Four years ago they flew their brown shirts on an Enron jet to shut down the recount in Miami-Dade with physical intimidation. Now, bereft of accomplishments and stripped of excuses, they are going to deploy their brown shirts to black and otherwise progressive precints in Bardoground States...Because the _resident has already been defeated. They have already lost Ohio, Fraudida, New Hampshire and probably Nevada, Virginia and West Virginia...They cannot wait until election night to steal it this time, they have to bring election day itself to a grinding halt...But they will not succeed...This land of Woody Guthrie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez and those four little girls who died in that church in Montgomery not so many years ago is not going to fall to the "stupid, angry white men" of a Three Stooges Reich...There is an Electoral Uprising at hand. It cannot be thwarted. Lean into the fire, just as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) are doing...REMEMBER DUVAL COUNTY! DO NOT LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!!! It is within our power to thwart the theft of this election. Please read these THREE stories and share them with others. Please vote and encourage others to vote. REMEMBER DUVAL COUNTY!
MICHAEL MOSS, NY Times: Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots..
Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.
Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.
Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100...
Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.
Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.
"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''
The Republican challenges in Ohio have already begun. Yesterday, party officials submitted a list of about 35,000 registered voters whose mailing addresses, the Republicans said, were questionable. After registering, they said, each of the voters was mailed a notice, and in each case the notice was returned to election officials as undeliverable...
Lucy Komisar, AlterNet: Kerry took on not only the Bush clan and its friends, but the CIA, and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. This is not irrelevant history, but important to examine, because it reveals a lot about Kerry and how he might respond to terrorism or other global criminal enterprises. Kerry’s record shows that he took on powerful political and bureaucratic interests, was a tenacious investigator, and savvy about international crime and money flows, which is crucial in the fight against terrorism.
Against the opposition of powerful Republicans and Democrats, and in light of a lack of cooperation from a very politicized Justice Department and stonewalling by the CIA, Kerry worked with investigators and ran Senate hearings that exposed the bank’s shadowy multi-billion-dollar scams and precipitated its end...
During this presidential campaign, Kerry has talked a lot about his service in Vietnam, but he doesn’t take credit now for exposing BCCI, perhaps because he thinks it’s too complicated for the American public to understand the scandal. Yet, more than physical courage, what the U.S. needs is guts and smarts and the resolution and courage to fight scourges that range from terrorism to international crime to corporate corruption and tax evasion.
So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected President? He would be not only the nation’s president but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who knows how to — and is willing to — overcome obstacles, whether they be international criminals or U.S. power brokers, to “follow the money” and bring about justice.
Brian Witte, Associated Press: The wife of an Army reservist sentenced to prison for abusing prisoners in Iraq said she knows her husband was wrong, but she also blames higher-ranking officials who "sit behind the curtains" for the abuse.
Martha Frederick, wife of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, said the eight-year sentence he received Thursday for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will force her family to "endure hardships and many sacrifices."
"The pain sets deeper yet in knowing that he serves these years not only for his actions or actions of a few reservists, but those included in the chain of command," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press...
"I feel outrage that he and a few others will bear the weight for the actions of many," she wrote...
Martha Frederick said she will always see her husband as a "good soldier."
"I will see my husband as a far greater man than those who have abandoned him, left him to be convicted for his acts and the failures of their own," she wrote.
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.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/politics/campaign/23vote.html?ei=5059&en=420a0a2df3218dec&hp=&ex=1098504000&partner=AOL&pagewanted=print&position=
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 23, 2004
Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
By MICHAEL MOSS
epublican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.
Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.
Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over voting procedures and the anticipation of an election as close as the one in 2000.
Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.
Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks. Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland, Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid $100.
The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than Republicans from large turnouts, said they had registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible ones.
Republican officials said they had no intention of disrupting voting but were concerned about the possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly registered Democrats.
"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters - I call them ringers - have created these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County.
Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the battleground states to register millions of new voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election Day.
Ohio election officials said that by state law, the parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable" justification for doubting the qualifications of a voter before asking a poll worker to question that person. And, the officials said, challenges could be made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.
Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the criteria would minimize the potential for disruption. But Democrats worry that the challenges will inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.
"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting, because challenging takes a long time,'' said David Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long lines causes our people to leave without voting.''
The Republican challenges in Ohio have already begun. Yesterday, party officials submitted a list of about 35,000 registered voters whose mailing addresses, the Republicans said, were questionable. After registering, they said, each of the voters was mailed a notice, and in each case the notice was returned to election officials as undeliverable.
