Know Your BFEE: Poppy Bush Armed Saddam

[Octafish]

The American news media have betrayed the American people by overlooking the crimes of the Bushes*. Some of the biggest lies of ommission concern how, as Vice President and then as President, George Herbert Walker Bush helped arm Iraq and its strongman, Saddam Hussein. In their work to create a counterbalance to the Ayatollahs of Iran, Bush and his cronies created a Frankenstein. Today, Bush's son, installed as president by a partisan and thus crooked Supreme Court, continues to use the threat of this Bush-made Frankenstein as justification for the illegal invasion of Iraq.



First: George Herbert Walker Bush and his toadie Donald Rumsfeld led the charge to arm Saddam Hussein... of course, their "work" was done on behalf of Ronald "Can't Recall" Reagan...

In the Loop: Bush's Secret Mission

by Murray Waas and Craig Unger
The New Yorker Magazine - November 2, 1992

EXCERPT…

Iraq desperately needed American aid. On February 26th, the State Department sent a memo, classified "Confidential," to Bush's national-security adviser, Donald P. Gregg, who is now Ambassador to South Korea. The memo was intended to prepare the Vice-President for a March 2nd meeting with Nizaar Hamdoon, the Iraqi Ambassador, and was accompanied by "talking points for Bush to use in conversations first with John Bohn, the new chairman of the Export-Import Bank, and then with Hamdoon. "Iraqi Ambassador Hamdoon is calling on me soon," Bush's first script read, "and I expect him to raise the issue of short-term Exim credit insurance for Iraq...I urge you and your colleagues on the Board to give that favorable consideration... Exim's support for continued trade with Iraq would be a powerful timely signal... of U.S. interest in stability in the Gulf."

The bank's economists had already concluded that Iraq had little chance of repaying the loan. Nevertheless, Bohn agreed to Bush's request, overriding the advice of the bank's professional staff, and when the Vice-president met with Hamdoon he was able to relay the good news. He was scripted to say, the memo notes, "I am pleased that Commerce has recently issued licenses for some long pending items" - high-technology exports -for Iraq. "You should take that as a sign of our seriousness in addressing the issue." Many of those items, it is now known, were examples of dual-use technology -helpful to Iraq's programs to develop ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, and nuclear weapons.

By this time, the Iran-Contra investigations were under way in Congress. But one of the key witnesses, William Casey, was unable to appear, he was in Georgetown hospital, being treated for a malignant brain tumor. He died on May 6th. Amiram Nir, who was also expected to be a witness in the Iran-Contra trials, died in the crash of a small plane in Mexico in 1988. Meanwhile, Vice-President Bush was trying to escape the political fallout of the Iran-Contra disclosures. He told the Washington Post that he had not been aware that serious objections were raised by Shultz and Weinberger to selling weapons to Iran. "If I had sat there, and heard George Shultz and Cap express it strongly, maybe I would have had a stronger view. But when you don't know something it's hard to react... We were not in the loop."

On August 6, 1987, the day the Post article appeared, Weinberger telephoned Shultz, incredulous that Bush had denied knowledge. "He was on the other side," Weinberger said, according to notes taken by Shultz's executive secretary, Charles Hill. "It's on the record! Why did he say that?"

More recently, Howard Teicher, the former national Security Council adviser who worked closely with Casey and Bush on the covert arms sales, had come forward to dispute Bush's story. "Bush definitely knew almost everything about the Iranian arms-sales initiative," Teicher told us. "I personally briefed him in great detail many times. Like so many others, he got premature Alzheimer's after the arms sales became public."

CONTINUED…

http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2002/111402.htm

Gee. Do you think the American people would be, uh, angry to discover their government was arming a nutjob? Maybe that's why most people don't know this stuff.

U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup

Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds

by Michael Dobbs

High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.

Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.

The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."

CONTINUED…

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1230-04.htm

Here's more to remember: The same technology we sold to Saddam were used to justify the illegal invasion of 2003.

Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA

Saddam Hussein: Made in the USA

by Mike Burke
[e-mail], February 14, 2003

"The Bush administration sent U.S. technology to the Iraqi military and to many Iraqi military factories, despite over-whelming evidence showing that Iraq intended to use the technology in its clandestine nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile programs."

No this quotation is not pulled from a conspiracy-minded website, but from the Congressional Record from July 27, 1992. They are the words of the late Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas.

For months in the early 1990s Gonzalez released hundreds of documents that outlined how the highest levels of the U.S. government - including Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - had secretly and illegally helped arm Saddam Hussein. The scandal was known as Iraqgate.

In 1991, Charles Schumer, then a New York Congressman, now the New York Senator, said Hussein was Bush's Frankenstein: "He had been created in the White House laboratory with a collection of government programs, banks, and private companies." At the time, future Vice President Al Gore said, "Bush is presiding over a cover up significantly worse than Watergate."

SNIP...

In December, the White House boldly seized Iraq's 12,000-page weapons document in order to censor parts for the non-permanent Security Council states.

Among the information deleted was a list of U.S. corporations, government agencies and laboratories that aided Iraq. The companies included Honeywell, Kodak, Bechtel, Dupont and Hewlett-Packard. Among the government agencies were the Departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce and Agriculture. And then there were government nuclear weapons laboratories Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia, which all offered training to Iraqi scientists. This information emerged only after a German news reporter obtained unedited portions of the Iraq documents.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Iraq/Saddam_MadeInUSA.html

Thanks largely to Joseph Trento, we still have someone around who can still talk about all this. He's in the pen, like Poppy's other business buddies Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega...

Another Failed Attempt to Gag The Arms Dealer Who Supplied Saddam

Joe Trento's Column
5/16/2005

Miami – Sarkis Soghanalian was once the most powerful arms dealer in the world. Filled with charm, able to communicate in eight languages, Soghanalian had one weakness – he liked to speak to reporters. A few weeks ago I went into the Perdue rehabilitation center in South Miami to reconnect with the arms dealer. Even sick with diabetes and unable to walk, Soghanalian still scares the hell out of the Bush family and their business associates.

SNIP...

Soghanalian has also had a long relationship with the CIA, working with one of their brightest (now retired) officers, Lou Severe. His poorest relationship was with Customs and Immigration, now known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). He had been instructed by his bosses in the Reagan White House not to do business with Customs. The Miami office of Customs, now ICE, has been angry with Soghanalian ever since he refused to help them by becoming a snitch concerning other CIA front companies.

In 1984 former Nixon officials (including John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew and others) forced the arms dealer to put them in business selling military uniforms to Saddam. If Sarkis didn’t throw the uniform business their way, he was told he would not get export licenses to provide the helicopters the Reagan Administration wanted sent to arm Saddam. Even Richard Nixon, wrote letters of endorsement of the deal. The $450 million dollar deal produced shoddy uniforms Saddam refused to pay for. Soghanalian was sued in civil court by these former public servants. After Soghanalian beat the businessmen in civil court, the arms dealer found he was being targeted by his old associates through the administration of George H.W.Bush. When Soghanlian began sharing details with ABC’s Nightline, of how the Reagan/Bush team had aided Saddam through the 80’s as the 1991 Gulf War loomed, the hammer fell on Soghanalian. In the early 1990’s the first Bush Administration orchestrated a prosecution of Soghanalian for delivering weapons on his private 727 to Iraq. One of the key witnesses standing by to testify against him was former Marine Colonel Jack Brennan, then a Bush I White House aide. Brennan had been a key partner in the uniform deal. The case was political. Bush was running for reelection and the Iraqgate scandal was engulfing him.

Bush I appointees in Miami indicted and convicted Soghanalian. That resulted in a six-year federal prison sentence and an attempt by the Bush Administration to cut Soghanalian off from all media contact while in the Federal prison system. But even in jail the arms dealer had bombs to throw. He told me in an interview for British television that Mark Thatcher (son of the Prime Minister) had profited from dealing classified night vision devices to Saddam’s government. That resulted in a major scandal in England. George H. W. Bush’s defeat gave Soghanalian a chance to show the Clinton Administration - what he could do about its $100 bill counterfeiting problem. He was so successful in his work with the Secret Service that his jail sentence suddenly ended and he was back in business in time for the 1995 Paris Air Show. Working with France, Soghanalian was involved in deals around the world, including Saudi Arabia.

In 1995 while on a visit to Los Angeles Soghanalian was approached by an associate of now infamous Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. That meeting resulted in a previously unreported FBI investigation of a top Republican member of the House of Representatives and his wife. A two-year off and on FBI investigation followed. Soghanalian was promised that sanctions against Iraq would be lifted—allowing Soghanalian to be paid—in exchange for a huge payment to self-proclaimed surrogates of the politician. The investigation was stopped at the highest levels in the FBI during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. The main target of the probe left elective political life with no evidence collected that he had done anything illegal. According to the prosecutor in charge there were very hard feelings against Soghanalian for his role in starting the investigation. According to federal agents involved in the case the FBI leadership stopped the case before evidence could be collected on the politician.

