotten lessons that she learned as a girl in Spokane about saving for a rainy day.
"You don't print everything you have. Always you have that extra 10 percent, so you can ask the person delivering the threats: Do you really want this to come out?" said the author who has chronicled the Bush family, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Kelley is riding atop the best-seller list with "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." The book's 634 pages take on the meticulously groomed image of the ruthless WASPs who supplanted the Kennedys as our dominant political family.
Kelley was hit by a lawsuit from Sinatra at the beginning of her research. Close friends of Nancy Reagan tried omerta -- a strategy of silence. But nowhere has she encountered such fear and secrecy as when trying to peer behind the Bushes.
"I would take Frank Sinatra, multiply him by Nancy Reagan and quadruple the total when I speak of the Bushes," she joked in an interview. "Here, you are dealing with an ex-president, a former CIA director, a sitting president, and a major governor. Above all, you are challenging a family fully vested in its public image.
"It's like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' With the Bushes, there's always another pod coming along."
The White House has discouraged talk shows from booking Kelley. She did spend three mornings on the "Today Show," but Matt Lauer's accusatory questioning had little to do with the substance of the book.
It's not surprising. "Today" has a vested interest in the adoring "exclusives" of former President George H.W. Bush and wife Barbara regularly produced by its national correspondent Jamie Gangel.
Still, Kelley has produced a compelling book, replete with black sheep and episodes of dark humor but also tributes to the steeliness of family patriarchs and matriarchs.
Robert Scheer, The Nation: Vice President Dick Cheney has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears. And for good reason: Cheney's business behavior could serve as a textbook case of much of what's wrong with the way corporate CEOs have come to play the game of business.
The game involves more than playing loose with accounting rules, as Halliburton Co. is accused of doing while Cheney was the Texas-based energy company's chief executive.
On Sunday, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, whom Cheney pushed for the job, reluctantly turned on his sponsor and announced a vigorous investigation of Halliburton's accounting violations. Recent business scandals, however, are also the product of legal loopholes that allow firms to scoop up billions in unregulated profits.
It was just such loopholes that allowed the rise and subsequent fall of Enron and telecom heavyweights like WorldCom--in the process making CEOs like Dick Cheney very, very rich.
Recall that Cheney was a political hack for most of his professional life, first as a staffer in the Ford White House, then as a congressman for a decade and after that as secretary of Defense under the current President's father.
During the Clinton years, however, Cheney took an extremely lucrative five-year cruise into the private sector as chief executive of Halliburton.
After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for Vice President, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36-million payoff for his final year of corporate service.
This journey from the public payroll to the corporate towers and back left a slimy trail of conflict-of-interest questions. For example, Defense Secretary Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on US military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer, Halliburton, to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade. When Cheney left to become CEO of the entire company, he recruited his Pentagon military aide, Joe Lopez, to become senior Vice President in charge of Pentagon dealings, which ultimately formed the most lucrative part of the otherwise ailing company's business...
Sidney Blumenthal, Guardian: In the split TV screen, how Bush felt was written all over his face. His grimaces exposed his irritation and anger at being challenged. Lacking intellectual stamina and repeating points as though on a feedback loop, he tried to close argument by assertion. With no one interrupting him, he protested, "Let me finish" - a phrase he occasionally deploys to great effect before the cowed White House press corps.
John Kerry was set up beforehand as Bush's foil: long-winded, dour, dull. But the Kerry who showed up was crisp, nimble and formidable. His thrusts brought out Bush's rigidity and stubbornness. The more Bush pleaded his own decisiveness, the more he appeared reactive.
Time and again, as he tried to halt Kerry, he accused him of "mixed signals" and "inconsistency." For Bush, certainty equals strength. Kerry responded with a devastating deconstruction of Bush's epistemology. Nothing like this critique of pure reason has ever been heard in a presidential debate. "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong," said Kerry.
Kerry's analysis of Bush's "colossal error of judgment" in Iraq was systematic, factual and historical. The coup de grace was the citation of the president's father's actions in the Gulf war. "You know," said Kerry, "the president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad, beyond Basra. And the reason he didn't is, he said - he wrote in his book - because there was no viable exit strategy. And he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That's exactly where we find ourselves today." With that, Kerry touched on Bush's most ambivalent relationship, the father he recently called "the wrong father," compared to the "Higher Father".
