TERROR ALERT: If you don’t think the BFEE is capable of bombing our own -

-- then you haven’t read about what P2 did to the Bolgna train station or Operation NORTHWOODS.

P2 was a secret society dedicated to "fighting communism." Its members included government ministers, members of the military and church as well as assorted fascists and mafiosi. Not just in Italy, either, its honorary members included many in the United States. An excerpt from what appears to be a decent book review on the subject:

From the Egg to the Apples: The Combined Chronologies of the Strategy of Tension in Italy and of the Italian Section of the Situationist International
by Len Bracken

EXCERPT…

March 1979 -- Publication of On Terrorism and the State by Gianfranco Sanguinetti and the murder, Mafia-style, of Mino Pecorelli, publisher of OP. Pecorelli was scheduled to have an appointment for "dinner Licio" the night after his death - Licio being, quite probably, Gelli. The headline of the OP published a week before his death: "Assassinations, bombings, coup attempts - the shadow of freemasonry hovered over them all: from Piazza Fontana to the Occorsio murder, from the Borghese coup to kidnappings, to the flight of Sindona from Italy."

August 2, 1980 -- Bologna railway station bombing kills 85 and injures 200. 1988 conviction of right-wing terrorists for the crime is overturned in 1990.

January 1981 -- P2 Venerable Master Licio Gelli attends Ronald Reagan's inauguration. Gelli would later report that he spent the entire week with George Bush.

March 1981 -- P2 Venerable Master Licio Gelli's home is searched revealing that four cabinet ministers, three under-secretaries and 38 parliamentarians were P2 and helped precipitate the fall of the government of Arnaldo Forlani to appoint a Prime Minister who was not Christian Democrat for the first time since WWII.
CONTINUED…

NORTHWOODS was a strategy proposed by the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage terrorist incidents involving American citizens, including hijacking airliners, to build public support for an invasion of Cuba. The plan was rejected by President John F. Kennedy who then fired the Chairman of the JCS. Here’s a very good overview:

OPERATION NORTHWOODS:
US PLANNED FAKE TERROR ATTACKS ON CITIZENS
TO CREATE SUPPORT FOR CUBAN WAR

From BODY OF SECRETS, James Bamford, Doubleday, 2001, p.82 and following. Scanned and edited by NY Transfer News.

...In Lemnitzer's view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over.
For those military officers who were sitting on the fence, the Kennedy administration's botched Bay of Pigs invasion was the last straw. "The Bay of Pigs fiasco broke the dike," said one report at the time. "President Kennedy was pilloried by the super patriots as a 'no-win' chief . . . The Far Right became a fount of proposals born of frustration and put forward in the name of anti-Communism. . . Active-duty commanders played host to anti-Communist seminars on their bases and attended or addressed Right-wing meetings elsewhere."

Although no one in Congress could have known it at the time, Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.

According to secret and long-hidden documents obtained for Body of Secrets, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.

CONTINUED…

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/northwoods.html

I don't believe that even this Administration will bomb its own citizens for political purposes. There is simply no good reason to believe it. I think that such accusations do a grave disservice to the Democratic Party and America - unless they are backed by unamibiguous, iron-clad evidence.

n/t

I watched it. Occam's Razor slits up the conspiracy theories (weak as they are) pretty quickly.

He must have been a pretty busy guy.

Any event involving plotting my more than one person is a "conspiracy"--& you don't believe in those.

I don't believe that the government was involved in the attack. Now, if you want to play silly games...well, knock yourself out. I'll watch. :)

then you haven't been paying attention.

Were they involved via contributory negligence?
Were they involved via passive allowance?
Were they involved directly?

What does "government" mean? Who specifically had knowledge and who didn't?

Those are the interesting questions. I believe the original respondent is really simply saying he/she is skeptical that our government MIHOP. That's fair, MIHOP can't be proven - yet. But just because there isn't conclusive evidence for MIHOP does not mean a person is saying that therefore they believe the "official story." There are about six different levels of possible explanations. Personally I believe a weak LIHOP is the best theory to currently fit all the facts. I believe they had enough information that they could have and should have taken more action but didn't, and I believe that part of the reason they didn't take more action is because - whether it was literally talked about or a subconscious disposition - the administration had reason to want a national attack to happen.

The reason I typed that out is because, I don't believe our government "did" 9/11 this time either, not because I don't believe our government is capable of it, but because I don't believe that explanation currently fits the facts as well as other explanations. But just because I agree with the original responder that I don't think our government "did" 9/11, that doesn't mean I support the "official" story, and I resent ignorant all or nothing either/or logical fallacies illicitly manufactured just to irrationally bolster your position rather than bolster it through honest representation and another's point of view.

TruthIsAll
Scandal: Jonathan Bush

Inside the Mind of Gloria Brame: Media Covers Up Bush/Riggs ...
... The move solidified the relationship between Jonathan Bush and Riggs ... Riggs denies any connection between Bush and the ... domain, when reporting the scandal at Riggs ...
http://gloriabrame.typepad.com/inside_the_mind_of_gloria/2004/05/media... - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

TPJ.org
... Jonathan Bush was a Yale classmate of William Donaldson, George W. Bush's second chair of ... Bush Appointee Corportate or Campaign Scandal Corporate Welfare ...
www.tpj.org/docs/pioneers/pioneers_view.jsp?id=158 - 21k - Cached - Similar pages

TPJ.org
... Jordan was George W. Bush's personal attorney during an early scandal. ... tens of thousands of dollars from the Riggs bank account (see Jonathan Bush) of Saudi ...
www.tpj.org/docs/pioneers/pioneers_view.jsp?id=628 - 22k - Cached - Similar pages
< More results from www.tpj.org >

TalkLeft: Bush's Uncle is Head of Bank Fined in Money Laundering ...
... 80s." According to Public Citizen, the uncle Jonathan was a Bush Pioneer, having ... Between this latest scandal, Neil's S&L thievery, and questionable Saudi ...
http://talkleft.com/new_archives/006540.html - 19k - Cached - Similar pages

I Stole the Head of Prescott Bush! More Scary Skull and Bones ...
... of a young child to an Apache tribal official in an apparent attempt to hush up a potential Bush family scandal. ... (A message left at Jonathan Bush’s number in ...
www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=2947 - 33k - Cached - Similar pages

Webguild Sentinel Bush Family Hustle
... trust, yet his evasions about his own dealings and recent campaigning with brother Jeb immerse him within a family financial scandal of alarming ... JONATHAN BUSH. ...
www.webguild.com/sentinel/bush_family_hustle.htm - 16k - Cached - Similar pages

Top Bush Scandals of 2003, Part II
... Why hasn't this scandal been front-and-center on the networks and ... reveal if those funds came from her Riggs Bank account where Bush's uncle Jonathan is a ...
www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=18951 - 37k - Cached - Similar pages

GWB uncle mentionned in terrorist funding scandal
... GWB uncle mentionned in terrorist funding scandal « on: May 19, 2004, 05 ... drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush ...
http://discuss.agonist.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1 ;action=display;threadid=19607 - 28k - Cached - Similar pages

SKULL and BONES
... Arizona Republic, entitled ``Skull for Scandal: Did Bush's ... Post, the document which Bush attorney Endicott ... inappropriate for you, me or anyone ...
www.pa56.org/skullandbones.htm - 15k - Cached - Similar pages



What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children--not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women--not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.- John F. Kennedy


NewYorkerfromMass

Riggs Bank Starts Exploring Possible Sale


Curious doings at Riggs:

Riggs National Corp. has hired an investment bank to seek out potential buyers for the company, after months of unprecedented internal upheaval and intense regulatory scrutiny of its banking relationships with foreign embassies.....

Riggs's stock price has risen since late April, when it disclosed deepening regulatory troubles related to its embassy banking division. Regulators earlier this month fined the bank $25 million for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering laws in its relationships with embassies, especially those of Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea......

The company has already announced, under pressure from regulators, that it plans to exit embassy banking and sell most of its European business and a unit in Florida. But after years of resistance to selling by Riggs's controlling shareholder and longtime chairman, Joe L. Allbritton, the board has given Lehman a mandate to explore a broader array of options, the source said.....

Allbritton, 34, addressing a group of about 50 people at the meeting and speaking publicly about the matter for the first time, sought to make a clear distinction between Riggs's regulatory failures and any connection to terrorist financing. "To my knowledge, Riggs has never been used to finance or facilitate terrorist financing," he said.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61810-2004May27.html

Snazzy

Man held as a material witness in 9/11 probe deported to Yemen


By Kelly Thornton
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
May 26, 2004

Mohdar Abdullah, a former San Diego State student and material witness in the 9/11 terror investigation, was quietly deported to Yemen on Friday after spending almost three years in New York and San Diego County jails.