CONTINUED...

http://www.publicedcenter.org/stories/trento/2005-05-16/

Hmm. Jack Abramoff? No wonder no one in Washington like to talk about all this.

*Since November 22, 1963, the American media have turned a blind eye toward one family name – Bush. This series of posts is to fill in and correct the record of the Bush Family Evil Empire. Contrary to what the Press Corpse and its psyops handlers report, there is such a thing as a vast right wing conspiracy. And it works on behalf of the Secret Government, the one headed by the people that pay for George Walker Bush, his Poppy and all their sick and sordid ilk.

Death. Death. Death.



Money. Money. Money.

[understandinglife]

1. Yeap. And, it hasn't worked out very well, has it:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1106307,00.html

Revenge, indeed. And, if I remember correctly, our war criminal-in-chief did ask them to 'bring it on.'


Peace.

[Octafish]

4. Speak of the Devil.

The National Security Archive maintains a repository of information detailing the arming of Iraq.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/

If Baby Doc Bush has his way, all this stuff will be reclassified.

[DoYouEverWonder]

18. Baby Doc Bush

is currently arming the 'insurgency' in order to fuel civil war in Iraq. Why do you think they opened the gates to the ammunition dumps and we can never seem to find any of it?

[Octafish]

19. Al Qaqaa

The high-explosives looted from the site apparently are being used in the IEDs.



Who knew the explosives
would be used agin' us?

Missing Explosives Problem Goes Far Beyond Al-Qaqaa

by Lisa Ashkenaz Croke (bio)

As evidence continues to emerge indicating the Al-Qaqaa facility was looted after the invasion of Iraq, reports expose more missing arms and the US government scrambles to explain and excuse the discrepencies.

Nov 1, 2004 - New details have emerged in the week after nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives were reported missing from the Al-Qaqaa munitions facility south of Baghdad, supporting Iraqi interim government assertions that someone looted the site following the US capture of the capital city on April 9, 2003. Additional reports by eyewitnesses and the military suggest the problem extends well beyond that single installation. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and White House continue to put forth postulations intended to deny or excuse US culpability in the loss of deadly materials in Al-Qaqaa and throughout Iraq.

Last week, Mohamed AlBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), forwarded an October 10 letter to the UN Security Council from Iraqi officials notifying the IAEA that tons of Iraq's most powerful explosives "were lost after 9 April 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security" at Al-Qaqaa.

The Bush administration immediately denied the insinuation that the site was looted under the US's watch. White House spokesperson Scott McClellan stated that the sites are now "the responsibility of the Iraqi forces," directly contradicting provisions in UN Resolution 1546 of June 2004, which mandates that the US-led occupation forces in Iraq "shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq," a point also noted in ElBaradei’s October 25 correspondence.

Three days after the New York Times broke the Al-Qaqaa story, KSTP television news in Minneapolis broadcast footage of US soldiers breaking into an IAEA-sealed bunker at Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003. A team from the ABC TV affiliate had filmed the 101st Airborne Division’s exploration of explosives and other materials in "bunker after bunker" at the Al-Qaqaa installation.

CONTINUED...

http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=1188

[DrDebug]

2. CIA and Saddam involvement in coup of Abd al-Karim Qasim

Exclusive Saddam key in early CIA plot
By Richard Sale
UPI Intelligence Correspondent
Published 4/10/2003 7:30 PM

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.

United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report. While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.

(...)

Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official. Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allen Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."

In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."

(...)

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030410-070214-6557r

[Octafish]

5. CIA Involved in a LOT of Regime Change...

...Iraq being just one of many.

Regime Change: How the CIA put Saddam's Party in Power

From Richard Sanders, 24 October 2002

Source: Andrew and Patrick Cockburn,
excerpt from Out of the Ashes, The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, 2000.
Cited by Tim Buckley <http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2000/msg01267.html>

EXCERPT...

Another very good example of a CIA-organized “regime change” was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

SNIP...

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

Iraq is once again a target of US “regime change.” Despite that, precious little is being said by the corporate media about how the CIA aided and abetted political assassination, regime change and mass murder, all in the name of putting Saddam's Ba'ath power into power for the first time in Iraq.

One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute “regime change” in Iraq.

Here then are some quotations that I've gathered on this fascinating early history of CIA involvement in the vicious history of “regime change” in Iraq:

In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to worry about than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. “We really had the ts crossed on what was happening,” James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. “We regarded it as a great victory.” Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. “We came to power on a CIA train,” admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers.

CONTINUED...

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html

No wonder Poppy's name turns up in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Most importantly: Thanks for putting up the info on Qasim. Certainly was the CIA's "favorite coup" and CIA could look past Qasim getting rid of the Iraqi Roils and threatening Kuwait. The poor rotter never really had a chance once he nationalized the oil fields, though. Dulles knew a cash crop when he saw it.

[seemslikeadream]

3. Historical reminders

With news of President George W. Bush's bombing of Iraq on February 16th, here are some historical reminders as to who helped build Saddam Hussein's power -- former President George H. W. Bush, with the assistance of Secretary of State James Baker.

Also included is information about Dick Cheney and George W.'s business dealings in the Gulf region. (Unless otherwise indicated, all quoted excerpts are from the article linked at the bottom of that section.)



Arming his "Hitler"

Dick Cheney was Bush's Defense Secretary while Bush Sr. covertly armed and funded Hussein's military right up to the Kuwaiti invasion in August 1990, eventually leaving the American taxpayers holding $2 Billion in defaulted Iraqi debt. Was Cheney simply "out of the loop" or asleep at the wheel? Or something worse?

Secretary of State James Baker was Bush's right hand man in the Iraqgate scheme. "And it emphasized the striking fact -- buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece -- that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loan guarantees to Iraq."

Prior to the invasion, Kuwait had been slant drilling at the Iraq-Kuwait border into Iraq's oil, with equipment from National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft's former company. Bush's ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, told Hussein that the US "took no position" on Iraq's dispute with Kuwait. Five Days later, Iraq invaded. Then Bush ramped up Operation Desert Shield. During this phase Bush refused any offers from Hussein to withdraw and save face. The result was full-scale war -- Desert Storm.

Although Bush's propaganda apparatus told the Iraqi people to rise up against Hussein -- and our troops would support them -- Bush reneged and pulled back our troops. Ultimately, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens were injured or killed, with an environmental holocaust as a result of oil spills in the Gulf, and Hussein's troops setting fire to Kuwaiti oil wells. Tragically, Hussein remained in power, and continued to oppress his citizens and slaughter the Kurdish people (see Mark Zepezauer's "The CIA's Greatest Hits" and Alan Friedman's "Spider's Web").

http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/93/2/iraqgate.asp



The Teicher Affidavit

"Howard Teicher, who served on Reagan's National Security Council staff, offered an affidavit in the Teledyne case that declared that CIA director William J. Casey and his deputy, Robert M. Gates, 'authorized, approved and assisted' delivery of cluster bombs to Iraq through Cardoen (In These Times, 3/6/95)." Years earlier, during his 1991 confirmation hearings for Bush's CIA Director, "Gates denied under oath that he had played a role in Cardoen cluster bomb sales to Iraq, as arms dealers had charged. Teicher's affidavit provides new evidence that Gates misled the Senate." The government promptly sealed the Teicher affidavit as a "state secret".

Dating back to the early '80's, the Iraqgate scheme was directed by then-Vice President George Bush (see above-linked CJR article). "Teicher's affidavit also bolsters a New Yorker article (11/2/92) by reporters Murray Waas and Craig Unger, which asserted that Vice President George Bush in 1986 urged Saddam Hussein to intensify his air war against Iran -- in order to increase Iran's demand for U.S.- made anti-aircraft weapons."

In other words, Bush was running the Iraqgate operation while "in the loop" of Iran-Contra, as Weinberger's notes proved. And Iran-Contra was far from a noble operation to "rescue hostages" and "fight communism".

http://www.fair.org/extra/9505/iraqgate.html



Media Blackout

"Given the significance of the Teledyne trial and Teicher's affidavit in judging the actions and integrity of the Reagan/Bush and Clinton administrations, why the near-total press blackout? Part of it is the power of 'conventional wisdom' -- Washington insiders have decided that Iraqgate didn't happen, so any evidence to the contrary doesn't register. Another reason might be the residual fear of conservative attacks against journalists who plumb the crimes of the Reagan/Bush era too deeply. It's easier to dismiss such issues as 'ancient history' -- a term that somehow doesn't get applied to stories about 15-year-old Arkansas land deals."