In flustered response, Bush simply insisted on his authority. "I just know how this world works ... there must be certainty from the US president." He reverted to his claim that September 11 justified the invasion of Iraq because "the enemy" - Saddam Hussein - "attacked us." A stunned but swift-footed Kerry observed: "The president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important ... he just said, 'The enemy attacked us'. Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us." In his effort to banish all doubt, Bush had retreated into a substitute reality, a delusional version of Iraq, ultimately faith-based.
Bush's attack lines on Kerry did not describe the surprising man standing opposite him. They had been effective last week, but were suddenly shopworn. But Bush couldn't adjust. The greater his frustration in the debate, the more frequently he spoke of his difficulties in coping with "my job." Ten times he spoke of his "hard work": listening to intelligence briefings, talking to allies, having to comfort a bereaved mother whose son was killed in Iraq.
Near the end, Kerry praised Bush for his public service, and his wife, and his daughters. "I'm trying to put a leash on them," Bush said. That was hard work, too. "Well, I don't know," replied Kerry, who also has daughters. "I've learned not to do that, Mr President." Even in the banter, Kerry gained the upper-hand.
But Bush lost more than control in the first debate. He has lost the plot.
Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1001-20.htm
Ad Featuring Debate Response to Air Today, Features "Band of Sisters" Attacking Bush's Debate Performance
WASHINGTON, October 1 - A group of women calling themselves the "Band of Sisters," whose loved ones are currently deployed or were killed in Iraq, are featured in a new advertisement airing today that sharply questions George Bush's version of reality during last night's candidate debate. The ad may be viewed at: http://www.sistersspeakout.com
The ad was produced by Win Back Respect, a new campaign group formed to rapidly respond to Republican assertions on Iraq and national security in the final weeks of the campaign. The group has financial support from George Soros and Moveon.org, and its advisors include foreign policy experts such as Clinton National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.
Last night, members of the Band of Sisters came together from around the country to view the debate, and the ad records their reactions. "He stood on TV pretending that what's happening is not happening," Michelle Harris of Arlington, Texas says in the ad. J
ane Jenson of Fitchburg, Wis., whose son currently is deployed in Iraq, says of Bush's debate performance: "He still is not taking it seriously. He still has that silly grin."
Responding to the president's assertion last night that he 'has a plan' for Iraq, Brook Campbell of Atlanta, Ga. ads, "If he had a plan for progress (in Iraq), my brother might still be alive."
The ad will air beginning today in the Washington, D.C. area, and it will air beginning early next week in key markets in Wisconsin, Iowa and New Mexico. These states have high military family populations, who have been especially affected by George Bush's war in Iraq.
Win Back Respect is sponsoring a national tour headlined by the Band of Sisters and Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. The tour was launched on Sept. 14 in Green Bay, Wis., and it will intensify through election day, visiting key battleground states with military bases and high military family populations. Win Back Respect is airing television advertisements in conjunction with the tour. General Clark said that he was proud to be joined by the Band of Sisters for these events:
"These courageous women and all of our military families are right to feel uneasy about the direction of our foreign policy. It is time for Americans to hear how this administration's failed policies have impacted our military families. I look forward to a real discussion about the costs of this administration's policies and the alternatives."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100104E.shtml
Families of Iraq War Dead Target Bush in Ads
Reuters
Thursday 30 September 2004
Washington - Angered by President Bush's policy in Iraq, a group of military families whose relatives died there is targeting the president in new television ads to be aired ahead of the Nov. 2 election.
"I think the American people need to know that we have been betrayed in this rush to war," said Cindy Sheehan, whose son Casey is among more than 1,000 U.S. troops who died in Iraq.
Sheehan joined a small group of military families at a news conference in Washington on Wednesday to launch new political ads by an interest group called RealVoices.org, which supports Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry's White House bid.
The first ads are set to run next week nationally and in battleground cities of Las Vegas, Orlando and Albuquerque.
In one ad, Sheehan is seen sobbing as she tells the story of her son, 24-year-old Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who died in the arms of his best friend in Iraq on April 4.