Abdullah and his friend and former cellmate, Omar Bakarbashat, were among the first Muslim immigrants in the nation to be detained after Sept. 11, 2001, and are two of the last to be released. Bakarbashat was deported to Yemen on Oct. 24.

"After lengthy negotiations, the government of Yemen issued a travel document for Abdullah and we were able to remove him back to that country," said Lauren Mack, spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department.

"He had been initially identified as a close associate of two of the deceased hijackers from San Diego, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid al-Midhar," Mack said.

much more at:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20040526-9999-7m26deport.html

(NB: Going to Yemen will probably not be a punishment, just a way-point in eventual return to Saudi. Recap: One of the guys the princess appeared to be funding (Bandar). Held till now on material witness, i.e. no charge. Quitely removed from the country. See a pattern? I only caught this story through following-up on Riggs Bank scandal).

Edit, add this link for some recap:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4661093 /

and especially posts by seemslikeadream in this thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic ...




http://www.paranoidlarry.com / http://www.globalresearch.ca / http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/index.jsp http://www.madcowprod.com / http://www.deepblacklies.co.uk / http://www.ndp.ca / http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com / "We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men." George Orwell


whosinpower
Bush's Uncle BUSTED !!!!!!


just read this on Yahoo......

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=509&e=14&u=/ap/riggs_b ...

snip - WASHINGTON - The Federal Reserve (news - web sites) ordered Riggs Bank's parent company Friday to take steps to prevent money laundering after the bank was fined $25 million in connection with a probe into possible links to terrorism financing.


And guess who is the CEO???????

Washington, D.C., May 31, 2000 - Riggs Bank N.A. today announced that the Board of Directors of RIMCO, a wholly owned investment management subsidiary, has elected Jonathan J. Bush President & Chief Executive Officer and a Director, replacing Philip Tasho who resigned."

http://www.riggsbank.com/Discover_Riggs/may31_00.html


Pinochet and Riggs what a combo


from Snazz


Pinochet, who is now fighting arrest on kidnapping and murder charges in Santiago, has not clarified how he and his wife, Lucia, bhad $1,169,308 (around £730,000) in their account in the Riggs Bank in Washington on 1 March 1997. As commander-in-chief of the Chilean army, his annual salary in March 1997 was $16,000 (£10,000).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Pinochet_on_trial/Story/0,2763,409367,00.htm ...


Snazzy
LAT: U.S. Investigates Oil Firms' Deals in West Africa


THE WORLD
U.S. Investigates Oil Firms' Deals in West Africa

Sources say real estate purchase and leases in Equatorial Guinea may have improperly benefited the nation's president.

By Ken Silverstein, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators have been looking into American oil companies' real estate dealings in Equatorial Guinea to determine whether they have improperly benefited the country's despotic ruler, according to sources familiar with the inquiries.

...

Investigators are trying to determine whether oil companies paid prices so far above the market rates that they violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars companies from bribing foreign government officials, sources told The Times.

Marathon Oil Corp. and ExxonMobil Corp. confirmed that company officials had met with Senate investigators, but would not provide details. Both firms said their dealings in Equatorial Guinea had been proper and lawful.

Interest in the land deals grew out of a money-laundering inquiry involving accounts held by Equatorial Guinea at Riggs Bank in Washington. The biggest account contained hundreds of millions of dollars in oil revenues deposited by American oil companies operating in the country.

more at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-oil22may22,1,88675 ...

British businessman accused of leading role in failed coup


Exclusive Investigation: Mercenaries held over Equatorial Guinea plot identify west London consultant as mastermind
By Paul Lashmar and Adrian Gatton
16 May 2004


A management consultant from west London has been accused of being one of the masterminds behind a plot to overthrow the government of the oil-rich African state of Equatorial Guinea.

The failed coup - strikingly reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth's mercenary tale The Dogs of War - came to light in March with the dramatic arrests of 67 soldiers of fortune at Harare airport in Zimbabwe. Now a witness statement seen by The Independent on Sunday names Greg Wales, 53, an accountant and management consultant, as a key organiser behind the plot.

He vehemently denies any involvement. But the government of Equatorial Guinea has confirmed to the IoS that it now wishes to interview Mr Wales, who has homes in Chiswick and Wiltshire and a history of business in Africa.

A statement on behalf of the state and President of Equatorial Guinea said yesterday: "The appropriate authorities are anxious to interview Mr Wales in view of his apparent involvement in the attempted coup d'état." British lawyers acting for the government have asked Scotland Yard's Anti-Terrorist Branch to investigate Mr Wales's role. "We believe attempting a coup against an elected government by the use of force is an act of international terrorism and should be investigated as such," one lawyer said

more
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=521746

Mr du Toit claims that Mr Wales arranged much of the finance for the coup.


Mr Wales denies involvement in the coup. While he says he knows most of the key figures said to be involved in the failed plot, he stressed: "I was not involved in a coup. I do not even believe that there was a coup plot. This is all a deal between Mugabe and Obiang. If the government of Equatorial Guinea is saying I was involved then it is a joke."

But Mr du Toit identifies Mr Wales as a key organiser, in a statement seen by the IoS. It was signed in the presence of a British lawyer working for the government. In the statement he says: "The first person who I spoke to about the coup was Greg. I had not met him before. I do not know how he got my telephone number but this was probably through Simon Mann. I do not know his family name."

The IoS has confirmed that Mr du Toit had Greg Wales's personal mobile number in his notebook. Mr Wales is an old Africa hand and has been involved with Mr Mann over many years; Mr du Toit claims that Mr Wales arranged much of the finance for the coup.

At the time, Mr du Toit was based in Equatorial Guinea starting up businesses, including a deep-sea fishing project and an airfreight operation in partnership with ministers. In his statement he says: "He called me and asked me to meet him on 4 January 2004 in Sandton, South Africa. He said he had a business proposition for me ... I decided to see what he proposed."

more
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=521746


The weapons supplied to Nick Du Toit's customers


The alleged mercenaries, arrested in March, are to be extradited to Equatorial Guinea to stand trial for plotting the overthrow of the government there. The Harare authorities announced the extradition last week, not long after receiving legal documents from lawyers representing the arrested men outlining their defence to various minor charges laid against them in Zimbabwe.

A court case would have revealed that the parastatal Zimbabwe Defence Industries (ZDI) has been working for the past few years with a number of white South Africans in joint ventures to ship arms around the continent.

'There was no way he would have got involved in a coup'
The South African arms brokers, operating with offshore companies, registered in places like the Bahamas, were able to guarantee delivery of weapons "within 24 hours of payment being received, to anywhere in Africa," according to a source in Pretoria.

Once payment had been received, an aircraft would be dispatched from South Africa to Harare. It would load the weapons from military facilities at Harare airport and would then fly on to its final African destination, said the source
The weapons supplied to Nick Du Toit's customers could have come from three sources: The Zimbabwe National Army armouries; from weaponry captured by Zimbabwean troops in their involvement in the DRC or could be have been bought new.

more
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=84&art_id=vn20040508105453653C ...


Equatorial Guinea also involved in the Riggs bank scandal


but laundering money for the government (Obiang) and likely paying out the bribes from the oil companies.

LA Times story (somewhere odd) has good details: http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=43&num=11319&printe ...

That's the Jonathan Bush linked company that there were other stories about today and recently--funneling money from Saudi's to the West Coast 9/11 terrorist cell.

I don't yet get if or how the coup money would be related. Greg Wales doesn't google very well, for one. But naturally we have a Bush linked company doing something hokey with oil rich EG, so there's got to be more to it. From some reading today, I think the International arm of Riggs is based in Miami--maybe throw in some Jeb, Cubans, drugs or other crazy Florida stuff that always makes up a nice BFEE crime conspiracy. I'm catching a strong wiff of BCCI.



Mugabe to barter mercenaries for fuel


Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has struck a deal with Equatorial Guinea to extradite the 70 suspected mercenaries held in Harare to the oil-rich country in exchange for fuel worth US1.2-billion.

Official sources say Mugabe has agreed with Equatorial Guinea's President Teodora Obiang Nguema Mbasogo to hand over the mercenaries, accused of plotting a coup in the West African nation, on condition that he received a two-year supply of fuel.


The deal was first discussed at a meeting between Mugabe and Obiang in Pretoria on April 27.


Mugabe and Obiang were in South Africa to attend President Thabo Mbeki's inauguration.