In Cuyahoga County alone, which includes the heavily Democratic neighborhoods of Cleveland, the Republican Party submitted more than 14,000 names of voters for county election officials to scrutinize for possible irregularities. The party said it had registered more than 1,400 people to challenge voters in that county.
Among the main swing states, only Ohio, Florida and Missouri require the parties to register poll watchers before Election Day; elsewhere, party observers can register on the day itself. In several states officials have alerted poll workers to expect a heightened interest by the parties in challenging voters. In some cases, poll workers, many of them elderly, have been given training to deal with any abusive challenging.
Mr. Trakas, the Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga County, said the recruits would be equipped with lists of voters who the party suspects are not county residents or otherwise qualified to vote.
The recruits will be trained next week, said Mr. Trakas, who added that he had not decided whether to open the training sessions to the public or reporters. Among other things, he said, the recruits will be taught how to challenge mentally disabled voters who are assisted by anyone other than their legal guardians. In previous elections, he said, bus drivers who had taken group-home residents to polling places often helped them vote.
Reno Oradini, the Cuyahoga County election board attorney, said a challenge would in effect create impromptu courts at polling places as workers huddled to resolve a dispute and cause delays in voting. He said he was working with local election officials to find ways of preventing disruptions that could drive away impatient voters and reduce turnout.
State law varies widely on voter challenges. In Colorado, challenged voters can sign an oath that they are indeed qualified to vote; voters found to have lied could be prosecuted, but their votes would still be counted. In Wisconsin, it is the challenger who must sign an oath stating the grounds for a challenge.
"You need personal knowledge," said Kevin J. Kennedy, executive director of the Wisconsin State Elections Board. "You can't say they don't look American or don't speak English."
National election officials said yesterday that Election Day challenging had been done only sporadically by the parties over the years, mainly in highly contested races. In the bitterly contested 2000 presidential election, they said, challenges occurred mainly after Election Day.
The preparations for widespread challenging this year have alarmed some election officials.
"This creates chaos and confusion in the polling site," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center, an international association of election officials. But, he said, "most courts say it's permissible by state law and therefore can't be denied."
In Ohio, Republicans sought to play down any concern that their challenging would be disruptive.
"I suspect there will be challenges," said Robert T. Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. "But by and large, people will move through quickly. We want to make sure every eligible voter votes." He added, "99.9 percent will fly right by."
Challengers on both sides said they were uncertain about what to expect. Georgiana Nye, 56, a Dayton real estate broker who was registered by the Republicans as a challenger, said she wanted to help prevent fraud and would accept the $100 for the 13 hours of work and training.
For the Democrats in Dayton, Ronald Magoteaux, 57, a mechanical engineer, said he agreed to be a poll watcher out of concern for new voters. "I think it's sick that these Republicans are up to dirty tricks at the polls," Mr. Magoteaux said. "I believe thousands of votes were lost in 2000, and I want to make sure that doesn't happen in Ohio."
Democrats said they were racing to match the Republicans, precinct by precinct. In some cities, like Dayton, they registered more challengers than the Republicans, election officials said. But in Cuyahoga County, where the Republicans said they had registered 1,436 people to challenge voters, or one in every precinct, Democrats said they had signed up only about 300.
The parties are also preparing to battle over voter qualifications in Florida, where they had until last Tuesday to register challengers. In Fort Myers, Republicans named 100 watchers for the county's 171 precincts, up from 60 in 2000. But Democrats registered 300 watchers in the county, a sixfold increase.
Nader Loses Ohio Ballot Bid
COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 22 (AP) - The Ohio Supreme Court on Friday rejected an effort by Ralph Nader to get his name on the ballot, most likely ending his chances in the state for the Nov. 2 election.
Mr. Nader wanted the court to force election boards to review their voter registration lists, a process he said could have led to the validation of petitions to place him on the ballot. The court ruled 6-1 against him.