Indeed, a recent article by the otherwise exemplary Sean Wilentz inaccurately labeled as a "pseudo-scandal" the Bush scheme to fund Iraq through the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). Nothing could be further from the truth, as the above-linked Columbia Journalism article states, "Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-Contra, both in its scope and its consequences."

http://www.fair.org/extra/9505/iraqgate.html



"The Shadow CIA"

In a Spy article ("Inside the Shadow CIA", Sept. 1992), investigative journalist John Connolly exposed that the Wackenhut Corporation had been involved in the Iraqgate scheme. "...after a six-month investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did contain-equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons-and where it was headed : to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the Wackenhut Corporation -- a publicly traded company with strong ties to the CIA and federal contracts worth $200 million a year -- was making sure Saddam would be getting his equipment intact." Could it be that Gulf War Syndrome is somehow related to such chemical weaponry?

George Wackenhut is a long-time friend of George Bush Sr., and he has contributed generously to the campaigns of George Sr., George W. and especially his state's governor -- Jeb Bush. Has Wackenhut Corp helped the Bushes with other operations as well -- especially a recent biggie in Florida?

http://www.pdxnorml.org/WACKEN.HUT.html



Dubya and BCCI

George W's obscure little Harken Energy was awarded an incredible contract by the Bahraini government to drill in the Persian Gulf. But like everything Junior touches, it soon turned to fool's gold.

"On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560 -- a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf. There is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold the $848,560 of Harken stock."

"George Jr. also violated Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations which require 'insider' stock deals to be reported promptly, in Bush's case by July 10, 1990. He didn't file the stock sale with the SEC until the first week of March 1991." Nevertheless, the Bush I Administration SEC eventually cleared Dubya.

The below article also mentions Jr's ties to BCCI -- the CIA/Syndicate banking laundromat -- which has been linked to BNL and Iraqgate. "Meanwhile, a cloak-and-dagger aura surrounds Junior's business dealings. James Bath, a Texas entrepreneur who invested $50,000 in Arbusto Energy, may be a business cutout for the CIA. Bath also acted as an investment 'adviser' to Saudi Arabian oil sheikhs, linked to the outlaw BCCI, which also has ties to the CIA."

Sadly, we will never know into whose secret bank accounts disappeared all those billions skimmed from the Iran-Contra & Iraqgate arms sales, Contra drug running, BCCI money laundering and the Savings and Loans lootings. Before he met his untimely demise, investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was trying to untangle what he called "The Octopus" linking these and other CIA-based criminal operations during the Reagan-Bush years. Perhaps some of those laundered megabucks went to the accounts of the family of a certain former CIA Director for whom the Langley headquarters' is named?

http://mediafilter.org/caq/BushFamilyPreys.html



General McCaffrey -- War Criminal?

"An investigative report for the New Yorker by veteran muckraker Seymour Hersh alleges that Clinton drug czar Barry McCaffrey orchestrated a 1991 massacre of hundreds of Iraqi troops , two days after a cease-fire went into effect at the end of the Gulf War."
http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/05/15/hersh/inde...




Cheney Plunders

Still Trading With The Enemy: "During former defense secretary Richard Cheney's five-year tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Inc., his oil services firm raked in big bucks from dubious commercial dealings with Iraq. Cheney left Halliburton with a $34 million retirement package last July when he became the GOP's vice-presidential candidate." Cheney and Halliburton exploited loopholes in the US sanction orders that enabled them to deal with Iraq.

Lately, the Bush-Cheney Administration has announced that they are backing Iraqi opposition groups. But as with any Bush Administration, public proclamations are often at variance with actual policy. As this report documents, the earlier Reagan-Bush administrations were guilty of double-dealing -- especially in backing both Iraq AND Iran while they were at war. By the way, George W. has appointed various foreign policy advisors from the Reagan-Bush Administrations -- such as Condoleeza Rice, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell and Robert Zoellick. Just what exactly were they doing while Iraqgate was going on? We already know that Powell and Armitage were up to their eyeballs in Iran-Contra. (Read more about Cheney and Halliburton's profiting in the aftermath of the Gulf War and in other hot spots at Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough and Who is Dick Cheney?)

http://www.sfbg.com/reality/04.html

Cheney's Lies About Halliburton & Iraq
By JASON LEOPOLD

This is my last ditch effort to show the hypocrisy within President Bush's administration regarding its policies toward Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein, just as the United States and Britain prepares to invade the country.

It was only five years ago when Vice President Dick Cheney, as chief executive of the oil-field supply corporation, Halliburton Co., was engaged in secret business dealings with Saddam's regime by selling Iraq oil production equipment and spare parts to get the Iraqi oil fields up and running, according to confidential United Nations records.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied such dealings. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, "Iraq's different." He claimed that he imposed a "firm policy" prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.

"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program "This Week" on July 30, 2000. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

But it turns out that Cheney was lying. It's only through the sale of Iraqi oil that Saddam would be able to afford to obtain such weapons. If Saddam was in fact building nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, which some news reports allege could be used against American and British troops, Cheney is partially responsible.

http://www.counterpunch.org/leopold03202003.html

[Octafish]

6. Money Money Money Money! BFEE Makes a Killing Off of War.

Banco Nazionale del Lavoro + Bank of Credit and Commerce International = Big Bucks for BushCo

War is Golden for the Bush Administration

By CHRIS FLOYD
February 15, 2003

EXCERPT...

That's because the trial could open a can of particularly grubby worms concerning the UK government's extensive canoodling with BCCI. A host of worthies are expected to be grilled in the dock, including John Major, former UK prime minister and current business partner of George Bush I in yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, violence, repression and the greasing of highly-placed palms: the Carlyle Group.

Even as the trial finally gets underway, British PM Tony "Bow-Wow" Blair is withholding crucial BCCI evidence, claiming it's top secret. In fact, says Blair, the hidden juice is so red hot that even the law under which it has been declared secret must remain secret. An overreaction? Probably not--not when you consider the fact that BCCI was one of the chief conduits by which Western governments secretly armed Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction throughout the 1980s. This is not the kind of dirty laundry you want aired at the very moment you are waving the bloody shirt of war at, er, Saddam Hussein for, er, possessing weapons of mass destruction that, er, you and your allies sold to him in the first place.

The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used by the first Bush Administration to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States like, weapons merchant Matrix Churchill. (As always with the Busha Nostra, geopolitics--in this case, helping Saddam wage aggressive war against Iran--and crony profits go hand in hand. Once the war was over and Iran was left a shattered hulk, with millions dead and displaced, the useful idiot Saddam was expendable, swiftly morphing from good buddy into budding Hitler.)

As soon as the BNL case broke, President Bush I moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts--where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe--especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, etc., etc.: Kissinger Associates.

SNIP...

And the commodities connection? President Pretzel's relentless hissy-fit for war on Iraq has of course goosed the price of gold enormously--and that's set Bush Family coffers a-clinking. How so? In the waning days of his failed presidency, Bush I invoked an obscure 1872 statute to give a Canadian firm, Barrick Corporation, the right to mine $10 billion in gold from U.S. public lands. (U.S. taxpayers got a whopping $10,000 fee in return.) Bush then joined Barrick as a highly-paid "international consultant," brokering deals with various dictators of his close acquaintance. Barrick reciprocated with big bucks for Junior's presidential run. And in another quid for the old pro quo, last year Junior dutifully approved Barrick's controversial acquisition of a major rival. (Barrick is also one of the biggest polluters in America, by the way.)

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd02152003.html

Just when I thought got out, they pulled me back in. Right.

The deep politics of regime removal in Iraq: Overt conquest, covert operations

Part Four: The unfinished business between Saddam Hussein and George H.W. Bush

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Contributing Editor

November 14, 2002—In a much-publicized CNN interview on September 18, 2002, former President and CIA Director George H.W. Bush declared that he "hates" Saddam Hussein. This canard-filled propaganda display was designed to cloak the historical fact that the elder Bush "loved" Saddam Hussein—as a key Middle East ally, a CIA asset, and partner in numerous illegal business partnerships. Indeed, the recalcitrant Saddam Hussein poses a grave threat, i.e., to the secrecy that cloaks the Bush family's involvement in some of the most unsavory episodes in American history.

"Read My Lips, I'm Lying"

 "I hate Saddam Hussein," the trembling former president told interviewer Paula Zahn. "I don't hate a lot of people. I don't hate easily, but I think he's, as I say, his word is no good and he's a brute. I have nothing but hatred in my heart for him." Bush added, threateningly, "He's got a lot of problems, but immortality isn't one of them."