"Initially, Mugabe did not want to send the suspects to Equatorial Guinea because he wanted to use them to gain cheap publicity and later to bargain for fuel," a source said. "Obiang had to send at least three teams to Zimbabwe to negotiate the extradition but Mugabe refused. It was only after Obiang accepted the fuel deal that he agreed."

more
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/05/16/news/africa/africa04.asp



Zim strikes detainees-for-fuel deal

author/source:Zimbabwe Independent
published:Fri 14-May-2004
posted on this site:Sat 15-May-2004


Deal entails US$50 million worth of fuel monthly for two years

Gift Phiri/Dumisani Muleya

In an unusual diplomatic arrangement, Zimbabwe has entered a US$1,2 billion deal to extradite the 70 suspected mercenaries currently held in Harare to Equatorial Guinea in exchange for fuel. Intelligence sources say President Robert Mugabe discussed the deal with his Equatorial Guinea counterpart, Teodora Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, at their initial meeting in Pretoria with South African president Thabo Mbeki on April 27. Mugabe and Obiang were in South Africa to attend Mbeki's inauguration. The three leaders are said to have met over the mercenaries' saga after Zimbabwe had earlier refused to send the suspects for trial in the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. Sources said the meeting agreed in principle that Zimbabwe would extradite the suspected mercenaries on agreed terms and conditions. Mugabe and Obiang finalised the mercenaries-for-fuel arrangement at a meeting in Bulawayo the following day. The two leaders met at State House in the second city on April 28. After the meeting Obiang told journalists that they had been discussing the issue of the suspects' extradition. High-level sources said Mugabe agreed to extradite the suspected soldiers of fortune on condition Equatorial Guinea - the third largest oil producer after Nigeria and Angola in sub-Saharan Africa -would supply Zimbabwe with fuel.


more
http://www.zwnews.com/issuefull.cfm?ArticleID=9292


Business
Bank and African Oil State Ties Probed
By Ken Silverstein, LA Times 9/4/04
Apr 11, 2004, 07:50


A federal grand jury and a Senate subcommittee are investigating the relationship between a prominent Washington bank and a tiny, oil-rich West African state.

Investigators are scrutinizing hundreds of millions of dollars in accounts held at Riggs Bank by the government of Equatorial Guinea and its ruler, Brig. Gen. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Sources familiar with the probes said investigators were trying to determine whether any deposits into Obiang's personal accounts were the fruits of corruption and whether funds from a state account were diverted to the president or his family members.

The Times first reported on Riggs' relationship with Equatorial Guinea last year, which prompted the bank to conduct an internal investigation. Riggs subsequently dismissed Simon Kareri, a senior executive overseeing the Equatorial Guinea accounts.

In February, Riggs ordered Equatorial Guinea's government to withdraw all of its assets from the bank. U.S. government and banking sources said Equatorial Guinea has had difficulty finding another U.S. bank to take its money, and most, if not all, of its deposits are still held at Riggs.

"Riggs' security procedures detected questionable activities on the part of Simon Kareri," said Mark Hendrix, a bank spokesman. "Riggs turned the matter over to U.S. criminal authorities. Riggs is cooperating with authorities and, in light of the investigations, views it as inappropriate to comment further on these matters."

Snazzy

A lot to absorb here and research--bookmarked


Interesting but not surprising that whatever congressional inquiry is flying under the radar. The $25 million is nothing but a slap (Riggs has $6.4 billion in assets), as someone here pointed out. But the fact that Allbritton stepped down, and they are shutting down Miami and some of the other money laundering capabilities, suggests the shit has hit the fan.

Here's the guy who runs the London Riggs: Steve Pfeiffer (who googles better).

Bio: http://www.fulbright.com/site_map/FindAttorney/371.htm

I'd guess his operation would the point for paying out the British mercs. He's some sort of Africa specialist, former assistant to Sec of the Navy (and assistant CINC Europe and NATO muckty-muck) sometime around Regan. (Yale Law too).

Here's the Riggs 2002 annual report:
http://www.riggsbank.com/Discover_Riggs/annualreport2002.pdf

Lots of names worth checking out--I'm going to see what comes up with Juan Luis Toro, who ran the Miami international operation. I'll bet there's some connection to Haiti, Columbia/Venezuela and/or something more with 9/11.

Cool that we get a Walker involved and they have offices in the Watergate. "It's all the same fucking day, man" (--Janis J).


Snazzy

Saudi-ization of African oil


Same plan, different country. Take oil rich nation, find dictator who can be educated on siphoning off oil profits for his own personal wealth (to the further impoverishment of his people) and in exchange for preferential treatment of us companies.

Were they about to double-cross Obiang? His money was initially frozen in DC--it has now left. Was he just exiting to his Maryland mansion? Dunno, but this Riggs bank connection sure seems to be the follow-the-money thread to pull on Bushco for several different plots. Enough material here for a book.

For one, I'd like to ask someone who knows WTF, say an economist (can we get Krugman?), how an "Edge Act" bank functions, and what's up in Miami with international banking in general. How does that tie in with the export/import bank in DC and Riggs? The Edge Act is something about a bank that can only lend to foreign banks--that Jonathan Bush and Riggs in general could control such an entity while also engaging in other business like investments and domestic lending apparently violates the "Edge Act" (and a bunch of other regulations) and is partly why Riggs is dumping that portion of the business. I wonder whether there have been changes under Jeb that had led to Miami expanding the definitions of what's allowable into money laundering for oil and terror. The answer is: of course he did, just need to find that.

A complicated thread to pull--18 browser windows open so far! Like I found this great Newsweek Isikoff piece from April that I missed:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4661093


Among the payments that have drawn scrutiny, documents show, were $19,200 in checks between December 2000 and January 2003 from the Saudi Embassy to an Islamic cleric, Gulshair Muhammad al-Shukrijumah. The Florida-based imam has been on the FBI's radar screen for some time: he once testified on behalf of convicted terrorist Clement Hampton-El.

Hampton-El was convicted in trying to blow up the WTC the first time in '93. al-Shukrijumah is apparently still missing, also served as the blink sheik's interpreter and may have had a serious role in 9/11. So, it's not just the princess sending money to the West Coast cell.

(Another browser window has the odd factoid that the former head of Riggs international lending (Paul Cushman III) died with Ron Brown in '96. Wild. Kareri succeeded him.)

Plenty to run down here, although a tangent (or the opposite side of the coin) to the original news story in this post. Haven't come across anything that links Riggs to funding of the coup. Maybe it's more like switch dictators and get to keep the Riggs money.

seemslikeadream

Bush, the Saudi billionaire and the Islamists: the story a British firm is



MUST SEE: stories on Riggs National Bank -- note links to 2 of 19 hijackers in San Diego through wire transfer from Saudi Arabia. Jonathon Bush, George W. Bush's uncle, is a top official within the bank and the Motley suit brought by the 9/11 families has issued a subpoena of the bank's records. -KFH


Articles / Current News about 9-11
Date: Apr 02, 2004 - 04:25 PM
Publication of book cancelled as libel laws blamed for stifling free speech
David Leigh -- Wednesday March 31, 2004 -- The Guardian

A book investigating links between rich Saudis and US politicians has been suppressed by the giant publishing firm Random House because, it says, of growing "libel tourism" by wealthy foreigners, and exorbitant legal "success fees".

Libel lawyers are stifling free speech, the deputy chairman of Random House, Simon Master, said yesterday.

The UK publication of House of Bush, House of Saud, by the American writer Craig Unger, has been cancelled because Secker and Warburg, a Random House subsidiary, says it can no longer afford such risks.

The book focuses in part on the activities of a Jeddah-based Saudi billionaire, Khalid bin Mahfouz, who has been engaged in a war of words in the US, where there have been public accusations by officials linking him and others to funding received by Osama bin Laden.

more
http://www.911citizenswatch.org/print.php?sid=176


Hijacked bank

Questions also remain regarding the web of money transfers from Princess Haifa, Prince Bandar and the daughter of late King Faisal, some of which reached Nawaf Alhazmi and fellow terrorist Khalid Almihdar.Princess Haifa's bank account--the source of the funds which ultimately supported the alleged hijackers--was with Riggs Bank where Jonathan J. Bush, the brother of former President George H. W. Bush and uncle of President George W. Bush, is CEO, President and Director of Riggs' investment management subsidiary.

snip

After Al Bayoumi fled the U.S. to England in July, 2001--two months before the attacks, Princess Haifa's Riggs Bank checks were then sent to Osama Basnan, who with his wife Majeda Dweikat, were both later to be found in the U.S. illegally as a result of poor or suspicious State Department visa supervision.

Former FBI linguist Sibel Edmonds said she found evidence of espionage in both the State Department and the FBI in pre-9/11 translations of intelligence intercepts--which also warned about planes used as weapons well before the attacks.A federal law enforcement source said Basnan was a known "al-Qaeda sympathizer" who "celebrated the heroes of September 11" at a party after the attacks and openly talked about "what a wonderful, glorious day it had been," according to Newsweek.