Sheehan, who lives in Vacaville, California, said she was prepared for critics likely to accuse her of being unpatriotic but she said she had to speak out in an attempt to stop more young Americans dying in Iraq.
Nadia McCaffrey, a French-American whose son Patrick was killed in an ambush in Iraq on June 22, held up a picture of her only child clutching flowers given to him by Iraqi children about half an hour before he died.
"Can somebody tell me why my son had to die? We need some changes in this country. Strong, positive changes. We need to see things the way they are, not the way we are told. And yes, there is nothing I can do to replace my son," she said.
Another ad shows Raphael Zappala, whose brother Sgt. Sherwood Baker was killed on April 26 in Iraq while searching for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The threat of such weapons was given by Bush as the key reason for going into Iraq but no such weapons were found.
"The war was based on false stories and bad information. As the truth comes out, we know that the president was withholding information (about Iraq)," said Zappala, who also criticized the president for not providing all troops with body armor.
Zappala's family is active in "Military Families Speak Out", a group that opposes the U.S. war in Iraq and has about 1,700 families among its members.
Opposing Views
Another group, "Military Moms with a Mission," is campaigning for Kerry in 30 cities across America.
"They are traveling the country telling people their stories and why George Bush has let them down. Many are frustrated that George Bush is not telling the truth about the reality in Iraq," said Kerry campaign spokesman Chad Clanton.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said the president enjoyed broad support among veterans and the military, which he had supported with the best equipment, pay and resources.
"The president's most solemn duty is to protect this nation and the most difficult task he has is to put our men and women in harm's way," said Stanzel.
"We will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission in Iraq and bringing stability and freedom to a troubled area of the world so that it no longer breeds terror," he added.
Countering the campaign to support Kerry are similar groups who back Bush and his policy in Iraq.
One of these, retired Air Force Capt. Linda Bergin who is campaigning in New Jersey said many veterans and people still in the military felt Kerry had been disloyal, particularly for criticizing the U.S. presence in Vietnam after he returned from fighting there.
"People are heartbroken their people are over there (in Iraq) but out of respect of their child, they want to support the president," she said.
© 2004 Star Tribune.
September 29, 2004 at 8:17 PM
Marine's family has sharp reprimand for Bush administration
September 30, 2004 ANGELL0930
Relatives of a Minnesota Marine who was killed in Iraq lashed out Wednesday against the war and the Bush administration's conduct in waging it.
Across the street from the Lake Elmo restaurant where Vice President Dick Cheney had finished speaking an hour earlier, the grandmother of Levi Angell spoke of "my precious grandson I lost to this useless, needless fix we're in."
Lila Angell said the war "is crazy. It's just wrong." Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry "certainly would do better" in Iraq than President Bush. "He couldn't do any worse."
Levi Angell, a 20-year-old Marine from Cloquet, was killed April 8 when his Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.
His father, Gordon, said he never received a condolence call from any member of the administration. "Bush was giving a speech 20 miles away [from Cloquet] and he never bothered to pick up the damned telephone and say 'I'm sorry about your son,' " he said. "From now on, I'm a Democrat after the way they treated us."
He said he got just such a call from John Kerry. "The only ones who seem to care about this whole terrible tragedy are Democrats," he said at the news conference arranged by the Kerry campaign.
Angell said Bush "has deceived the American public so bad, up there smirking on the TV."
The family also appeared later in Duluth, alongside several veterans who are opposed to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.
Lila Angell said administration officials "have just forgotten the guys over there. But we live it over and over and over. Are we safer here? No. Osama bin Laden's still running around, and he's the one who started all this."
Jim Bootz, a Navy veteran who heads Minnesota Veterans for Kerry, challenged Cheney's assertion earlier Wednesday that the war in Iraq is a vital part of a wider war against terrorism.
"The vice president is confusing the war in Iraq with the war on terror," he said. "It's not terrorists we're fighting, but insurgents."
In Duluth, ex-Marine Bill Soderlind said that, "after Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush and his administration had the whole world at our doorstep," offering help. Now, he said, it's clear that the administration squandered that good will.
Soderlind said: "If I could propose one question at tomorrow's debate it would be, "Mr. President, what did you do with our allies?' "
Bob von Sternberg and Larry Oakes
-------
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html
Respond to this Article September 2004
Follow the Money
How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank.