Not satisfied with simply offering deceptive opinion, the elder Bush began reeling off historical falsehoods, starting with the now-classic Saddam Hussein "gassing" legend. "He's used poison gas on his own people!" Bush declared, not mentioning, of course, that he and other members of the Reagan-Bush administrations armed the Iraqi regime with this poison gas, and encouraged its use.

As documented by US Congressional records, the Reagan administration—with VP George H.W. Bush spearheading top-level policy—furnished Iraq with the biological and chemical materials, throughout the 1980s. This continued through Bush I's administration, right up to the start of the Gulf War.

Poison gas used in the Iran-Iraq War was manufactured using ingredients reportedly supplied by LaFarge Corporation, of which Bush was a substantial owner, and Hillary Rodham Clinton was a director.

On July 3, 1991, the Financial Times reported that a Florida company run by an Iraqi national had produced cyanide—some of which went to Iraq for use in chemical weapons—and had shipped it via a CIA contractor.

CONTINUED...

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/Chin111402/chin111402.html

It's like a Greek gladiator movie, except the really ugly crooks are winning... no thanks to the monstrous media.

IRAQGATE

The Big One That (Almost) Got Away
Who Chased it -- and Who Didn't

by Russ W. Baker
Baker, a member of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, is a free-lance writer who regularly contributes to The Village Voice. Research assistance was provided by Julie Asher in Washington and Daniel Eisenberg in New York.
Columbia Journalism Review
March/April 1993 | Contents

ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.

Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage? Certainly, if you watched Nightline or read the London Financial Times or the Los Angeles Times, you saw this monster grow. But if you studied the news columns of The Washington Post or, especially, The New York Times, you practically missed the whole thing. Those two papers were very slow to come to the story and, when they finally did get to it, their pieces all too frequently were boring, complicated,and short of the analysis readers required to fathom just what was going on. More to the point, they often ignored revelations by competitors.

The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.

Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don't appear to be getting any better telling them. In the interest of learning from our mistakes, this reporter examined several hundred articles and television transcripts on Iraqgate and spoke to dozens of reporters, experts, and generally well-informed news consumers.

CONTINUED...

http://archives.cjr.org/year/93/2/iraqgate.asp

Thanks for the info, seemslikeadream. No wonder you know so much. You can read... and think.

[Octafish]

24. Kafka's Banker

Don't forget BNL...

Kafka's Banker

News: Bob Maxwell's nightmarish slide from banker to bartender began with a simple question: Are you willing to do work for the CIA?

By Robert Dreyfuss

March/April 1994 Issue

This is a spy story about a banker named Bob Maxwell.

Eleven years ago, Maxwell entered a frightening world of spooks, arms dealers, and money launderers when he unwittingly became involved with the Central Intelligence Agency. That chance encounter cost him his career and his health, and has propelled him into a legal battle that has gone all the way to the Supreme Court.

The CIA does business with many banks, not to mention law firms, airlines, computer companies, and corporations of all kinds. Some know they are dealing with the CIA, some don't. Most of us believe that if we found ourselves caught in the underworld of national espionage, the police or the courts would rescue us.

That's what Bob Maxwell used to think, too. But like a character in an eerie Kafka novel, Maxwell awoke one morning so entangled with secret agents that he could not extricate himself. Justice has eluded him. He has been threatened, followed, photographed, and finally gagged by a U.S. court order at the CIA's request. "I feel that I'm fighting the entire federal government," he says.

Maxwell's story is a parable about the 1980s. Under Reagan, the CIA threw itself into covert operations from Angola to the Middle East. Some were run dutifully, with White House approval and congressional oversight; others were freelanced "off the books." Maxwell's story provides a small window into U.S. intelligence operations in the 1980s.

Perhaps that is what worries the CIA.

CONTINUED...

Our tax dollars at work...arming Saddam.

Then again, when Bush's buddies are making a buck of off Hurricane "Corina," what could I expect?

[Hapameli]

34. George H. W. Bush and James Baker are still running the operation

Rove, Bush Jr. and Cheney are just their lackies

[Just Me]

7. Their religion of money is genetic: grandpappy Bush dealt with Hitler,...

,...for profit. All those branched from his tree have been far more crafty in profiteering off human misery and death and oppression: they have excelled in getting away with the most egregious global exploitation of humanity in history. They are an amoral "consumption",...a human bacteria that eats away and slowly destroys the flesh of life, all life.

The BFEE's "vision" of the world is,...for them to spend and profit from it as swiftly as possible. EVERYTHING and EVERYONE is an "item" to be manipulated and utilized for the BFEE's benefit.

The BushCO/neoCON regime,...will NEVER "spend" me,...EVER!!!

[Octafish]

20. Bushes Made Big Time Bucks off NAZI Germany.

You know the story, Just Me. Most of America, doesn't...

How the Bush family made
its fortune from the Nazis

by Robert Lederman

Note: This article's author, John Loftus, is a former U.S.Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor, the President of the Florida Holocaust Museum and the highly respected author of numerous books on the CIA-Nazi connection including The Belarus Secret and The SecSecret War Against the Jews, both of which have extensive material on the Bush-Rockefeller-Nazi connection.

by Attorney John Loftus

The Dutch Connection

How a famous American family made its fortune from the Nazis For the Bush family, it is a lingering nightmare. For their Nazi clients, the Dutch connection was the mother of all money laundering schemes. From 1945 until 1949, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team. For four long years, successive teams of inquisitors tried to break Thyssen's simple claim to possess neither foreign bank accounts nor interests in foreign corporations, no assets that might lead to the missing billions in assets of the Third Reich. The inquisitors failed utterly. Why? Because what the wily Thyssen deposed was, in a sense, true. What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks. He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents - stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts--from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker. Thyssen's partners in crime were the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States.

The allied investigators underestimated Thyssen's reach, his connections, his motives, and his means. The web of financial entities Thyssen helped create in the 1920's remained a mystery for the rest of the twentieth century, an almost perfectly hidden underground sewer pipeline for moving dirty money, money that bankrolled the post-war fortunes not only of the Thyssen industrial empire...but the Bush family as well. It was a secret Fritz Thyssen would take to his grave.

It was a secret that would lead former US intelligence agent William Gowen, now pushing 80, to the very doorstep of the Dutch royal family. The Gowens are no strangers to controversy or nobility. His father was one of President Roosevelt's diplomatic emissaries to Pope Pius XII, leading a futile attempt to persuade the Vatican to denounce Hitler's treatment of Jews. It was his son, William Gowen, who served in Rome after World War II as a Nazi hunter and investigator with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. It was Agent Gowen who first discovered the secret Vatican Ratline for smuggling Nazis in 1949. It was also the same William Gowen who began to uncover the secret Dutch pipeline for smuggling Nazi money in 1999. A half-century earlier, Fritz Thyssen was telling the allied investigators that he had no interest in foreign companies, that Hitler had turned on him and seized most of his property. His remaining assets were mostly in the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany (which he knew were a write-off anyway).

His distant (and disliked) relatives in neutral nations like Holland were the actual owners of a substantial percentage of the remaining German industrial base. As innocent victims of the Third Reich, they were lobbying the allied occupation governments in Germany, demanding restitution of the property that had been seized from them by the Nazis. Under the rules of the Allied occupation of Germany, all property owned by citizens of a neutral nation which had been seized by the Nazis had to be returned to the neutral citizens upon proper presentation of documents showing proof of ownership. Suddenly, all sorts of neutral parties, particularly in Holland, were claiming ownership of various pieces of the Thyssen empire. In his cell, Fritz Thyssen just smiled and waited to be released from prison while members of the Dutch royal family and the Dutch intelligence service reassembled his pre-war holdings for him.

The British and American interrogators may have gravely underestimated Thyssen but they nonetheless knew they were being lied to. Their suspicions focused on one Dutch Bank in particular, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, in Rotterdam. This bank did a lot of business with the Thyssens over the years. In 1923, as a favor to him, the Rotterdam bank loaned the money to build the very first Nazi party headquarters in Munich. But somehow the allied investigations kept going nowhere, the intelligence leads all seemed to dry up.

CONTINUED...

http://www.john-loftus.com/Thyssen.asp#fortune

Thanks for giving a damn, Just Me. You are a real Truth-Seeker.

[Octafish]

21. NAZI Biz explains why today's America is going fascist...

As the war in Europe wound down, Prescott Bush and Averell Harriman's business colleague, Allen Dulles, helped enlist NAZI Reinhard Gehlen's Organization into the fight against the commies.

Many of these mass murderers became "America's Allies" in the Cold War. Unfortunately for us today, they never left once the Cold War was over.

The Case of Nazis in the CIA

The Gehlen Org: From OSS to CIA

EXCERPT...

What is more believable is that Gehlen had made these arrangements far in advance. By using certain trusted contacts within the German High Command who had both pre-war and current business dealings across national boundaries, Gehlen had coordinated a deal with a specified contact within the American intelligence community. Namely Allen Dulles.