James Dao contributed reporting from Ohio for this article, and Ford Fessenden and Anthony Smith from New York.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top
http://www.alternet.org/election04/20268/
The Case That Kerry Cracked
By Lucy Komisar, AlterNet
Posted on October 22, 2004, Printed on October 23, 2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/
One gets an eerie sense of déjà vu watching John Kerry battle the Bush clan. He’s done it once before, against the old man, President Bush’s father, though many voters have probably forgotten. That battle involved the first Bush administration’s attempt to put the lid on an investigation that connected a worldwide criminal bank to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and to Middle East money men who helped the Bush family make piles of cash. Those links connect to people now on the U.S. post-9/11 terrorist list.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kerry fought to expose an international criminal bank, BCCI — the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was run by a Pakistani, working with Persian Gulf managers who operated through a network of secret offshore centers to hide their operations from the world’s bank examiners. They weren’t, however, hidden from the CIA, which not only knew what the bank was doing, but used the bank to funnel cash through its Islamabad and other Pakistani branches to CIA client Osama bin Laden, part of the $2 billion Washington sent to the Afghani mujahideen. The operation gave bin Laden an education in black finance. CIA director William Casey himself met with BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi. The CIA also paid its own agents through the bank and used BCCI to fund black ops all over the world.
Kerry took on not only the Bush clan and its friends, but the CIA, and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. This is not irrelevant history, but important to examine, because it reveals a lot about Kerry and how he might respond to terrorism or other global criminal enterprises. Kerry’s record shows that he took on powerful political and bureaucratic interests, was a tenacious investigator, and savvy about international crime and money flows, which is crucial in the fight against terrorism.
Against the opposition of powerful Republicans and Democrats, and in light of a lack of cooperation from a very politicized Justice Department and stonewalling by the CIA, Kerry worked with investigators and ran Senate hearings that exposed the bank’s shadowy multi-billion-dollar scams and precipitated its end.
The Bank and the CIA
BCCI was founded in 1972 by Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi and initially capitalized by Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi. It incorporated in the bank secrecy jurisdiction of Luxembourg but operated out of London. During two decades, it expanded to 73 countries worldwide, with nearly a million depositors with accounts totaling more than $10 billion. When the bank was finally shut down nearly 20 years later, between $9.5 and $15 billion — the analysts differ — had been lost or stolen, making this the biggest bank fraud in the world.
The bank had carved out a niche: it was the banker to the bad guys. One U.S. indictment would say that money laundering was BCCI's "corporate strategy." BCCI survived for two decades because it floated on the waves of the offshore system, with key booking operations in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, where bank regulators couldn’t go. Its Grand Cayman "bank-within-a-bank" was just a post office box. The bank also had friends in high places in the U.S. and, of course, the wink and nod of the CIA and the Reagan-Bush administration, which depended on its services. Over the years, BCCI was involved with:
Drug cartels. As early as 1985, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the IRS found that BCCI was involved in laundering heroin money, with numerous branches in Colombia to handle accounts for the drug cartels. It ran accounts for the traffickers’ protector, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, as well as for the drug kingpins of Asia’s Golden Crescent, including Burmese heroin warlord Khun Sa, and for drug trafficking Afghanis and Pakistanis.
Illegal arms traders. For the Afghanis, the rule was “drugs out, American and British arms in.” Clients also included Middle East terrorist Abu Nidal, who used bank financing to get weapons; the sellers of nuclear technology to Pakistan; and Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar. The bank served international organized crime involved in extortion, bribery, kidnapping and murder, and ran accounts for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier, Liberian strongman Samuel Doe and other thieving heads of state who needed to hide their stolen cash.
The Iran/Contra scandal. BCCI had a role in the infamous scandal of the Reagan years. The CIA told Noriega to use the bank for the payoffs he got for helping National Security Council (NSC) staffer Oliver North set up shell companies and secret bank accounts in Panama to illegally move funds to the Contras in Nicaragua and arms to Iran in 1985-86. North had arranged to illegally sell 1,250 U.S. Tow missiles to Iran in exchange for a promise that Teheran would press militants in Lebanon to release American hostages. Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman and fixer, used a BCCI account to move $20 million for the illegal arms and money plot. BCCI prepared phony documents for the arms sale, and checks signed by North were drawn on the Paris branch of BCCI, which “had no records” of the account when U.S. law enforcement later sought them. The profits were sent to Nicaragua’s right wing Contra rebels, violating a congressional ban on such aid.
Saddam Hussein. During the Reagan-Bush support of Iraq as an adversary to Iran, BCCI funneled millions of dollars to Baghdad's banker in the U.S., the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, (an Italian bank), so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq — money for arms. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank’s international advisory board along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become Bush Sr.’s National Security Advisor.
BCCI’s global connections also helped bring private profit to the Bushes. Former Senate investigator Jack Blum told me, “This whole collection of people were wrapped up in the Bush crowd in Texas.” Prominent Saudis played a key role: Khalid Bin Mahfouz, head of National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, and a major investor and BCCI board member; Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence and a major shareholder and frontman for BCCI, and; Ghaith Rashad Pharaon, a BCCI shareholder and front man for the bank’s illegal purchase of three U.S. banks.