Al Bayoumi and Basnan both befriended Alhazmi and fellow Saudi hijacker Khalid Almihdar after they arrived in San Diego, according to the sources; and the Riggs checks from Prince Bandar's wife helped the terroists pay rent and living expences in the months just prior to the attacks, according to reports. Newsweek said Al Bayoumi helped them obtain social security cards and helped them arrange for flying lessons in Florida--indicating dramatic evidence of the state of congressional internal security oversight.

Basnan was convicted of visa fraud and deported to Saudi Arabia on November 17, 2002. His wife Majida Ibrahim--who had also laundered checks from Riggs Bank--was deported the same day to her native Jordan for visa violations. (Washington Post, 9-24, 2002) Reasons were not given why the White House allowed the high profile suspects to leave the country on charges much less important than being implicated as an accessory to mass murder.

more
http://www.tomflocco.com/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=53

Exclusive: New Questions About Saudi Money—and Bandar

Eric Draper / The White House


The White House is monitoring a joint FBI-Treasury Department probe into wire transfers overseas by Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, pictured with the president in August 2002
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
NewsweekApril 12 issue - A federal investigation into the bank accounts of the Saudi Embassy in Washington has identified more than $27 million in "suspicious" transactions—including hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to Muslim charities, and to clerics and Saudi students who are being scrutinized for possible links to terrorist activity, according to government documents obtained by NEWSWEEK. The probe also has uncovered large wire transfers overseas by the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The transactions recently prompted the Saudi Embassy's longtime bank, the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., to drop the Saudis as a client after embassy officials were "unable to provide an explanation that was satisfying," says a source familiar with the discussions.



A Saudi spokesman strongly denied that any embassy funds were used to support terrorism and said Bandar chose to pull the embassy's accounts out of Riggs. The Saudis point out that an earlier FBI probe into embassy funds that were moved to alleged associates of the 9/11 hijackers has not led to any charges. The current probe, by the FBI and Treasury Department, is one of the most sensitive financial inquiries now being conducted by the government and is being closely monitored by the White House. The federal commission investigating 9/11 was also recently briefed on developments, sources say. U.S. officials stress that they have identified no evidence of any knowing Saudi aid to terrorist groups. But they express frustration at their inability to penetrate a number of large and seemingly irregular transactions. "There's a lot of money moving in a lot of directions—maybe not all that carefully," said one senior law-enforcement official. "Everyone wants to get to the bottom of it."
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4661093 /


Our friend Dulcedecorum Sun Mar-21-04

Show me the money

Take Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mbasogo, a member of the same dictatorial ruling family that has ruled Equatorial Guinea since its independence from Spain in 1968. The dictatorship has been in power for about as long as Saddam held sway over Iraq. But Obiang is sitting on top of huge oil revenues and he is in tight with Bush's, Cheney's, and Condoleezza Rice's Exxon Mobil, Hess, and Marathon oil buddies in Houston and Dallas. Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues, estimated at $700 billion in 2003, keep Obiang in power. His son, Teodorino, spends a lot of time in Paris and Washington, where his dad just spent $3.5 million for two mansions courtesy of mortgages from Riggs Bank, where the African kleptocracy keeps much of its ill-gotten oil revenue.

It does not matter to the Bush regime that Obiang keeps his political prisoners in dark dungeons that would have made Saddam envious, or that Obiang executes opponents he finds particularly distasteful. Nor does it matter to Bush that Equatorial Guinea's children are dying from malaria, intestinal worms, and malnutrition because the Obiang dictatorship does not provide the country with adequate sanitation or medical care. The country's state radio recently pronounced that Obiang was God and that therefore he could kill anyone without accounting to anyone. It sounds a lot like Saddam. But in Obiang's case, he has the full support of Bush because Obiang is turning over his country's oil to the United States with himself getting enough money to buy Rolls Royces, Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and diamond-studded Rolex watches. Like Saddam with his son, Qusay, Obiang has designated his son, Teodorino, as his heir apparent.
http://www.newsinsider.org/madsta/saddam_is_captured_long_live_america ...

In June, Tony Blair is to host a transparency conference in London aimed at tackling the corruption that surrounds the exploitation of natural resources in developing countries. Equatorial Guinea is the only oil-producing country to have refused to attend, notes the piece. Equatorial Guinea has become a major oil and gas producer in the past 10 years, yet the 500,000-strong population remains in poverty.

Details of the Riggs Bank account have emerged after the country's ambassador, Teodoro Biyogo Nsue, who is President Obiang's brother-in-law, unwisely mentioned that oil revenue was held at Riggs during a presentation late last year at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times alleged that President Obiang is the account's sole signatory and more than $300 million of the country's energy earnings has been deposited in the account by oil companies active in Equatorial Guinea, including ExxonMobil and Amerada Hess. Alejandro Evuna Owono, a Guinean aide, denied to the LA Times that the government was secretive about oil revenue. "The IMF and the World Bank know national production figures, but we can use the money as we see fit," he said.
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,date:05-12-2003~menuP ...

Simon P. Kareri, Vice President and Senior International Banking Manager, was promoted to Senior Vice President and Senior International Banking Manager. Kareri joined Riggs in 1994 as Vice President and African Caribbean Embassy Manager.
http://www.riggsbank.com/Discover_Riggs/jan25_01.html

Malabo has been abuzz with rumours of a coup for the past few weeks and the authorities here are convinced that the US intelligence service, the CIA, was aware of the rumours. They say that this might explain why, as we exclusively reported in our last issue, the Washington-based Riggs Bank told Obiang to close his account with the bank when he visited it in late February. One of the bank’s senior vice-president and senior international banking manager, the Kenyan-born Simon Kareri, who handled the account — which had $300m — was subsequently fired. Curiously, all the African-Americans who were associated with Kareri at the bank were also dismissed. A number of people were quizzed by the FBI who wanted to know all manners of things about Equatorial Guinea and especially about the country’s First Family, which minister was related to Obiang and which companies he owns.

FBI officers had also raided Kareri’s home Washington. They asked his Senegalese wife a lot of questions on Equatorial Guinea which she could not answer. The FBI officers made it clear to her that they were not after her husband but were interested in any files on Equatorial Guinea that he may have left at home. They then took away all the computers that were in Kareri’s home. At the time Kareri was in Malabo. Curiously, when he returned to Washington after the failure of the coup attempt he contacted the FBI expressing his willingness to be interviewed by him but they declined, saying that they saw no need to interview him. No court charges have been brought against him and he is believed to be seeking legal counsel and may sue Riggs Bank.

Malabo authorities find it ‘awfully suspicious’ that for the past two weeks, the bank had refused to unfreeze Equatorial Guinea’s funds. Apparently, they had recently decided that if there were to be a coup in Malabo they would freeze Obiang and his government’s accounts. This was not done with the Haitian government account when Haitian President Jean Baptiste Aristide was ousted the first time. He was able to have access to his government’s funds with the same bank.
http://217.199.168.239/040.html

The unmasking of the coup plot may also embarrass Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who has had several meetings with Moto recently, and was said by military sources to have been aware of the plot. Aznar is due to stand down ahead of national elections in the next few weeks.

The affair will also be a test case for South Africa's anti-mercenary legislation, given that much of the planning for the coup happened there and that most of the mercenaries were former South African soldiers.

President Obiang will doubtless try to use the failed coup to his advantage. His position has seemed to weaken in recent months, with the succession battle heating up and rifts developing within the country's tiny ruling clique. The latest blow to Obiang came late last month when he visited Washington D.C. in an attempt to resolve problems with his government's account at Riggs Bank. Obiang is the sole signatory on that account, which had a balance of more than US$600 million. The account has recently been investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an official at Riggs Bank has been interrogated by US agents.
http://africa-confidential.com/latestissue.asp

Tony Worthington:
At one time, America had little interest in Africa, but increasing amounts of oil are coming from it. We are in a new version of the great game in which the powers are struggling for resources. The Americans are trying to get out of reliance on Saudi Arabia and west Africa is the middle of an oil boom. I was astonished by the figures: 7 billion of an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil discovered last year were found off the west coast of Africa. West Africa now sends almost as much oil to the United States as Saudi Arabia. With that change comes military interest as well, but I do not have time to speak about that.

Nigeria is the worst case of a country discovering oil and experiencing misery. Following the discovery of huge oilfields, per capita income fell by 23 per cent. since 1975. I watched with interest when democracy took over in Nigeria, but I have seen no further signs of transparency. When we went to Nigeria, it was hard for politicians to find out what was going on. In Angola, more than $1 billion—about a third of state income—disappears each year and cannot be accounted for.