Dulles knew Gehlen was coming. In April, one month before the war ended, and forty-five days before Gehlen surrendered to Bokor, Dulles ordered an aide to begin talks with the German general through intermediaries in Berlin.

While the Paperclip scientists were setting up shop in the U.S., Reinhard Gehlen began reestablishing his presence in West Germany. His organization, the Gehlen Org, quickly regained control of the majority of his former agents inside the Iron Curtain, and with the help of many of his former staff, put them back to work. Though he agreed not to hire any former Gestapo, SS or SD members, he sought them out and put them on the payroll--the CIA's payrollCregardless of his promise. And the CIA did not stop him.

Among his recruits were Dr. Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six and Augsburg had been members of an SS mobile Death's Head killing squad that hunted down and killed Soviet Jews, intellectuals and partisans wherever they could be found. Six was known as a Streber, or Eager Beaver, for the enthusiastic manner in which he pursued his job. Gehlen also recruited the former Gestapo chiefs of Paris, France, and Kiel, Germany. Then, that not being enough, he hired Willi Krichbaum, the former senior Gestapo leader for southeastern Europe.

Gehlen was pleasantly surprised by what happened next. His new employer, the OSS, not only encouraged but financed an escape mechanism set up by Gehlen for former Nazis. The Gehlen Org established, with OSS help, "rat lines" to provide an underground escape network to be used by former war criminals to escape prosecution by German war crimes tribunals. By way of this organization, over 5,000 Nazis secretly made their way out of Europe to relocate around the globe.

Most went to South and Central America. The countries of choice were Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Within a few years after their arrival in these particular countries, the infamous right-wing government "death squads" made their first appearances. Of note in the expatriate community were such characters as Dr. Joseph Mengele, who specialized in crude genetic experiments on Jewish concentration camp inmates, and mass murderer Klaus Barbie, the infamous "Butcher of Lyons."

CONTINUED...

http://www.riflewarrior.com/case_of_nazis_in_the_cia.htm

What many people don't know is that Gehlen's Org was infiltrated by the commies. So, as Dulles & Co. did all they could to use their new found right wing chums, they had no idea they were being used by the commies.

[Just Me]

37. Thank YOU for giving a damn. "Exploited Americans" are being,...

,...brainwashed/tricked/manipulated into cooperating with the U.S. Corporatocracy's profiteering and recklessly violent exploitation of other human beings.

The abuse of power, the deceit and betrayal and manipulation is plainly intolerable.

Americans DESERVE to know what these people are doing,...in their names, in the name of "democracy". Americans DESERVE to know the truth!!! They CAN handle the truth,...and will act appropriately to that truth. Only those who are damaged by the truth insist upon hiding it from their OWN PEOPLE!!!

Thank YOU for giving a damn, my man! Thank you! :hug:

[goclark]

8. Speak Octafish! Put the pin on the donkey --Poppy here is your pin!

Poppy is always in the middle of all this stuff.

I just nominated this thread.

It gives us a lot of food for thought...thanks

[Octafish]

22. Thanks, goclark! Poppy links all that's bad since November 22, 1963.

His own dad, Prescott, links to all that's bad since World War I.

Samuel Prescott Bush

From SourceWatch

Father of Prescott Sheldon Bush, grandfather to George Herbert Walker Bush (Poppy), great-grandfather to George Walker Bush (Dubya).

Sam Bush was in his era to Remington Arms what Dick Cheney is to Halliburton in ours. Son of an Episcopal minister, he switched to a darker religion. Sam started out as low-management for railroads, where he made the connections needed to move over to Buckeye Steel Castings Company. Buckeye harbored railroad strike-breaker sentiment from the president on down. It's founder was member of the "Cleveland Gatling Gun Battery",<1> (http://www.h-net.org/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v008/p0009-p0015.pdf) called a military and social organization, set up in 1878, the year after nationwide railroad strikes.

This guns and railroad connection returns for World War I, when Buckeye Steel produced gun barrels and shell casings, and Sam Bush was moved by his patrons into the position of chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board. Bush took national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.<2> (http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/54/54_12-13.pdf) This was during the time that Buckeye Steel was casting gun barrels and Bush was president of Buckeye.

Preacher's son Bush looks innocent until you are informed that his patron, Percy Rockefeller took control of Remington Arms in 1914. Frank Rockefeller was president of Buckeye Steel for three years from 1905-1908, followed by Sam Bush from 1908-1927, throughout the WWI years and the gunbarrel sales era of Buckeye.<3> (http://www.scripophily.net/bucsteelcasc4.html) In 1915 a new Remington plant was constructed, operational by 1916 for the first world war, just in time to get a million rifle order from Russia.<4> (http://www.remingtonsociety.com/gallery/album05), <5> (http://www.remington.com/aboutus/corphistory.htm) 67% of all the ammunition used in WWI by the US, Britain and Russia was sold by "Merchants of Death" Remington. Somebody got a no-bid contract on gun barrels for their company.

Pumping up nations war aspirations is good business for some, and the Bush family has been engaged in it for four generations.

Samuel Bush donated a son Prescott Sheldon Bush to the marriage of Dorothy Walker, daughter of George Herbert Walker. The name Walker thence comes in the middle of two George Bush presidents.

SOURCE:

http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Samuel_Prescott_Bush

Some family, those Bushes.

[goclark]

27. Keep it rolling Octafish ! You always back up everything

with some FACTS.

Love that donkey photo!

[Octafish]

30. Thanks, goclark! Here's why...Poppy Involved with JFK Assassination

These aren't just crooks.



Until Poppy explains himself to the American people his role in the assassination -- and why he didn't report this to the FBI BEFORE the assassination -- I'll suspect him and his political descendants (of all political stripes who haven't investigated the murder of President Kennedy) as traitors.

[goclark]

31. If you think of it as a puzzle, this piece fits

When the puzzle is completed Poppy's face will be in the Middle of the picture.


It is so clear to me, and I think clear to Michael Moore.

I'll always remember that part in the film when Poppy is visiting with the Saudi fellow. Remember that scene?

Michael Moore says something like, " Why is Bush there, is he representing the USA or ? "

I'll always believe that he wanted to say more but didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle yet.

[Amonester]

9. Nominated. Thanks. At least 1900 (official) "expendables" have

already paid the price with their lives, tens of thousands with their limbs or skin burns...

http://icasualties.org/oif/

Ain't that Criminal enough for the freaps? Apparently, they want more of the same (because they don't 'wanna' know the truth)... :cry:

[newspeak]

11. keep it simple

BFEE and friends MO--prop up corporate puppet dictators over democratically elected individiduals, corporations sell weapons and other paraphinalia, when they get out of line (like doing something for their people or against the corporations), the corp. make money (our tax money, also our children's lives) to bring them down, then the corps make money on rebuilding and put in another stooge regime. Same MO all of the time.

[newspeak]

12. still disturbed

Octafish, still disturbed over the debt forgiveness of Pakistan. What kind of deal was made? Something doesn't smell right. Gen. Mamoud (sp.) transferred money to Atta and was in Washington on Sept. 10th? Then there is the ISI, and the death of an American journalist. I just don't know how to put it all together.

[DrDebug]

16. ISI and CIA are partners in crime

Welcome newspeak :toast:

The relationship goes back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

When the Shah of Iran was overthrown in January 1979, the United States lost its chief ally and outpost in the Soviet-border region, as well as its military installations and electronic monitoring stations aimed at the Soviet Union. Washington's cold warriors could only eye Afghanistan even more covetously than before. <1> On July 3 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the Mujahideen, opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on 24 Decempber 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the President in which I explained to him that in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention."

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

Six months later the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden was selected for the head Al Qaeda by Turki al-Faisal al-Saud, head of Saudi intelligence 1977-2001, currently Saudi ambassador to the UK. Osama bin Laden and al-Faisal have reportedly maintained close ties to this day. The CIA / ISI had requested a Saudi prince, but al-Faisal couldn't find any that was willing. (2)

With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan's fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. (3)

The Islamic "jihad" was supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia with a significant part of the funding generated from the Golden Crescent drug trade. (3)


So the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were working together building and funding the Mujahideen. Since billions were poured into the war, the relationship became very close, however after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mujahideen were pretty much ignored.

They in 2001 Pakistan and the US wanted another regime change in Afghanistan. The preparations for this war start in the beginning of 2001. And the justification turned out to be 9/11 because immediately a request for war was send to the United Nations and subsequently approved. The nations who wanted to continue this war included the player in the previous war: United States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. When you research 9/11 you'll keep on seeing individuals from the above mentioned nations instead of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Back to Mahmoud and the missing $100,000

In early October 2001, Indian intelligence learned that Mahmoud had ordered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh - the convicted mastermind of the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl - to wire US$100,000 from Dubai to one of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta's two bank accounts in Florida.