Then there was James Bath, a Texas businessman, who owned Houston’s Main Bank with Bin Mahfouz and Pharaon. When George W. Bush set up Arbusto Energy Inc. in 1979 and 1980, Bath provided some of the financing. As it turned out, Bush was not much of a businessman, and when Arbusto needed a bailout, political connections eventually got him a buyout by Harken Energy Corp., which paid him $600,000 in stock and a $120,000-a-year consultancy.
BCCI-connected friends were there again with money to help when Harken got into trouble. Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens in 1987 worked out Harken’s debts by getting $25 million financing from Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), a partner with BCCI in the Swiss Banque de Commerce et de Placements. As part of that deal, a board seat was given to Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.
Were the Bushes putting their financial interests ahead of American security? Given the Bush links to BCCI, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration tried to smother the investigation and prosecution of the bank.
It might have succeeded, were it not for New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — and the junior Senator from Massachussetts, John Kerry.
Kerry The Investigator
As a former prosecutor, Kerry knew a lot about the workings of financial crime. Kerry pointed out how billions of dollars looted from U.S. savings and loans in the 1980s — after Ronald Reagan deregulated the thrift industry — had been stashed in secret offshore accounts. After he became head of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Kerry had wanted to look into cocaine trafficking by Contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the connection to Oliver North’s illegal offshore Contra-support operation. So, in 1986, Kerry hired Washington lawyer Jack Blum to head the investigation.
Four books were written about BCCI in the early 1990s:
"False Profits" by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin (Houghton Mifflin: 1992).
"A Full Service Bank," by James Ring Adams and Douglas Frantz (Pocket Books, 1992).
"Dirty Money," by Mark Potts, Nicholas Kochan and Robert Whittington (National Press Books, 1992).
"The Outlaw Bank," by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne (Random House, 1993).
As an investigator for Senator Frank Church’s subcommittee on multinational corporations, Blum had exposed the Lockheed bribes and ITT’s attempts to destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
“The Foreign Relations Committee was looking at the relationship between drug trafficking and arms dealing and the way we run foreign policy,” says Blum. “’Did we ignore all the stuff going on to support the war in Nicaragua?’ We got into the issue of money laundering.” Blum said he “stumbled across Lee Ritch,” who told the panel, “I used to launder my money in the Cayman Islands. The U.S. wised up, and the bankers told me to shift to Panama. In Panama, I’m told the only guy to talk to is Noriega. He sends me to BCCI.”
Blum says, “We go poking around. I found a guy who had worked for BCCI. I met him in Miami. He said, ‘That’s their major line of work. They’re a bunch of criminals.’ He goes on to say that in addition to handling drug money, they were managing Noriega’s personal finances and that the bankers who did that lived in Miami.” Noriega even carried a BCCI Visa credit card.
So Blum subpoenaed that information. He said, “There is a subplot between us and the federal government and prosecutors. We find out about coming arrests for money laundering [in an ongoing Tampa drug trafficking investigation], but the feds want to make only a limited case in Tampa; they don’t want to investigate other ramifications. Their story is they had their case and didn’t want it messed up with extraneous stuff. The notion the other stuff was extraneous boggles the mind.”
Blum began poking deeper and came across the CIA standing in the shadows. He found that during the 1980s, the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports that discussed BCCI’s criminal connections — drug trafficking, money laundering — and its control of Washington's First American Bank, part of an illegal plot to get into the U.S. banking system. He also found that this was accomplished with the help of major U.S. figures, including former Treasury Secretary Bert Lance, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington, ex-federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators.
The CIA provided its reports to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan but not to the prosecutors in Tampa. The Treasury and Customs departments also sat on evidence. Kerry tried to get the Bush Justice Department to expand the Tampa investigation or to turn its information over to the FBI or other agencies. It refused.
Blum told me, “We started with laundering drug money, but then pursued it much further and got in testimony a pretty good layout of the criminal nature of the bank. Having done that, we wrote a report and said the matter needs further investigation. But the Justice Department doesn’t pick up on any of the clues. I talked to them. I got a leading figure in the bank to turn evidence to the government, which didn’t want to listen. I taped him for three days with undercover agents in a hotel room in Miami; the government didn’t transcribe the tapes.”