By David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade. It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with respected figures around the world.
All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of whom were eager to see him succeed.
By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge.
More than a decade later, Kerry is his party's nominee for president, and terrorist financing is anything but a back-burner issue. The Bush campaign has settled on a new strategy for attacking Kerry: Portray him as a do-nothing senator who's weak on fighting terrorism. "After 19 years in the Senate, he's had thousands of votes, but few signature achievements," President Bush charged recently at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh; spin that's been echoed by Bush's surrogates, conservative pundits, and mainstream reporters alike, and by a steady barrage of campaign ads suggesting that the one thing Kerry did do in Congress was prove he knew nothing about terrorism. Ridiculing the senator for not mentioning al Qaeda in his 1997 book on terrorism, one ad asks: "How can John Kerry win a war [on terror] if he doesn't know the enemy?"
If that line of attack has been effective, it's partly because Kerry does not have a record like the chamber's dealmakers such as Sens. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) or Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Though Kerry has been a key backer of bills on housing reform, immigration, and the environment, there are indeed few pieces of landmark legislation that owe their passage to Kerry.
But legislation is only one facet of a senator's record. As the BCCI investigation shows, Kerry developed a very different record of accomplishment--one often as vital, if not more so, than passage of bills. Kerry's probe didn't create any popular new governmental programs, reform the tax code, or eliminate bureaucratic waste and fraud. Instead, he shrewdly used the Senate's oversight powers to address the threat of terrorism well before it was in vogue, and dismantled a key terrorist weapon. In the process, observers saw a senator with tremendous fortitude, and a willingness to put the public good ahead of his own career. Those qualities might be hard to communicate to voters via one-line sound bites, but they would surely aid Kerry as president in his attempts to battle the threat of terrorism.
From drug lords to lobbyists
Despite having helmed the initial probe which led to the Iran-Contra investigation, Kerry was left off the elite Iran-Contra committee in 1987. As a consolation prize, the Democratic leadership in Congress made Kerry the chairman of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations and told him to dig into the Contra-drug connection. Kerry turned to BCCI early in the second year of the probe when his investigators learned that Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was laundering drug profits through the bank on behalf of the Medellin cartel.
By March 1988, Kerry's subcommittee had obtained permission from the Foreign Relations Committee to seek subpoenas for both BCCI and individuals at the bank involved in handling Noriega's assets, as well as those handling the accounts of others in Panama and Colombia. Very quickly, though, Kerry faced a roadblock. Citing concerns that the senator's requests would interfere with an ongoing sting operation in Tampa, the Justice Department delayed the subpoenas until 1988, at which point the subcommittee's mandate was running out.
BCCI, meanwhile, had its own connections. Prominent figures with ties to the bank included former president Jimmy Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, and a bevy of powerful Washington lobbyists with close ties to President George H.W. Bush, a web of influence that may have helped the bank evade previous investigations. In 1985 and 1986, for instance, the Reagan administration launched no investigation even after the CIA had sent reports to the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments bluntly describing the bank's role in drug-money laundering and other illegal activities.
In the spring of 1989, Kerry hit another obstacle. Foreign Relations Committee chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), under pressure from both parties, formally asked Kerry to end his probe. Worried the information he had collected would languish, Kerry quickly dispatched investigator Jack Blum to present the information his committee had found about BCCI's money-laundering operations to the Justice Department. But according to Blum, the Justice Department failed to follow up.
The young senator from Massachusetts, thus, faced a difficult choice. Kerry could play ball with the establishment and back away from BCCI, or he could stay focused on the public interest and gamble his political reputation by pushing forward.
BCCI and the bluebloods
Kerry opted in 1989 to take the same information that had been coldly received at the Justice Department and bring it to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who agreed to begin a criminal investigation of BCCI, based on Kerry's leads. Kerry also continued to keep up the public pressure. In 1990, when the Bush administration gave the bank a minor slap on the wrist for its money laundering practices, Kerry went on national television to slam the decision. "We send drug people to jail for the rest of their life," he said, "and these guys who are bankers in the corporate world seem to just walk away, and it's business as usual…When banks engage knowingly in the laundering of money, they should be shut down. It's that simple, it really is."