September 11, 2001: Terrorist Attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. At the time of the attacks, Lt General Ahmad was at a breakfast meeting at the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees Sen Bob Graham and Rep Porter Goss. Also present at the meeting were Sen. John Kyl and the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Maleeha Lodhi. (4)

So what happened to the money?
Mohammed Atta was living in Winter Garden with his relative Majed Atta. Mohammed Atta was a member of Able Danger (5) and he probably disappeared to Canada after 9/11 (6), however his cousin needed a new place as well and that's probably where the $100,000 comes in.

Until the middle of 2001, Majed Atta ran the Rainbow Grocery on Plant Street in Winter Garden. On Aug. 1 2001, he and his family packed their belongings into a U-Haul and left their rental home near Lake Apopka. Majed Atta's former landlady said they moved just one week after Atta said he planned to buy the home from her and open a new grocery store in the Orlando area. (Orlando Sentinel Sep 23, 2001)

However according to the news story below a Majed Atta is back again in 2004, running a grocery store on Congress Street in New Orleans address together with Shareef Quattom, but according to the FBI it was a different Majed Atta who happened to be in the grocery business and who also happened to leave Florida just before 9/11 and was busy buying a grocery store for $92,000. How much money did Mohamed Atta receive from Mahmoud Ahmad? $100,000? (7)

Times-Picayune (New Orleans) June 4, 2004 Friday:

Atiya Saleh, Shareef Quattom and Majed Atta have given paperwork to Lincoln County, Miss., officials that indicates that the $27,000 in currency sheriff’s deputies confiscated from the trunk of Mr. Saleh’s Ford sedan March 10 was the down payment for a grocery store Mr. Atta was purchasing.

Still, sheriff’s officials are skeptical and say they want to make sure the three New Orleans men weren’t on a money-laundering trip that took them through Mississippi.

(...)

Among Arab-Americans, Mississippi has a reputation for being a good place to steer clear of, said former Jackson merchant Atta, who is now selling groceries on Congress Street in New Orleans.

It wasn't like that before Sept. 11, 2001, said Atta, a native of Jordan who moved to the United States at 16 and attended college in Hattiesburg. His fond memories of the years he spent in Mississippi brought him back to the state in 2001, when he and his family decided to leave Florida, their home for 10 years.

(article no longer online)

Confused yet?

Sources:
(1) http://members.aol.com/bblum6/afghan.htm
(2) http://www.countercurrents.org/ipk-saleem150703.htm
(3) http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html
(4) http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO206A.html
(5) http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050916/ap_on_go_co/sept11_hijackers
(6) http://www.cbc.ca/cgi-bin/templates/view.cgi?/news/2001/09/13/leadall010913
(7) http://www.madcowprod.com/102204issue.htm

[newspeak]

23. vvvery interestingggggg!

I remember an article around the time Soviets were in Afghanistan----I believe it was in Time Magazine, about how the US was funding extremists instead of moderate Afghani citizens. So, the US government was promoting extremism even then. My hubby stated probably because the extremists were more volatile, but I call bull.

[DrDebug]

29. Correction on the story above

Since I cannot edit my post anymore.

Errata:
I quickly added a link (6) and it turned out to be a wrong link and I can't find where I read. Please strike out the part of Atta going to Canada. I was sure when I wrote it that I've read it somewhere, but since I can't find it anymore and maybe I was mistaken for the numerous sightings of Atta in Toronto prior to 9/11 ( http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a01toronto ).

The able danger link was sloppy and ad hoc as well. There are plenty of stories on this board with more detail and information than the link mentioned above.

[Octafish]

25. FDR didn't like 'War Profiteering.'

Limit profit motive for war

By Sarah Anderson
Posted September 19 2005

"I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster." -- President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1940

If he were alive today, the commander in chief from World War II would be appalled. As the conflict in Iraq rages on, CEOs of the nation's top defense contractors are cashing in on the military spending boom that began with the 9-11 terrorist attacks.

Total pay for these modern-day Daddy Warbucks has ballooned 200 percent, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. By contrast, the average large-company CEO got a 7 percent pay hike between 2001 and 2004.

The CEO of a Long Island-based body armor maker received the biggest pay raise among the 34 leading defense CEOs included in the study. David H. Brooks, CEO of DHB Industries, made more than $70 million in 2004, 3,349 percent more than he made in 2001.

Brooks also billed the company for $87,500 in compensation for "foregone vacation" -- a perk that might be hard to stomach for the 50,000 or so military personnel who faced stop-loss orders extending their duty in Iraq.

On top of all that, the Marine Corps recalled 5,277 DHB Interceptor armored vests after questions were raised about the vests' ability to stop 9-mm pistol rounds. By that time, Brooks had personally pocketed $250 million-plus in war windfalls.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-30forum19sep19,0,3593108.story?coll=sfla-news-opinion

Thanks for bringing up the most important point, Amonester. The BFEE care not one iota for the American people -- or anyone, for that matter. As far as individual members of the U.S. armed forces go, those Poppy refers to as "One Fodder Unit."

[Just Me]

38. Oh, if FDR were alive, today,....

,...I'd bet he would be advocating a coup for the sake of saving this nation, and Butler would help him plan the removal of this a neo-fascist regime,...no doubt.

When I consider all the wise and inspirational leaders throughout the development of this country,...I imagine how frustrated and angry and sad they must feel in observing what is happening, what has happened to this "Great Hope" of a nation as our country follows money and egoism and destruction as its path.

I also imagine a climatic turning point, arriving soon, where the demons of human will experience a dramatic bashing,...long enough for the rest of us to gather our strength and hope and will to pull humanity a bit more forward.

[NNN0LHI]

10. Osama bin Laden too...

http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0925/p9s1-coop.html

US: Choose allies carefully

TUCSON, ARIZ. - In the discussion about Osama bin Laden, a key point is often omitted: that Mr. bin Laden began his career as a US ally. Indeed, he has followed in the tradition of Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein - unsavory leaders who began as America's "friends," and later became archenemies.

Bin Laden's military career began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Bin Laden, a Saudi exile, moved to the Afghan frontier to join the guerrillas, or mujahideen. During this time, the US launched a vast effort to support the guerrillas. This effort, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency in cooperation with Pakistani intelligence, was the largest operation in CIA history, involving billions of dollars of weapons, training, and other support.

The mujahideen had great publicity; after all, they were fighting communism. But their image concealed an exceptional brutality by key leaders. Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, a mujahideen leader and recipient of US aid, began his political career as a student who threw acid in the faces of women who did not wear veils. Several guerrilla leaders participated in the international heroin trade, and Afghanistan became a major source of heroin entering the United States.

The US continued aiding the mujahideen, even though the Reagan administration had declared war on drugs. US officials believed that winning the cold war outweighed concerns about human rights and narcotics. snip

But there is little doubt that many men in bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist organization received CIA arms, training, or other support, either directly or through the CIA's intermediary in Pakistan. Al Qaeda has US-supplied weapons, including Stinger missiles. At least one Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan - which was targeted during the 1998 US cruise missile attack - was constructed with CIA assistance.

[Octafish]

26. Osama is another US-created Frankenstein.

You got it NNN0LHI! The BFEE has a method to our madness. From 1999...

Frankenstein the CIA created

Mujahideen trained and funded by the US are among its deadliest foes, reports Jason Burke in Peshawar

Sunday January 17, 1999

When Clement Rodney Hampton-el, a hospital technician from Brooklyn, New Jersey, returned home from the war in Afghanistan in 1989, he told friends his only desire was to return. Though he had been wounded in the arm and leg by a Russian shell, he said he had failed. He had not achieved martyrdom in the name of Islam.

So he found a different theatre for his holy war and achieved a different sort of martyrdom. Three years ago, he was convicted of planning a series of massive explosions in Manhattan and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Hampton-el was described by prosecutors as a skilled bomb-maker. It was hardly surprising. In Afghanistan he fought with the Hezb-i-Islami group of mujahideen, whose training and weaponry were mainly supplied by the CIA.

He was not alone. American officials estimate that, from 1985 to 1992, 12,500 foreigners were trained in bomb-making, sabotage and urban guerrilla warfare in Afghan camps the CIA helped to set up.

Since the fall of the Soviet puppet government in 1992, another 2,500 are believed to have passed through the camps. They are now run by an assortment of Islamic extremists, including Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist.

Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia in 1979, aged 22. Though he saw a considerable amount of combat - around the eastern city of Jalalabad in March 1989 and, earlier, around the border town of Khost - his speciality was logistics.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/yemen/Story/0,2763,209260,00.html

Thanks for the info from the CSM, Don. Like during the Cold War, We can't have a (most profitable) War on Terror without terrorists, can we?