The chief Customs undercover agent who handled the drug sting against BCCI was so disgusted, he quit. The Justice Department ordered key witnesses not to cooperate with Kerry, and it refused to produce documents subpoenaed by his subcommittee. The CIA also stonewalled or lied to the Kerry investigators.
As a junior senator, Kerry was further hampered because his subcommittee mandate was limited to looking into terrorism and drugs. But even that investigation was bothering too many important people, so Clayborne Pell, a Democratic senator, shut it down.
Then the Justice Department closed the Tampa case with a plea bargain that let BCCI off the hook. Kerry was furious. He thought the crooked bank should be shut down. He said the deal kept the bank alive and discouraged bank officials from telling the U.S. what they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including its ownership of First American and other U.S. banks. However, the bank relied on its friends. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) defended the plea bargain on the Senate floor, and then asked the bank to lend $10 million to a friend.
Following the plea agreement, the Justice Department stopped investigating BCCI for about 18 months. It even lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open — after being urged to do that by former Justice Department personnel working for BCCI.
Kerry tried in 1990 and 1991 to get an investigation by the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Democrat Donald Riegle. But Riegle and four of the other members of his committee had gotten money from Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who was later convicted of fraud, and they weren’t interested in drawing attention to crooked banks.
Finally, Kerry got permission to run a one-day subcommittee hearing in May 1991. Then he started holding public hearings through the banking committee, which wouldn’t staff them; he had to use his own people. “Riegle considered himself a gentlemen, because he let Kerry do that,” says Blum. “Riegle is probably the most misnamed U.S. senator.”
The bank’s friends prevented more Kerry hearings, says Blum. “They got it out of Foreign Relations,” he recalled. “We later learned that BCCI, between September 1988 and July 1991 when the bank closed, spent $26 million on lawyers and lobbyists trying to keep themselves in business. They hired people on both sides to shut [the investigations] down.”
But, Blum adds, “They didn’t stop me from going to the New York County DA’s office with Kerry’s blessing to assure a prosecution would ensue.” Blum went to see New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and told him about the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate BCCI's involvement in drug money laundering and other crimes. The Justice Department and the Federal Reserve, run by Paul Volcker, refused to aid the DA’s investigation.
However, Morgenthau got a grand jury indictment of BCCI in July 1991. It said the bank and its founders had defrauded depositors, falsified bank records to hide illegal money laundering, committed millions of dollars in larcenies and paid off public officials. It charged that BCCI had been a criminal enterprise since 1972 and had paid millions of dollars in bribes to central bankers or other financial officials in a dozen developing countries. Morgenthau named Ghaith Pharaon as a front man for BCCI who had gotten a secret loan from the bank to invest in three U.S. banks.
The New York Fed — not Washington — also took action. It coordinated an action on the fourth of July weekend 1991 to shut BCCI down. And, finally, the DA’s investigation forced Washington to act, though it kept the case as limited as possible. Soon after, Assistant Attorney General Robert S. Mueller III (now head of the FBI) oversaw the indictment by a federal grand jury of Democratic influence-peddler and former Johnson Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and his protégé Robert Altman — the top officials of First American Bank — for misleading the Federal Reserve Board about BCCI's secret control of the bank and obstructing the Fed's inquiries into BCCI.
Altman got off after convincing the jurors that he — an executive worth multi-millions of dollars in pay and stock benefits — didn’t know who the bank’s true owners were. Clifford evaded trial because of the Pinochet defense: his health.
In September, the Justice Department came up with an indictment of top BCCI officials which focused only on drug-money laundering, not on fraud against the bank’s depositors. It ignored leads, witnesses and evidence that would have revealed the bank’s large scale frauds — and exposed CIA and Reagan-Bush use of the bank.
“When I first looked at it, I thought there’s something nefarious or embarrassing — what is it? Their own incompetence? Worse? You never know the answer,” says Blum. “There was the Fed, which looked stupider than hell, the Office of the Comptroller who were stupid beyond comprehension. The then head of CIA said, yes, the CIA had used the bank. Everything you touched about that bank led to somebody ugly. Margaret Thatcher’s husband and maybe son, the prime minister of Canada, a 'who’s who of politics and the worlds of skullduggery.”
In July 1992, a New York County grand jury indicted Khalid Bin Mahfouz and an aide for defrauding BCCI and its depositors of as much as $300 million. But Bin Mahfouz was in Saudi Arabia, out of reach, and in the end Morgenthau settled for a fine. The Fed fined Bin Mahfouz $170 million. The Justice Department didn’t go after Bin Mahfouz at all.