He would soon have a chance to turn his declarations into action. In early 1991, the Justice Department concluded its Tampa probe with a plea deal allowing BCCI officials to stay out of court. At the same time, news reports indicated that Washington elder statesman Clark Clifford might be indicted for defrauding bank regulators and helping BCCI maintain a shell in the United States.
Kerry pounced, demanding (and winning) authorization from the Foreign Relations Committee to open a broad investigation into the bank in May 1991. Almost immediately, the senator faced a new round of pressure to relent. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman personally called Kerry to object, as did his fellow senators. "What are you doing to my friend Clark Clifford?," staffers recalled them asking, according to The Washington Post. BCCI itself hired an army of lawyers, PR specialists, and lobbyists, including former members of Congress, to thwart the investigation.
But Kerry refused to back off, and his hearings began to expose the ways in which international terrorism was financed. As Kerry's subcommittee discovered, BCCI catered to many of the most notorious tyrants and thugs of the late 20th century, including Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the heads of the Medellin cocaine cartel, and Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist. According to the CIA, it also did business with those who went on to lead al Qaeda.
And BCCI went beyond merely offering financial assistance to dictators and terrorists: According to Time, the operation itself was an elaborate fraud, replete with a "global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad."
By July 1991, Kerry's work paid off. That month, British and U.S. regulators finally responded to the evidence provided by Kerry, Morgenthau, and a concurrent investigation by the Federal Reserve. BCCI was shut down in seven countries, restricted in dozens more, and served indictments for grand larceny, bribery, and money laundering. The actions effectively put it out of business what Morgenthau called, "one of the biggest criminal enterprises in world history."
Bin Laden's bankers
Kerry's record in the BCCI affair, of course, contrasts sharply with Bush's. The current president's career as an oilman was always marked by the kind of insider cronyism that Kerry resisted. Even more startling, as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy, Bush himself did business with BCCI-connected institutions almost at the same time Kerry was fighting the bank. As The Wall Street Journal reported in 1991, there was a "mosaic of BCCI connections surrounding [Harken] since George W. Bush came on board." In 1987, Bush secured a critical $25 million-loan from a bank the Kerry Commission would later reveal to be a BCCI joint venture. Certainly, Bush did not suspect BCCI had such questionable connections at the time. But still, the president's history suggests his attacks on Kerry's national-security credentials come from a position of little authority.
As the presidential campaign enters its final stretch, Kerry's BCCI experience is important for two reasons. First, it reveals Kerry's foresight in fighting terrorism that is critical for any president in this age of asymmetrical threats. As The Washington Post noted, "years before money laundering became a centerpiece of antiterrorist efforts...Kerry crusaded for controls on global money laundering in the name of national security."
Make no mistake about it, BCCI would have been a player. A decade after Kerry helped shut the bank down, the CIA discovered Osama bin Laden was among those with accounts at the bank. A French intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post in 2002 identified dozens of companies and individuals who were involved with BCCI and were found to be dealing with bin Laden after the bank collapsed, and that the financial network operated by bin Laden today "is similar to the network put in place in the 1980s by BCCI." As one senior U.S. investigator said in 2002, "BCCI was the mother and father of terrorist financing operations."
Second, the BCCI affair showed Kerry to be a politician driven by a sense of mission, rather than expediency--even when it meant ruffling feathers. Perhaps Sen. Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, put it best. "John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult investigation," Brown said. "Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did."
David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin work for the American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C.
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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/193219_joel01.html
Friday, October 1, 2004
In the Northwest: Kitty Kelley met by fear and secrecy in Bush family
By JOEL CONNELLY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST
Kitty Kelley is a tell-all biographer of the prominent and powerful, but has never forgotten lessons that she learned as a girl in Spokane about saving for a rainy day.
"You don't print everything you have. Always you have that extra 10 percent, so you can ask the person delivering the threats: Do you really want this to come out?" said the author who has chronicled the Bush family, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Kelley is riding atop the best-seller list with "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." The book's 634 pages take on the meticulously groomed image of the ruthless WASPs who supplanted the Kennedys as our dominant political family.