[Octafish]

28. USG Study: 'Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why'

Almost forgot. To help illustrate the point, this report on the Whos and Whys of terrorism even included a photo of the main terror target in the USA...

THE SOCIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF TERRORISM:

WHO BECOMES A TERRORIST AND WHY?

A Report Prepared under an Interagency Agreement
by the Federal Research Division,
Library of Congress
September 1999

EXCERPT...

Increasingly, terrorist groups are recruiting members with expertise in fields such as communications, computer programming, engineering, finance, and the sciences. Ramzi Yousef graduated from Britain's Swansea University with a degree in engineering. Aum Shinrikyo's Shoko Asahara recruited a scientific team with all the expertise needed to develop WMD. Osama bin Laden also recruits highly skilled professionals in the fields of engineering, medicine, chemistry, physics, computer programming, communications, and so forth. Whereas the skills of the elite terrorist commandos of the 1960s and 1970s were often limited to what they learned in training camp, the terrorists of the 1990s who have carried out major operations have included biologists, chemists, computer specialists, engineers, and physicists.

CONTINUED...

http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/frd.html

It's not like anyone thought they would fly airplanes into buildings or anything.

[oasis]

13. Let's elect a courageous Democratic majority to congress in 2006. Put

these Bush criminals in jail after lengthy and revealing committee hearings.

Meanwhile Octafish, your continued contribution of this important information to our DU community will be very much appreciated.
:hi:
:patriot:

[Octafish]

32. Bush and CIA Still Won't Release pre-War 'INTEL' Paper

What don't they want us to know?

Bush is an idiot? We know that.

Bush is a liar? We know that.

Bush is a mass murderer? We know that.

Bush is a traitor? Well, we got a pretty darn good picture of that one.

Bush and CIA Won't Release Paper
on Prewar Intelligence

By Douglas Jehl
New York Times
July 13, 2004

The White House and the Central Intelligence Agency have refused to give the Senate Intelligence Committee a one-page summary of prewar intelligence in Iraq prepared for President Bush that contains few of the qualifiers and none of the dissents spelled out in longer intelligence reviews, according to Congressional officials.

Senate Democrats claim that the document could help clear up exactly what intelligence agencies told Mr. Bush about Iraq's illicit weapons. The administration and the C.I.A. say the White House is protected by executive privilege, and Republicans on the committee dismissed the Democrats' argument that the summary was significant.

The review, prepared for President Bush in October 2002, summarized the findings of a classified, 90-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's illicit weapons. Congressional officials said that notes taken by Senate staffers who were permitted to review the document show that it eliminated references to dissent within the government about the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusions. "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the N.I.E. dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, qualifiers and all, there is nothing clearer than this single page," Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in a 10-page "additional view" that was published as an addendum to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Friday.

A separate white paper summarizing the National Intelligence Estimate was made public in October 2002. The Senate report criticized the white paper as having "misrepresented'' what the Senate committee described as a "more carefully worded assessment" in the classified intelligence estimate. For example, the white paper excluded information found in the National Intelligence Estimate, like the names of intelligence agencies that had dissented from some of the findings, most importantly on Iraq's nuclear weapons program. That approach, the Senate committee said, "provided readers with an incomplete picture of the nature and extent of the debate within the intelligence community regarding these issues."

Among the specific dissents excluded from the public white paper on Iraq's weapons was the view of the State Department's intelligence branch, spelled out in the classified version of the document, that Iraq's importation of aluminum tubes could not be conclusively tied to a continuing nuclear weapons program, as other intelligence agencies asserted. Also left out of the white paper was the view of Air Force intelligence that pilotless aerial vehicles being built by Iraq, seen by other intelligence agencies as designed to deliver chemical or biological weapons, were not suited for that purpose.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/justify/2004/0713bushcia.htm

Thnk you for the kinds words, oasis. When it comes to doing what's truly right for the country, you've always been there.

[Tom Joad]

14. See this The New Republic Article, circa 1987 by key Bush aide

Daniel Pipes was appointed by President Bush during the Summer Congressional recess in August 2003 (to avoid a problem with Congress, why should Bush's appointments be questioned by anyone?) to the the board of United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally sponsored think tank dedicated to "the peaceful resolution of international conflicts." He served there until the end of 2004. There is more than a little irony in this. He sees no problem that cannot be solved by militarism. For example, in looking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he has stated that "What war had achieved for Israel," Pipes explained at a Zionist conference in Washington DC, "diplomacy has undone." Nothing short of total military victory will do.

"Conditions of peace have, by and large, been created through military victory"-- Daniel Pipes

So it should really come as no surprise that Pipes, whose hatred of Arab and Muslim people is legendary, would give his backing for military aid to the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, back when the Iraqi President was "gassing his own people" (killing Iranians and Kurds). After all, it was a military option. And for Pipes, any military option must be attempted before any alternative is even considered. This is keeping with the Pipes motto of "Give War a Chance!".

So it is in the interest of our understanding of this man, and the thinking of President Bush Jr. and those that support this extremist, that Pipes' article, which appeared in The New Republic on April 27, 1987 is presented.

See the article here:
http://www.tomjoad.org/pipes_supportSaddam.pdf
Copied from the library copy of the article.

[Octafish]

33. In '83 Mylroie wanted to arm Saddam. In '03, she wanted them back!

Wow! Great find, Tom Joad! Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie are the fiends who helps bring us the current quagmire. The article amply demonstrates the sheer hypocrisy of these two neo-con turdballs.

For those new to the subject, Mylroie helped Bush with all the evidence he needed to attack Iraq. That's where the treason part comes in...

Did one woman's obsession take America to war?

She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism?

By Peter Bergen

Monday July 5, 2004
The Guardian

Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator - they knew that - but because President Bush made the case that Saddam might hand weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. In the absence of any evidence for that theory, it's fair to ask: where did the administration's conviction come from? It was at the American Enterprise Institute - a conservative Washington DC thinktank - that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a goal. Among those associated with AEI is Richard Perle, a key architect of the president's get-tough-on-Iraq policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, now the number-two official at the Pentagon. But none of the thinkers at AEI was in any real way an expert on Iraq. For that they relied on someone you probably have never heard of: a woman named Laurie Mylroie.

Mylroie has credentials as an expert on the Middle East, national security and, above all, Iraq, having held faculty positions at Harvard and the US Naval War College. During the 1980s she was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but became anti-Saddam around the time of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In the run-up to that Gulf war, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Mylroie wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller.

It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing". Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, "provided crucial support".

Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon.

The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." Clarke writes: "I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1254072,00.html

BTW: Thanks for a great post, Tom Joad! And a most hearty welcome to DU!

[Nothing Without Hope]

15. Excellent reminder. They are STILL at it - promoting world weaponization

and undermining efforts to limit it;

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1788429
thread title: (UN) Summit failure blamed on US (The Observer)

The failure of last week's United Nations summit to deliver an agreement designed to prevent terrorists acquiring 'weapons of mass destruction' was sabotaged by the US, senior diplomats have told The Observer.

Officials involved in the negotiations have confirmed that the Bush administration's refusal to countenance any form of disarmament blocked attempts to push measures that would prevent regimes seeking to develop a nuclear capability. It contradicts reports last week that the US had in fact been furious that plans to crack down on nuclear proliferation were stripped out of the final UN document.

However, diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity have revealed it was in fact President Bush who scuppered what the UN believed was a crucial move in helping make the world safer from the risk of terrorists obtaining a nuclear threat.

Recommended if time remains

[Octafish]

35. BushCo made Trillions off of Cold War ... Team B

Remember Team B? Reagan-Poppy Bush monkey houses didn't like what CIA pros were saying. So, they enlisted and promoted "Team B," analysists who reported what the military-industrial complex wanted to hear: "The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!"

Remembering Team B

By Tom Barry | February 12, 2004

The most notorious attempt by militarists and right-wing ideologues to challenge the CIA was the Team B affair in the mid-1970s. The 1975-76 “Team B” operation was a classic case of threat escalation by hawks determined to increase military budgets and step up the U.S. offensive in the cold war. Concocted by right-wing ideologues and militarists, Team B aimed to bury the politics of détente and the SALT arms negotiations, which were supported by the leadership of both political parties. 1

The historical record shows that the call for an independent assessment of the CIA's conclusions came from the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB--pronounced piffy-ab ). But the fear-mongering and challenges to the CIA's threat assessments--known as National Intelligence Estimates--actually started with nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, who laid down the gauntlet in a 1974 Foreign Policy article entitled “Is There a Strategic Arms Race?” 2 Wohlstetter answered his rhetorical question negatively, concluding that the United States was allowing the Soviet Union to achieve military superiority by not closing the “missile gap.” Having inspired the Gaither Commission in 1957 to raise the missile gap alarm, Wohlstetter applied the same threat assessment methodology to energize hawks, cold warriors, and right-wing anticommunists in the mid-1970s to kill the politics of détente and increase budget allocations for the Pentagon. Following his Foreign Policy essay, Wohlstetter, who had left his full-time position at RAND to become a professor at the University of Chicago, organized an informal study group that included younger neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and longtime hawks like Paul Nitze.