The Kerry Committee report issued in 1992 was damning. It said that the White House knew about BCCI’s criminal activities, that the U.S. intelligence agencies used it for secret banking and that BCCI routinely paid off American public officials. Among the Kerry Report’s major findings:
Federal prosecutors handling the Tampa drug money laundering indictment of BCCI did not use the information they collected to focus on — or report to federal agencies — BCCI’s other crimes, including its secret, illegal ownership of First American Bank.
The Justice, Treasury and Customs departments failed to support or aid investigators and prosecutors.
Following lobbying by former Justice officials working for BCCI, the U.S. attorney in Tampa accepted a plea agreement that kept BCCI alive and discouraged bank officials from revealing other crimes.
CIA chief Casey and the agency knew, by early 1985, a lot about what BCCI was up to and didn’t inform the Justice Department or the Federal Reserve.
“After the CIA knew that BCCI was, as an institution, a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations.”
The Federal Reserve approved the first hidden BCCI takeover despite evidence the bank was behind it because it was swayed by influence-peddlers such as Clifford and because the CIA and Treasury failed to raise warnings about what they knew.
There’s a lot about BCCI that outsiders will never know. Once the investigations started, there were seven fires in the fireproof London warehouses where BCCI stored records. In one of them, four firemen were killed.
Experience That Counts
During this presidential campaign, Kerry has talked a lot about his service in Vietnam, but he doesn’t take credit now for exposing BCCI, perhaps because he thinks it’s too complicated for the American public to understand the scandal. Yet, more than physical courage, what the U.S. needs is guts and smarts and the resolution and courage to fight scourges that range from terrorism to international crime to corporate corruption and tax evasion.
So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected President? He would be not only the nation’s president but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who knows how to — and is willing to — overcome obstacles, whether they be international criminals or U.S. power brokers, to “follow the money” and bring about justice.
Jack Blum, who is not involved in the Kerry campaign, says: “There has never been a guy who has run for president who has, hands-on, known the kinds of substantive things he knows about the world of international crime, about banking and international bank regulation and finance, about the interconnectedness of the world finance system and how various intelligence agencies play into it. He is uniquely qualified.”
Kerry’s experience fighting the Washington establishment over BCCI also gave him a profound education in the workings of the insider Washington power and corruption that support corporate and organized crime and weaken the country’s ability to counter terrorism. He showed that he has what it takes to stand up to the big-money special interests that don’t want the system to change.
© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102304V.shtml
Wife of Soldier Sentenced in Prison Abuse Scandal Speaks Out
By Brian Witte
The Associated Press
Friday 22 October 2004
Baltimore - The wife of an Army reservist sentenced to prison for abusing prisoners in Iraq said she knows her husband was wrong, but she also blames higher-ranking officials who "sit behind the curtains" for the abuse.
Martha Frederick, wife of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, said the eight-year sentence he received Thursday for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will force her family to "endure hardships and many sacrifices."
"The pain sets deeper yet in knowing that he serves these years not only for his actions or actions of a few reservists, but those included in the chain of command," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press.
Her 38-year-old husband, of Buckingham, Va., received the stiffest punishment given so far in the scandal. But she questioned why her husband's superiors weren't being punished for what she said was their complicity on the abuse.
"I feel outrage that he and a few others will bear the weight for the actions of many," she wrote.
Since finding out her husband faced charges, Frederick wrote that her family has felt as if they were "facing a life-threatening situation when you relive your life's most memorable moments as well as contemplating all the things that you wish you could change or have done differently."
Martha Frederick said she will always see her husband as a "good soldier."
"I will see my husband as a far greater man than those who have abandoned him, left him to be convicted for his acts and the failures of their own," she wrote.
Throughout the e-mail, she claims "misguided" leadership led to the abuse of Iraqi detainees. She wrote that the photographs and videos showing abuse "do not represent the people of this country, nor do they represent Chip as a person."
"I do not see Chip as a good soldier gone bad but as a good soldier thrust into a no-win situation," she wrote.
She writes of the pain and isolation her family has felt, especially her husband, who was sentenced in Iraq, far from his family.
"It is not just how my husband will endure incarceration but how he will endure being left behind, used and discarded," she wrote.
Frederick joined the Army National Guard at 17, after convincing his mother to sign the papers authorizing his enlistment.
Seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company of Cresaptown, Md., have been charged in the scandal. Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., is already serving a one-year sentence after pleading guilty in May to three counts.
-------
Posted by richard at October 23, 2004 03:56 AM