Kelley was hit by a lawsuit from Sinatra at the beginning of her research. Close friends of Nancy Reagan tried omerta -- a strategy of silence. But nowhere has she encountered such fear and secrecy as when trying to peer behind the Bushes.
"I would take Frank Sinatra, multiply him by Nancy Reagan and quadruple the total when I speak of the Bushes," she joked in an interview. "Here, you are dealing with an ex-president, a former CIA director, a sitting president, and a major governor. Above all, you are challenging a family fully vested in its public image.
"It's like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers.' With the Bushes, there's always another pod coming along."
The White House has discouraged talk shows from booking Kelley. She did spend three mornings on the "Today Show," but Matt Lauer's accusatory questioning had little to do with the substance of the book.
It's not surprising. "Today" has a vested interest in the adoring "exclusives" of former President George H.W. Bush and wife Barbara regularly produced by its national correspondent Jamie Gangel.
Still, Kelley has produced a compelling book, replete with black sheep and episodes of dark humor but also tributes to the steeliness of family patriarchs and matriarchs.
Among the tidbits in the book:
At Andover, future President George W. Bush wrote an essay about the death of his little sister Robin. Looking for a synonym for "tears," he looked through a thesaurus and wrote: "And the lacerates ran down my cheeks."
Barbara "Bar" Bush emerges as anything but the beloved "America's grandmother" depicted in the press.
On a 1986 Jerusalem visit, the wife of the then-vice president was slated to visit the Holocaust Museum. "She had worn a blue flowered cotton housedress and open-toes sandals," according to the wife of the U.S. consul general. "She barked at me when I showed up in a black suit, pearls and heels. 'Why are you dressed like that?'
"She was obviously embarrassed. She screamed at her staff and demanded to know why they had not told her how to dress. She sent them to her hotel to get her another outfit."
"The Family" claims that George H.W. Bush carried on an early-1960s affair with an Italian beauty in New York, and later with an aide as U.S. envoy in Beijing and vice president.
The most eye-catching charge is that future President George W. snorted cocaine at Camp David while his father was president. A main source of the allegation, Sharon Bush -- about to be jettisoned after 23 years of marriage to presidential brother Neil -- has denied making the allegation. Another witness to the conversation has confirmed it.
"We all knew she (Sharon) would be the first to fall. It was spiller's remorse," Kelley said. "I was being used as emotional leverage in the divorce."
After Sharon Bush's long luncheon with Kelley was disclosed in The Washington Post, the monthly alimony offer from "Neilsie" rose from $1,000 to $2,500. Oh yes, "The Family" is replete with stories about how cheap the Bushes are.
Critics knock Kelley for being relentlessly negative. Yet, "The Family" details how Sen. Prescott Bush, grandfather of Dubya, was an unyielding advocate of civil rights bills.
It also relates how family matriarchs -- "Bar" Bush and Prescott's wife, Dorothy -- held families together as George H.W. was absent during growth of his oil business, and Prescott was indulging himself as a periodic binge drinker.
Unlike other American political dynasties, the Bushes have kept the womenfolk off the ballot.
Why? "Because for Bush husbands, the grotto is the kitchen," Kelley said in the interview. "No Bush wife steps out of the supportive role. The only Bush woman to make her own money is model Lauren Bush."
Don't read Kelley for meticulous accounts of Gulf War summits and smart bombs. But on the long-running feud between "Bar" Bush and Nancy Reagan -- who never invited the Bushes into family quarters of the White House -- she's dead on target.
I'm not convinced of the cocaine-snorting story, but Kelley's character studies ring true.
She jokes, for instance, about the supposed lifestyle conversion of errant son George W. Bush in the mid-1980s. "It's unrealistic to think it occurred like St. Paul getting knocked off his horse," said Kelley. "Like everybody dependent on drugs or alcohol, there are lapses."
She details how superachieving Jeb Bush was the family's president-in-waiting until he lost the 1994 Florida governor's race while George W. won the statehouse in Texas.
"George and Barbara Bush were stunned, absolutely stunned," she said. "Jeb had always been the golden boy in the family. They always felt he would be the star. George H.W. had, in the past, discussed openly his despair with his oldest son."