PFIAB, which was dominated by right-wingers and hawks, followed Wohlstetter's lead and joined the threat assessment battle by calling in 1975 for an independent committee to evaluate the CIA's intelligence estimates. Testimony by PFIAB President Leo Cherne to the House Intelligence Committee in December 1975 alerted committee members to the need for better intelligence about the Soviet Union. “Intelligence cannot help a nation find its soul,” said Cherne. “It is indispensable, however, to help preserve the nation's safety, while it continues its search,” he added. George Bush Sr., who was about to leave his ambassadorship in China to become director of intelligence at the CIA, congratulated Cherne on his testimony, indicating that he would not oppose an independent evaluation of CIA intelligence estimates.

Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush Support Team B

Joining in the chorus of praise, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Bechtel's president George Shultz also congratulated Cherne, implicitly adding their backing for an independent threat assessment committee. 3 Led by several of the board's more hawkish members--including John Foster, Edward Teller, William Casey, Seymour Weiss, W. Glenn Campbell, and Clare Booth Luce--PFIAB had earlier in 1975 called for an independent evaluation of the CIA's national intelligence estimates. Feeling that the country's nuclear weapons industry and capacity was threatened, PFIAB was aiming to derail the arms control treaties then under negotiation.

Shortly after President Gerald Ford appointed Bush to be the new director of intelligence, replacing the beleaguered William Colby, Bush authorized PFIAB's plan for an alternative review. The review consisted of three panels: one to assess the threat posed by Soviet missile accuracy; another to determine the effect of Soviet air defenses on U.S. strategic bombers; and a third--the Strategic Objectives Panel--to determine the Soviet Union's intentions. The work of this last panel, which became known as the Team B Report, was the most controversial. As Paul Warnke, an official at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time of the Team B exercise, wrote: “Whatever might be said for evaluation of strategic capabilities by a group of outside experts, the impracticality of achieving useful results by ‘independent' analysis of strategic objectives should have been self-evident. Moreover, the futility of the Team B enterprise was assured by the selection of the panel's members. Rather than including a diversity of views ... the Strategic Objectives Panel was composed entirely of individuals who made careers of viewing the Soviet menace with alarm.” 4

Team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and William Van Cleave, both of whom would become members of the second Committee on the Present Danger, as well as Gen. Daniel Graham, whose "High Frontier" missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars." The team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Seymour Weiss--all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter. 5 Although Richard Perle played no direct role in Team B, he was instrumental in setting it up. It was Perle who had introduced Richard Pipes, a Polish immigrant who taught Czarist Russian history at Harvard, to Sen. Henry Jackson, catapulting Pipes into a clique of fanatically anti-Soviet hawks. Pipes, who served as Team B's chairman, later said he chose Wolfowitz as his principal Team B adviser "because Richard Perle recommended him so highly." 6

CONTINUED...

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402teamb.php

Remember what a famous right winger once said?

"The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might, and the Republic is in danger. Yes - danger from within and without. We need law and order! Without it our nation cannot survive." - Adolf Hitler, 1932, a big-time business associate of Brown Brothers Harriman and Prescott Bush.

[Nothing Without Hope]

39. WOW! Added to my growing file on these horrors.

I was just thinking about how I've read that Poppy was called "ice pick" in his CIA days because of his cold-blooded ruthlessness - there was NOTHING he wouldn't do.

[oasis]

17. kick

[Octafish]

36. Countering Criticism of the Warren Report

Thanks, oasis! Much obliged. Here's why I do this scut work...

How the CIA Killed History

by Ace R. Hayes
(May/June 1997 issue)
From the Portland Free Press

Editor's note: Three decades ago (4 January 1967), the CIA produced a document (#1035-960), "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." This document was partly declassified under an FOIA, September 1976. It is the blueprint for employing "CIA media assets" to smear critics of the Warren Commission. The justification for this perversion of truth, justice and democracy was clearly stated: "Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society."

CONTINUED…

http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/flash/ciakillhistory.html

And what Ace was talking about...

(Dear Mods: This is a US Government document, so it's part of the public domain and not restricted by copywrite/fair-use considerations. Thanks!)

CIA Document 1035-960
Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

CIA Document #1035-960

RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report

1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results.

2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leadership of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination.

Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments.

3. Action. We do not recommend that discussion of the assassination question be initiated where it is not already taking place. Where discussion is active addresses are requested:


a. To discuss the publicity problem with and friendly elite contacts (especially politicians and editors), pointing out that the Warren Commission made as thorough an investigation as humanly possible, that the charges of the critics are without serious foundation, and that further speculative discussion only plays into the hands of the opposition. Point out also that parts of the conspiracy talk appear to be deliberately generated by Communist propagandists. Urge them to use their influence to discourage unfounded and irresponsible speculation.

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (I) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)


4. In private to media discussions not directed at any particular writer, or in attacking publications which may be yet forthcoming, the following arguments should be useful:


a. No significant new evidence has emerged which the Commission did not consider. The assassination is sometimes compared (e.g., by Joachim Joesten and Bertrand Russell) with the Dreyfus case; however, unlike that case, the attack on the Warren Commission have produced no new evidence, no new culprits have been convincingly identified, and there is no agreement among the critics. (A better parallel, though an imperfect one, might be with the Reichstag fire of 1933, which some competent historians (Fritz Tobias, AJ.P. Taylor, D.C. Watt) now believe was set by Vander Lubbe on his own initiative, without acting for either Nazis or Communists; the Nazis tried to pin the blame on the Communists, but the latter have been more successful in convincing the world that the Nazis were to blame.)

b. Critics usually overvalue particular items and ignore others. They tend to place more emphasis on the recollections of individual witnesses (which are less reliable and more divergent--and hence offer more hand-holds for criticism) and less on ballistics, autopsy, and photographic evidence. A close examination of the Commission's records will usually show that the conflicting eyewitness accounts are quoted out of context, or were discarded by the Commission for good and sufficient reason.

c. Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested would be impossible to conceal in the United States, esp. since informants could expect to receive large royalties, etc. Note that Robert Kennedy, Attorney General at the time and John F. Kennedy's brother, would be the last man to overlook or conceal any conspiracy. And as one reviewer pointed out, Congressman Gerald R. Ford would hardly have held his tongue for the sake of the Democratic administration, and Senator Russell would have had every political interest in exposing any misdeeds on the part of Chief Justice Warren. A conspirator moreover would hardly choose a location for a shooting where so much depended on conditions beyond his control: the route, the speed of the cars, the moving target, the risk that the assassin would be discovered. A group of wealthy conspirators could have arranged much more secure conditions.

d. Critics have often been enticed by a form of intellectual pride: they light on some theory and fall in love with it; they also scoff at the Commission because it did not always answer every question with a flat decision one way or the other. Actually, the make-up of the Commission and its staff was an excellent safeguard against over-commitment to any one theory, or against the illicit transformation of probabilities into certainties.

e. Oswald would not have been any sensible person's choice for a co-conspirator. He was a "loner," mixed up, of questionable reliability and an unknown quantity to any professional intelligence service.

f. As to charges that the Commission's report was a rush job, it emerged three months after the deadline originally set. But to the degree that the Commission tried to speed up its reporting, this was largely due to the pressure of irresponsible speculation already appearing, in some cases coming from the same critics who, refusing to admit their errors, are now putting out new criticisms.

g. Such vague accusations as that "more than ten people have died mysteriously" can always be explained in some natural way e.g.: the individuals concerned have for the most part died of natural causes; the Commission staff questioned 418 witnesses (the FBI interviewed far more people, conduction 25,000 interviews and re interviews), and in such a large group, a certain number of deaths are to be expected. (When Penn Jones, one of the originators of the "ten mysterious deaths" line, appeared on television, it emerged that two of the deaths on his list were from heart attacks, one from cancer, one was from a head-on collision on a bridge, and one occurred when a driver drifted into a bridge abutment.)


5. Where possible, counter speculation by encouraging reference to the Commission's Report itself. Open-minded foreign readers should still be impressed by the care, thoroughness, objectivity and speed with which the Commission worked. Reviewers of other books might be encouraged to add to their account the idea that, checking back with the report itself, they found it far superior to the work of its critics.

SOURCE:

http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html