My favourite example of the relationship between the United States, its oil companies and African states is that of Equatorial Guinea. It is a tiny country of about 500,000 people—about a third the size of Northern Ireland—but it sits on oil. In Washington, almost within sight of the White House, there is a place called Dupont circle. There one will find Riggs bank, in which, it is alleged by the Los Angeles Times and corroborated by Global Witness, there is a bank account holding between $300 million and $500 million in the name of the President of Equatorial Guinea. That amount of money can only have come from Equatorial Guinea's oil resources, because oil represents 90 per cent. of its income. The dominant oil companies are Exxon and Chevron—American companies that reveal no information about their payments to that country. If they did, we would know about the route that the money followed. The President of Equatorial Guinea is

4 Nov 2003 : Column 758

therefore accused of huge money laundering in President Bush's neighbourhood bank, but there has been no sign of any attempt to find out whether that is the origin of the money.
The magazine, New Internationalist, ranks the world's regimes from one star to five star. Five star is "excellent"; one star is "appalling". It gives Equatorial Guinea one star, saying that all power rests in the presidency and that the president has no political vision beyond self-enrichment, self-aggrandisement and ruthless repression. No one in this place would achieve that record. We used to treat Equatorial Guinea as a pariah state. It is said that around one third of its people have fled. When it had elections last year, the leaders of the three opposition parties were locked up in jail and President Obiang got 99 per cent. of the vote. That gives us a clue that something is wrong. Even the US Department of Energy reports strong evidence of Government misappropriation of the oil funds that represent 90 per cent. of the country's income.
http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd ...

And now, equal time with Mbob Mbodelango.

Madrid.- Feb. 26, 2004 .- The F.B.I. is investigating Teodoro Nsue Biyogo, former Ambassador of Equatorial Guinea in Washington and brother-in-law of President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.
http://www.guinea-ecuatorial.org/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid= ...

There are daily flights between Dallas in Texas and Malabo. This is possibly the highest frequency of direct airline flights between the United States and Africa. These are commuter flights that bring drilling workers from Dallas.

The oil companies pay a hefty fee to Mbassogo for drilling oil. This is paid into Mbassogo’s personal bank account in the Riggs Bank in Washington, DC owned by Mbassogo. The citizens of Equatorial Guinea have no idea how much money is deposited in that bank account.

Ultimately the wealth is shared between the Mbassogo family and his cronies and the oil companies. The rest of the citizens of Equatorial Guinea are living in abject poverty.

Why is the Mugabe regime trying to show off? They have invited reporters into the seized jet. The Home Affairs Minister has made several press statements on the matter.

In fact, the entire ZANUPF machinery has climbed onto the bandwagon on blitzing the world with information about this case. Mugabe’s foreign minister Mudenge said the mercenaries should face even the capital punishment. As it turned out, the mercenaries are to be tried for lesser crimes.

The lawyer for the mercenaries has already been allowed to go and see the so-called mercenaries. The lawyer later said the men were being well cared for. He said their only complaint is they are being given TOO MUCH FOOD.
http://actzim.com/lfamar15.html

Thank you very much for your input, Mr. Mbodelango.
I am sure we will have occasion to call on you again.

Jonathan J. Bush (Jonathan James Bush) (1931- ) is an uncle to President George Walker Bush.
May 31, 2000: Riggs Bank N.A. today announced that the Board of Directors of RIMCO, a wholly owned investment management subsidiary, has elected Jonathan J. Bush President & Chief Executive Officer and a Director, replacing Philip Tasho who resigned. In addition, Henry A. Dudley, Jr. was elected Chairman.
"Mr. Bush will continue as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of J. Bush & Co., an investment management company he founded in 1970, which Riggs acquired in 1997. Mr. Dudley, a 24-year veteran of Riggs, will continue to be responsible for all of Riggs Bank's investment management, trust and private banking business.
http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Jonathan_J._Bush

According to several of those sources and others familiar with the account, more than $300 million of the country's energy earnings has been deposited in the account by international oil companies active in Equatorial Guinea, including ExxonMobil Corp. and Amerada Hess Corp. The money is under the direct control of Obiang, the sources say.
The arrangement has raised concerns at the International Monetary Fund, where officials have refused to provide assistance to Equatorial Guinea until Obiang accounts for his country's oil money and have urged him to transfer it to its home treasury.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/2003/0122gui.htm

From what I have been given to understand, the Riggs Bank may very well experience considerable difficulty in coming up with $300 million CASH. It is at times like these that an uncle might call on his nephew for assistance.



At Riggs, problems passed on with legacy
Joe L. Allbritton won control of Riggs Bank in 1981 and used it as a launching pad into Washington`s top business and political circles. He assiduously cultivated "The Riggs" cachet as the bank for foreign governments and diplomats and steadfastly refused to sell the institution even as most of his competitors sold out, The Washington Post reported. Riggs has cultivated the diplomatic community and one quarter of its $4 billion in deposits come from that source. "My pride in Riggs has been paramount in my activities," he said in an interview when he retired in February 2001. "And you know, if you have just enough money, you`ll do more for pride than you`ll do for money…. My object was to put Riggs in a position where it could be the survivor. It is that." But when he bequeathed Riggs to his son Robert after retiring, he also passed on Riggs`s long-simmering problems complying with banking secrecy laws. Most controversial has been the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in funds controlled by the Saudi embassy in Washington, as well as suspicious transactions involving officials of Equatorial Guinea.

http://www.diplomatictraffic.com/embassy_briefs.asp?ID=Americas


This has probably been posted before but lets read it again


The action followed the $25 million civil fine against the midsize Washington bank, which has a near-exclusive franchise on business with the capital’s diplomatic community. The fine, which had been expected, is the largest ever imposed on a financial institution for such violations, experts said.


The FBI and regulators have investigated, for possible connections to terrorism financing, large cash transactions in Riggs accounts controlled by Saudi diplomats.

The Senate Finance Committee chairman, Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, recently asked the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks to examine Saudi transactions at Riggs and FleetBoston Financial Corp.

“Riggs Bank deserves every penny of this huge fine,” Grassley said Thursday. “Banks have a patriotic duty, not to mention legal requirement, to report suspicious activity. When banks look the other way, they put our national security at risk.”

Grassley said members of the bank’s board of directors should be held to account.

The Treasury regulators had earlier accused Riggs of failing to comply with a law requiring banks to notify the government of suspicious transactions. The bank also had been classified by the comptroller’s office as a “troubled institution” for not complying fully with a July 2003 consent order under which it agreed to strengthen its anti-money laundering controls.

more
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4973033 /

FleetBoston Financial?????


BCCI trial puts Bank in dock

The trial is expected to last a year and potentially embarrassing questions are likely to be asked about what Ministers, civil servants and some of the City's top institutions knew about BCCI before it crashed. The Bank's most senior officials past and present will go into the wit ness box, and the court may also consider evidence from John Major, the former Prime Minister, and several former Chancellors.

Unwanted light may even be thrown on the intriguing relationship between BCCI and Britain's intelligence service.

It has long been claimed that MI6 used accounts at the secretive bank to pay sources and operatives around the world, and that BCCI channelled Western funds to Mujahideen fighters in the Eighties. Conspiracy theorists are watching closely too.

The creditors are led by accountant Deloitte, BCCI's liquidator. They range from East End market traders and local councils to the state of Abu Dhabi, which had become BCCI's principal shareholder by 1991, and is thought to have lost £2bn.

At the time of BCCI's demise, the headlines tended to focus on its long list of unsavoury customers: Manuel Noriega, Panama's military leader, Colombian drug barons and the Abu Nidal terrorist organisation among them.

more
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/story/0,11268,1120347,00.html

emad aisat sana

BCCI total bill was just over $13.5 billion. UAE president Shaikh


Zayed copped approx $8 billion. Final bill still undisclosed because private litigation settlements not yet in public domain. London class action currently before the Royal Courts of Justice still ongoing until at least March 2005; final BCCI bill may then emerge.

Ex UAE ambassador to UK Mahdi Al Tajir believed to have lost $2 billion and been fined similar amount for knowingly allowing falsified accounts to remain unchallenged as late as 1989.

Tajir has gone to great lengths to excise from the internet all references to his business dealings with Andrew Fastow, Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay. Also business dealings with ex-Artoc Bank & Trust chief/shareholder Peter de Savary (ex business partner of Ambrosiano's Roberto Calvi)and Ednond Safra - the Monaco-based billionaire (Republic National Bank) whose unexpected death in a fire at his penthouse left his widow Lilly Watkins Safra a billionairess. Her previous exes also died in mysterious circumstances, including one who "comitted suicide" by shooting himself in the head, twice that is.