After dealing with the Bush dynasty for four years, too, Kelley has come to a new appreciation of Ronald Reagan -- depicted as a spouse-manipulated lightweight in her Nancy Reagan biography.
"Ronald Reagan really came to the American people with principles, a message and an ability to communicate it," she said. "George H.W. Bush felt self-entitled. He should be president. It was his to have. Ronald Reagan grasped history in a way the Bushes never have."
P-I columnist Joel Connelly can be reached at 206-448-8160 or joelconnelly@seattlepi.com
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020722&s=20020716
Cheney's Grimy Trail in Business
Robert Scheer
ice President Dick Cheney has spent most of the past year in hiding, ostensibly from terrorists, but increasingly it seems obvious that it is Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the media and the public he fears. And for good reason: Cheney's business behavior could serve as a textbook case of much of what's wrong with the way corporate CEOs have come to play the game of business.
The game involves more than playing loose with accounting rules, as Halliburton Co. is accused of doing while Cheney was the Texas-based energy company's chief executive.
ADVERTISEMENT On Sunday, SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, whom Cheney pushed for the job, reluctantly turned on his sponsor and announced a vigorous investigation of Halliburton's accounting violations. Recent business scandals, however, are also the product of legal loopholes that allow firms to scoop up billions in unregulated profits.
It was just such loopholes that allowed the rise and subsequent fall of Enron and telecom heavyweights like WorldCom--in the process making CEOs like Dick Cheney very, very rich.
Recall that Cheney was a political hack for most of his professional life, first as a staffer in the Ford White House, then as a congressman for a decade and after that as secretary of Defense under the current President's father.
During the Clinton years, however, Cheney took an extremely lucrative five-year cruise into the private sector as chief executive of Halliburton.
After deciding, following an extensive search, that he would be George W. Bush's best candidate for Vice President, Cheney resigned from the energy services company with a $36-million payoff for his final year of corporate service.
This journey from the public payroll to the corporate towers and back left a slimy trail of conflict-of-interest questions. For example, Defense Secretary Cheney conveniently changed the rules restricting private contractors doing work on US military bases, allowing the Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary of his future employer, Halliburton, to receive the first of $2.5 billion in contracts over the next decade. When Cheney left to become CEO of the entire company, he recruited his Pentagon military aide, Joe Lopez, to become senior Vice President in charge of Pentagon dealings, which ultimately formed the most lucrative part of the otherwise ailing company's business.
Since returning to the public office, these disturbing patterns have continued.
In a scathing expose of Halliburton's military contracts, for example, the New York Times revealed that the Vice President's old company had been the main beneficiary of the Pentagon's rush to build antiterrorism military bases around the world. This new work will cost taxpayers many billions, and, according to Pentagon investigators' estimates, without any cost controls the final bill will be considerably higher than if the military's own construction units do the work.
Cheney denies having a role in securing those recent contracts, as he does knowledge of Halliburton's alleged accounting improprieties.
Unfortunately for Halliburton's stockholders and employees, parlaying his Pentagon contacts into profit has proved to be Cheney's only major business success.
In fact, CEO Cheney put Halliburton's future in doubt by engineering the acquisition of rival Dresser Industries, a move ballyhooed at the time as justification of his $2.2-million annual salary and massive stock options.
But the acquisition has proved to be a disaster because Halliburton assumed Dresser's long-term liability under asbestos lawsuits.
Even without the Dresser acquisition, Cheney was running a failing operation at Halliburton.
The company, despite the government gravy garnered, had earnings well below Wall Street's expectations--until it suddenly changed its accounting rules. By assuming it would be able to collect on cost overruns on myriad construction projects, Cheney's Halliburton was able to inflate profits by $234 million over a four-year period.
Halliburton failed to disclose its accounting shenanigans to the SEC or the company's investors for more than a year afterward, leading to more than a dozen lawsuits alleging fraud, including one by Judicial Watch.
And why are we not surprised that Halliburton's accounting firm was Arthur Andersen, earlier this year convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding documents in connection with Enron?
Andersen's dubious methods have become the disgrace of American accounting. Cheney, however, was sufficiently enamored with it that in 1996 he glowingly endorsed the accounting firm in a video, thanking it for going "over and above the just-sort-of-normal, by-the-books audit arrangement."