Snazzy

S&P Rating for Amerada Hess today


NEW YORK, May 18 - Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said today that Amerada Hess Corp.'s (BBB-/Negative/A-3).... Rating stability depends on the company gaining government approval for development of its Northern Block G field offshore Equatorial Guinea during 2004....

http://www.forbes.com/markets/bonds/newswire/2004/05/18/rtr1375745.htm ...


Snazzy

Little more on that


In June, Hess plans to submit plans for a project off the coast of Equatorial Guinea to the local government. Hess has estimated it will take two years to start production at the West African project after the government approves the company's plans for an area known as Northern Block G.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/business/2575993

Was thinking this whole thing could be two companies fighting over the oil. Or US Brits group vs France.

I also noticed that Logo Logistics (the company that bought the plane, maybe hired the mercs) is in the Channel Islands (Jersey), same as Riggs--but all kinds of squirrelly crap goes on there...


Foundation of the Friends of Equatorial Guinea and the United States

Edited on Sat May-15-04 09:38 PM by seemslikeadream
Kareri could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Jonathan Shapiro, did not return phone calls. Shapiro, a high-profile attorney based in Virginia, previously represented convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad.
Sources also confirmed that Riggs held accounts for Teodoro Biyogo Nsue, Equatorial Guinea's ambassador to the U.S. and Obiang's brother-in-law, and for Obiang's son, Teodorin Nguema Obiang.

The latter is a government minister but spends little time in the country. Housing and business records show that the son owns a $6-million home in Los Angeles as well as a music company in L.A. called TNO.

Armengol Ondo Nguema, Obiang's brother and the country's feared security chieftain, also held a personal account at Riggs. In correspondence obtained by The Times, Kareri referred to Nguema -- who is accused in U.S. State Department reports of employing torture -- as a "valued customer."
Kareri is close to Obiang and his family. Records show that he is also a board member of the U.S.-based Foundation of the Friends of Equatorial Guinea and the United States, whose aim is to promote stronger ties between the two countries. Other board members of the group include Equatorial Guinea's representative to the International Monetary Fund and the country's minister of justice.

Sources told The Times that Riggs' demand that Equatorial Guinea withdraw its funds reportedly occurred after a tense meeting in Washington among bank officials, Obiang, the FBI and several government representatives. An FBI official said the agency could not comment on an ongoing investigation.


http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=43&num=11319&printe ...


seemslikeadream


"warbusiness"

Child soldiers wait in Bule for orders to move. When this photo was taken, they were the only defense forces in a 25-mile radius. Two days later they too pulled out, and Bule was attacked.


http://www.zwnews.com/warbusiness.doc

one tiny snip:

In April 2001, an MPRI representative met with the Pentagon’s regional director for Central Africa to discuss the company’s hopes of winning the contract to train Equatorial Guinea’s forces. “They may need our help or moral support,” Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski wrote in a memo on the meeting, obtained by ICIJ under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. She quoted the MPRI representative as saying that Equatorial Guinea was “the Kuwait of the Gulf of Guinea” and, in a briefing paper three months later, advanced that characterization to “a possible ‘Kuwait of Africa’ with huge oil reserves” that was “US-friendly for both investment and security reasons.” Kwiatkowski also noted in her April memo that the highest-ranking U.S. official to meet with Obiang when he visited Washington early in 2001 was an assistant secretary of agriculture – that after French President Jacques Chirac had spared time to meet with him.

Despite concerns about Equatorial Guinea’s human rights record, Obiang’s currency rose dramatically after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. When he visited the United States as it marked the first anniversary of the attacks, Obiang was among 10 African leaders to meet with President George Bush for talks on the prospect of war with Iraq and peace and development on the African continent.


ended up here because of this:

If you've been reading the news the last few days you may have noticed this odd and somewhat mysterious story of a US-registered cargo plane loaded with 64 "mercernaries" and various military equipment which was impounded

Sunday night at Harare International Airport in Zimbabwe "after its owners had made a false declaration of its cargo and crew."

When asked about it on Monday, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said "We have no indication this aircraft is connected to the U.S. government."

That seemed like a rather less than unequivocal response. And behind the scenes US government officials said they didn't believe the US government had any connection with this operation. But they wanted to make sure before saying anything definitive.

Now, if you look at the press accounts, what's caught people's attention is the US registry of the plane. Specifically, it's registered to a company called Dodson Aviation, which is based in Kansas.

Now, Dodson says they sold the plane to a "reputable" firm in South Africa about a week ago. "I think they were going to use it for charter flights," company director Robert Dodson told the Associated Press.

Now here's a little more detail.

Dodson Aviation of Kansas has a South African subsidiary, Dodson International Parts SA Ltd (According to their website, "Dodson International Parts SA (Pty) Ltd is the African division of United States based companies Dodson International Parts Inc. and Dodson Aviation. The company was established in 1998 and is based at Wonderboom Airport, Pretoria.") And it was from this subsidiary's hangar at an airport just north of Pretoria that the aforementioned mercenaries boarded the plane.

Now, here's where this gets a little murky.

I wanted to find out more about Dodson International Parts SA Ltd. What I found something out about was a company that sounded very similar: a South African company called Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts.

They're also in the airplane business.

Not exactly the same name. But remember, the South African company is the subsidiary of two American companies, Dodson Aviation and Dodson International. If these aren't the same company, or closely related companies, I'd figure they often get confused for one another.

In any case, here's what I found about Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts.

They come up in the December 2000 Report of the Panel of Experts to the United Nations on Sierra Leone, in the section of the report dealing with the arms trade.

Here's the section that caught my eye (italics added) ...

187. Fred Rindel a retired officer of the South African Defence Force and former Defence Attaché to the United States, has played a key role in the training of a Liberian anti-terrorist unit, consisting of Liberian soldiers and groups of foreigners, including citizens of Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Niger and The Gambia.
188. The panel interviewed Mr Rindel extensively. Rindel was contracted as a security consultant by President Charles Taylor in September 1998, and training started in November 1998. The contract included consultancy services and strategic advice to convert Charles Taylor's former rebel militia into a professional unit. The Anti-Terrorist Unit is used in Liberia to protect government buildings, the Executive Mansion and the international airport, and to provide VIP Security and the protection of foreign embassies. The numbers trained were approximately 1200. Because of negative media attention, Rindel cancelled his contract in Liberia in August 2000.

189. In 1998, ECOMOG identified a plane, registration number N71RD, owned by a South African company, Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts, as having carried weapons to Robertsfield in September of that year. The plane is a Gulfstream 14-seater business jet that cannot be used for arms transport, but there are other relevant connections. Fred Rindel was the owner of Dodson. The company was closed on 31 December 1998, but during the period under investigation, the plane was leased to, and operated by, Greater Holdings (Liberia) Ltd., a company with gold and diamond concessions in Liberia. The plane was used for the transport of the Greater Holdings' staff to and from Liberia.



Mr. Rindel's name came up earlier in 2000 in testimony at the UN Security Council by then-UN Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke in a discussion of Sierra Leone (italics added) ...

In regard to arms trafficking to Sierra Leone, Mr. Chairman, we remain concerned and I would like to add a few more items to the record. The principal Africa countries involved in arms trafficking to the RUF - though they deny it - include Burkina Faso, Liberia and Libya.
In 1999, planes landed in Ouagadougou, allegedly coming from the Ukraine, with several tons of small arms and ammunition. This incident, which the Ukrainians say has stopped, is one that we believe should be brought to the attention of your committee.

In regard to trafficking, arms brokers have played a vital role in keeping the RUF supplied with weapons and other military materiel. A well-known arms and diamond dealer in Sierra Leone, Zief Morganstein, in July 1999 arranged for a Continental Aviation-based charter out of Dakar to fly a shipment of small arms from Bulgaria to Sierra Leone. Last year the RUF received 68 tons of weapons from Bulgaria, which Morganstein may have helped arrange. There have been other connections between former government officials from South Africa during its Apartheid regime who now operate as private individuals, including Fred Rindel, the South African Defense Attache in Washington, who now works as a security consultant in Liberia and trains Liberian troops and RUF insurgents. There are other charges about other businessmen who are reportedly helping the Sierra Leone government coming from various countries around the world.



Now, I've scanned the news coverage of this and I haven't seen any mention of this seeming connection. So perhaps these are two utterly unrelated companies?

As of Tuesday the situation in Zimbabwe seems to be calming down, though now there are apparently fears in Equatorial Guinea that these mercenaries were somehow intended to assist a coup in that country. (No, I can't keep up either.) "Some 15 mercenaries have been arrested here," the country's Information Minister Agustin Nse Nfumu told Reuters. "It was connected with that plane in Zimbabwe. They were the advance party of that group."