Of course, ordinary investors did not know they were getting less than "by-the-books" auditing.
It is especially ugly that the President and Vice President, men in a position to know just how sketchy the accounting practices of public companies are, were so eager to make our Social Security system a vehicle for pouring individuals' retirement money into a stock market they knew to be a house of cards.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/100304Z.shtml
Retreat Into a Substitute Reality
By Sidney Blumenthal
The Guardian U.K.
Friday 01 September 2004
By touching on Bush's ambivalent relations with his father, Kerry exposed his delusions about Iraq.
After months of flawless execution in a well-orchestrated campaign, President Bush had to stand alone in an unpredictable debate. He had travelled the country, appearing before adoring pre-selected crowds, delivered a carefully crafted acceptance speech before his convention, and approved tens of millions of dollars in TV commercials to belittle his opponent. In the lead, Bush believed he had only to assert his superiority to end the contest once and for all.
But onstage the president ran out of talking points. Unable to explain the logic for his policies, or think on his feet, he was thrown back on the raw elements of his personality and leadership style.
Every time he was confronted with ambivalence, his impulse was to sweep it aside. He claimed he must be followed because he is the leader. Fate, in the form of September 11, had placed authority in his hands as a man of destiny. Scepticism, pragmatism and empiricism are enemies. Absolute faith prevails over open-ended reason, subjectivity over fact. Belief in belief is the ultimate sacrament of his political legitimacy.
In the split TV screen, how Bush felt was written all over his face. His grimaces exposed his irritation and anger at being challenged. Lacking intellectual stamina and repeating points as though on a feedback loop, he tried to close argument by assertion. With no one interrupting him, he protested, "Let me finish" - a phrase he occasionally deploys to great effect before the cowed White House press corps.
John Kerry was set up beforehand as Bush's foil: long-winded, dour, dull. But the Kerry who showed up was crisp, nimble and formidable. His thrusts brought out Bush's rigidity and stubbornness. The more Bush pleaded his own decisiveness, the more he appeared reactive.
Time and again, as he tried to halt Kerry, he accused him of "mixed signals" and "inconsistency." For Bush, certainty equals strength. Kerry responded with a devastating deconstruction of Bush's epistemology. Nothing like this critique of pure reason has ever been heard in a presidential debate. "It's one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong," said Kerry.
Kerry's analysis of Bush's "colossal error of judgment" in Iraq was systematic, factual and historical. The coup de grace was the citation of the president's father's actions in the Gulf war. "You know," said Kerry, "the president's father did not go into Iraq, into Baghdad, beyond Basra. And the reason he didn't is, he said - he wrote in his book - because there was no viable exit strategy. And he said our troops would be occupiers in a bitterly hostile land. That's exactly where we find ourselves today." With that, Kerry touched on Bush's most ambivalent relationship, the father he recently called "the wrong father," compared to the "Higher Father".
In flustered response, Bush simply insisted on his authority. "I just know how this world works ... there must be certainty from the US president." He reverted to his claim that September 11 justified the invasion of Iraq because "the enemy" - Saddam Hussein - "attacked us." A stunned but swift-footed Kerry observed: "The president just said something extraordinarily revealing and frankly very important ... he just said, 'The enemy attacked us'. Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Laden attacked us." In his effort to banish all doubt, Bush had retreated into a substitute reality, a delusional version of Iraq, ultimately faith-based.
Bush's attack lines on Kerry did not describe the surprising man standing opposite him. They had been effective last week, but were suddenly shopworn. But Bush couldn't adjust. The greater his frustration in the debate, the more frequently he spoke of his difficulties in coping with "my job." Ten times he spoke of his "hard work": listening to intelligence briefings, talking to allies, having to comfort a bereaved mother whose son was killed in Iraq.
Near the end, Kerry praised Bush for his public service, and his wife, and his daughters. "I'm trying to put a leash on them," Bush said. That was hard work, too. "Well, I don't know," replied Kerry, who also has daughters. "I've learned not to do that, Mr President." Even in the banter, Kerry gained the upper-hand.
But Bush lost more than control in the first debate. He has lost the plot.
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Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is Washington bureau chief of www.salon.com.