Equatorial Guinea is next door to Gabon. And Joe Wilson used to be the US Ambassador there back in the day. So maybe he can make some sense of this. I can't. But I'd be very interested to talk to the investigators who put together that UN report and see if there's any connection between Dodson International Parts SA Ltd and Dodson Aviation Maintenance and Spare Parts.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com /

I just can not forget that Poppy's gold mining buddies Barrick



War is Golden for the Bush Administration
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.)

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

The money behind Barrick is from Saudi arms dealer and Bush family friend Adnan Khashoggi, who was identified as conduit in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986 he was arrested and charged with fraud but failed to be convicted. In one of his last acts as president Bush pardoned Khashoggi's alleged co-conspirators, who were key members of Bush's own cabinet. As a result, no case could be made against Khashoggi – or against Bush himself.

http://www.penfield-gill.com/presentations/bush_the_elder.htm

Where was flight N4610 heading?

March 10 2004 at 08:11AM



They were 64 "heavily built men", mostly white. No, they were all black. No, only 40 of them were black.

The plane left South Africa illegally from Wonderboom airport, strayed into Zimbabwe airspace and was ordered down. No, the plane left the country legally, having filed a flight plan to Harare and then on to Burundi. No, the plane was headed for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The men on board were suspected of being mercenaries hired to overthrow Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. No, they were on their way to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. No, they were going to the eastern DRC to carry out security duties.

These are just some of the stories surrounding the flight of N4610, a Boeing 727-100 cargo plane that has been impounded in Harare.

And 64 - though some reports say there are 67 - of those who were aboard, whether they were white, black or a mixture, and whether they were mercenaries or honest men, are in Harare cells facing intense interrogation.

On Tuesday, a company named in connection with the flight disputed all the speculation, saying the "mercenaries" were in fact security people "going to eastern DRC".

They were stopping in Zimbabwe to pick up mining equipment, "Zimbabwe being a vastly cheaper place for such".

Charles Burrow, a senior executive of Logo Logistics which had chartered the Boeing 727 freighter, said via telephone from London that most of the people on board were South African and had military experience, but were on contract to four mining companies in the DRC. He declined to name the companies.

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=84&art_id=vn20040310081125342C ...

Plane Did Stop At Grantley Adams - Thursday 11, March-2004

A UNITED STATES registered plane at the centre of controversy after being detained on Monday with 64 suspected mercenaries aboard by the Zimbabwean government did stop at Grantley Adams International Airport last Saturday morning.
Informed sources told the DAILY NATION yesterday that the aircraft, a Boeing 727 (100 series), with registration number N4610, landed in Barbados shortly after midnight for refuelling before leaving around 6:30 a.m.

Sources also indicated that the aircraft, which Zimbabwean officials alleged also carried military equipment, had arrived from the Hope Air Force Base in North Carolina, United States, before its stop-over in Barbados.

Further reports stated that the plane, originally a commercial PanAm Airways aircraft up until a week ago, was being operated by the American Air Force, but international Press reports stated it had been sold to a South African company.

http://www.nationnews.com/StoryView.cfm?Record=48033&Section=Local&Cur ..


seemslikeadream

Corporate Mercenaries - Executive Outcomes Leads to Bush


Executive Outcomes is the most infamous mercenary company in operation today. Unlike traditional mercenary companies, it operates as the heavy partner in a web of related companies. Sandline international is such a sister company: 170 elite South African dogs of war were hired to crush the Bougainville freedom Fighters for $22m. Just another job for the likes of Sandline international? Paul Vernon investigates...

Set up in 1993 by Tony Buckingham and Simon Mannl <1>, Executive outcomes (EO) has worked in Asia, Africa and South America. Most of it's personnel are hired from South Africa.

Buckingham is the chief executive of Heritage Oil and Gas, which is now registered in the (tax-free) Bahamas. When EO was hired by the Sierra Leone government to crush people's revolt, Heritage received much of the payment in the form of mining rights. Sir David Steel MP happens to be a director of Heritage as well as a close friend of Buckingham. Recently Sierra Leone was thrown back into chaos with another military coup.

Eeben Barlow, the present CEO of Executive Outcomes, is a veteran of the Civil Co-operation Bureau, which allegedly assassinated antiapartheid activists. Barlow is the frontman for the group he told Newsweek (2) in February: "I'm a professional soldier. It's not about politics. I have a job to do. I do it." EO is thought to have a annual turnover of more that £20 million.

The South Afri

My choices is depraved indifference.

By the way, as a side note, we all enjoy neato cut and paste fun. How much of what you've posted have you actually read, in its entirety, yourself? Think on that.

Having read it all I will say that nothing there can bring a person to the point of specifics beyond the fact that these guys are bastards and up to no good. Did that no good include planning, ordering and implementing the murder of New Yokers on 9/11? I rule out no possibilities, but as of yet, no evidence anywhere makes that case a slam dunk.

So we should keep investigating - and if you haven't read every single link you posted by Truthisall then apparently I'm more interested in genuine investigation than you. And if you have then great, we should keep asking questions and seeking clear truth - keeping an open mind rather than freaking out when other people have questions about our pet theories, etc. Like I said I don't rule out the most sinister conspiracy theory you can describe - but I don't rule it in either. Uncovering the truth is a slow and painful process - as my dad once said, "finding truth is much more like a sunrise than a sunburst."

It doesn't have to be EITHER the goverment "did" 9/11 or "a pretty busy guy" did it.

You watched one plane flying into a building, you watched two or three buildings collapse, and a damaged and burning Pentagon building, and some smoke where allegedly flight 93 crashed.

You watched the final result of a long process. You certainly (assuming you don't work for the CIA or other law enforcement agencies) did not watch all the preceding steps in the preparation process of 9/11, and you certainly did not watch who hijacked the planes.

To claim by watching TV you can confirm the official version of 9/11 or to claim somehow (without specifying how) Occam's razor would disprove any other version than the official one is dishonest.

That was planned by the Pentagon. You can't get more American than that, unless one's with the DAR.

We had plans that involved nuking the USSR. Thankfully, they were never implemented. And to point out the obvious, Operation Northwoods wasn't planned by the Bush Administration.

True, the Bush administration did not plan NORTHWOODS. That doesn't mean he didn't benefit, perhaps tangentally, from events of that time. Did you know Mr. George Bush was involved, apparently innocently, with the assassination of President Kennedy?

Check this out:



This also makes a good record for loyal Americans to reference:



Here's the source and some more background:

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

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

I fail to see how any of that supports a government link to the 9/11 attacks. Sorry.

You're right, Birthmark. It doesn't prove anything in regards to 9-11 or the current terror alert Yellow. What it does show is how current events have their roots in the past.

nail any and all investigations into any and all aspects of 9-11, the biggest "intelligence failure" in the history of the world? And have stonewalled like crazy those the couldn't, because of public pressure, keep from happening.

Cheney himself threatened Daschle in January of 2002 (during the brief priod when Daschle was the Majority Leader) that if he opened a Senate investigation, the Bush administration would call Democrats "obstructionists." There was a reporter IN the office with Daschle at the time and the exchange got report in the WP (probably -- I've lost the link with one of my various hard drive failures).


How irrelevent is it that the Bush administration is doing everything they can to gag Sibel Edmonds? (Do you even know who Sibel Edmonds is?)


How irrelevent is it that whatever faux "investigation" went on relative to those amazing put options on American Airlines and other firms affected by 9-11, nothing has ever come of it?


How irrelevent is it that FBIHQ repeatedly quashed field requests for FISA investigations for Moussaoui's computer for the Minneapolis FBI office, to the extent that the whistleblower (forgotten her name at the moment -- Colleen Rowley, I think) and others in that office ended up joking that there must be a mole at FBIHQ? The Phoenix FBI office had a similar experience in having a key memo suggesting the FBI look for terrorists at flight schools around the country ignored/quashed. YET, some of those at FBIHQ who were responsible for what WE rightfully ought to consider miserable failures here were actually PROMOTED shortly thereafter?


How irrelevent is it that for however many billions (including some of those "lost" funds) we spend annually on defense, we couldn't get jets in the air for an hour or more to go after 4 hijacked passenger jets, but we could when golfer Payne Stewart's little bitty private plane went off course?


How irrelevent is it that with no investigations of any type, no forensics were done on any of the rubble, and the steel and everything else was carted away so it couldn't have any investigation done on it?


How irrelevent is it that our government could name all those hijackers within days, but they weren't on the passenger lists?


Oh, almost forgot this one. How irrelevent is it that in the months prior, and with considerable specificity, the U.S. was warned -- to and at the highest levels -- by NUMEROUS intelligence services from around the world -- off the top of my head: Germany, France, UK, Israel, Egypt, Jordan "and probably Morocco" (said the news article), Phillipines, Russia?


How irrelevent is it that we had already promised the Taliban that we would provide them with "a carpet of gold, or a carpet of bombs" and that the war plan had been delivered to Bush's desk on September 5? (They weren't cooperating with our pipeline plans, plans for which Enron had done some of the feasibility studies.)


How irrelevent is it that the bin Laden family was heavily invested in the Carlyle Group -- until that became public sometime after 9-11 and they (allegedly) disinvested? How irrelevent is it that the Bushes and bin ladens have been family friends for decades? Salem bin Laden was a GWBush business partner, and GWB's longtime friend James Bath (with whom he was in the National Guard, until they both weren't quitein the TANG together anymore) was Salem bin Laden's business manager here in the U.S.? (Salem, alas, met an untimely death in a small aircraft somewhere over Texas some time ago. The Bushes have a terrible time with their friends and allies and especially enemies meeting untimely deaths in small aircraft and other strange and unusual circumstances. Must be a family curse. Or something.)


How irrelevent is it that Osama bin Laden himself had been a major CIA "asset" since at least the Soviet/Afghan war (if not before)? And Bush seemingly forgot all about him once we'd bombed the hell outta Afghanistan and "accidentally" let him go when we airlifted a bunch of Pakistanis out of Afghanistan? And Bush still doesn't seem to care much about him. Poor ole Osama bin Forgotten.


I could go on. The money trail, numerous other players -- Prince Bandr, Mahfouz, Adnan Kashoggi, many people with ties back to the BCCI scandal, and many, many other details.

how the partiot act was planned before 9/11, but at least they didn't implement it until after 9/11? at least they "just" planned to take away our rights before then.

The Constitution it upends turns 228 this year:

Uncensored Gore Vidal

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly
December 30, 2003

EXCERPT...

Your book revisits the debate between the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Hamiltonian Federalists, which at the time were effectively young America's two parties. More than 200 years later, do we still see any strands, any threads of continuity in our current body politic?

Just traces. But mostly we find the sort of corruption Franklin predicted. Ours is a totally corrupt society. The presidency is for sale. Whoever raises the most money to buy TV time will probably be the next president. This is corruption on a major scale.

Enron was an eye-opener to naive lovers of modern capitalism. Our accounting brotherhood, in its entirety, turned out to be corrupt, on the take. With the government absolutely colluding with them and not giving a damn.

Bush's friend, old Kenny Lay, is still at large and could just as well start some new company tomorrow. If he hasn't already. No one is punished for squandering the people's money and their pension funds and for wrecking the economy.

So the corruption predicted by Franklin bears its terrible fruit. No one wants to do anything about it. It's not even a campaign issue. Once you have a business community that is so corrupt in a society whose business is business, then what you have is, indeed, despotism. It is the sort of authoritarian rule that the Bush people have given us. The USA PATRIOT Act is as despotic as anything Hitler came up with – even using much of the same language. In one of my earlier books, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, I show how the language used by the Clinton people to frighten Americans into going after terrorists like Timothy McVeigh – how their rights were going to be suspended only for a brief time – was precisely the language used by Hitler after the Reichstag fire.

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17442

This has been a busy day and I haven't had a chance to say hi!

What a charming creature! She is filled with warmth and wonder. If only all human souls could know, what a different world this would be!



Hey! Did Al Gore drop the bomb
on the BFEE today or what?
Wow! Wow! Wow!

"How dare they drag the name of the United States through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison?!!!!!!"
-- President Albert Gore

"How dare they drag the name of the United States through the mud of Saddam Hussein's torture prison?!!!!!!"

:nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke:

....for no good reason at all. Bush's grandfather is indirectly linked to the murder of millions due to his willingness to fund Adolf Hitler. And as far as 9-11-01 goes, they were at best willingly negligent and at worst involved with the planning and execution of the operation. (and in any event, Osama Bin Laden is an employee and long time friend of the family).

This isn't tinfoil hat, aside from speculation on the level of involvement in 9-11. This is the reality of what these bastards have done. They are capable of anything.

However, it is a far distant cry from the government actively murdering its citizenry.

I do agree that the Administration was negligent. That is based on the testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

I should also point out that Bush is not his grandfather, even assuming that Gramps was a wholehearted supporter of Hitler that has no bearing on what Bush does.

Racism is alive and well. It never went away. It only went underground.



How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, helped found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele — and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."

In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.

Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized — legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement — its institutions and leading scientists — renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.
http://www.waragainsttheweak.com/

Against the mongrelization of the submerged tenth, the eugenicists posed the purity of the Nordic races. Peoples of the north, they held, had forged their superiority over generations through the struggle to survive in severe environments. The weaker members had long been eliminated by natural selection.


This was set out in texts like The Passing of a Great Race by American eugenicist Madison Grant, which Hitler read while imprisoned in the mid '20s for inciting mob violence.


(The German translation was published by Hitler's co-conspirator Julius Lehman; Hitler even wrote Grant a fan letter declaring the book his "Bible.")

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/w/war-against-the-weak.shtml

I was aware of most of that. How does this support a government link to the 9/11 attacks?

However, it is a far distant cry from the government actively murdering its citizenry.

I don't see anything in there about the government murdering its citizens. If you mean the Nazis, then you are again implying an equivalence between the current Administration and the Nazis which is not justified by the evidence.

A little story about Jonathan Bush and Riggs Bank


Not even Frederick Forsyth thought of so many twists and riddles in his Dogs of War, probably the best-known novel about mercenaries.
The book was based on Forsyth's personal adventures - he was involved in an unsuccessful scheme to overthrow the head of state of Equatorial Guinea in 1972.
But even the Dogs of War cannot rival this bizarre tale of confusion.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=84&art_id=vn20040310081125342C ...

Ladies and Gentlemen,
visitors from the darkside,
it is with much pleasure that I present:
AFRICAN OIL POLITICS
which offers
forward-looking views on african oil politics and related energy security issues
http://africanoilpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_africanoilpolitics_a ...

This MOST INSIGHTFUL BLOG
offers information, interviews and analysis that cannot - to my knowledge - be found elsewhere.
As you all know, the US is VERY dependent on oil and as global oil reserves diminish, the West is once again aligned in a Scramble for Africa.
The Organization of African Unity, having seen what the the first Western-led Scramble for Africa did to the people and the resources of Africa, took the pre-emptive step, in 1999,
of permanently outlawing coups d'etat on African soil.
http://www.thisdayonline.com/archive/2003/04/22/20030422bus07.html
Unfortunately,
this action has not deterred certain nations (whose ideas of protective pre-emptive action consist basically of violating the Peace of Westphalia) from doing their darndest to destabilize African nations - and most especially those African nations who have oil.
http://www.netnomad.com/fineman.html
The African Oil Politics blog keeps a watchful eye on these and other oil-related developments.
But I digress.

Our story today,
starts in Madrid,
where a terrible bombing occurred on March 11, 2004.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/spain/article/0,2763,1166996,00.html

The bombings in Madrid have distracted the attention of many from the events taking place in Zimbabwe.

Zimbabwe investigators allege that Spanish-based rebel leader Severo Moto offered the suspects money and oil rights to overthrow the government in Equatorial Guinea. Fifteen suspected mercenaries were also arrested in that country last week.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=79&art_id=qw1079700483956B251& ...

Pedro said the men were recruited by an agent representing Logo Logistics, which had connections with the now defunct Executive Outcomes (EO), a private security company owned by former South African Defence Force intelligence officer Eben Barlow.
The recruiting agent is known to be a former 32 Battalion sergeant.
EO is now operating under the name of Saracen and has close links with Logo Logistics, based in London.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=84&art_id=vn20040319045713308C ...

And now, over to our star reporter:

Saturday, March 13, 2004
Before I start to the review of the most juicy stories of the day, let me urge you to visit Katryn Cramer's blog. She did a wonderful job tracking the N4610 plane background and posting updates. Katryn is a SciFi writer and editor from Pleasantville (NY). I wonder what grabbed her interest. Sometimes, Africa just looks like another planet and African Oil Politics reads like a pod conspiracy.
Today's media coverage was... average. No new interesting leads emerged. However, more western (mostly Bristish) newspapers dare report the story. But there's a specific twist and bias that is absent from the African papers reviewed here yesterday. I'll start with Nicholas Christian's piece which is clearly designed to arouse pity for Simon Mann - the poor little boy who finds himself in such a baaad situation:

FEARS were growing last night for a former British soldier who faces the death sentence after he was arrested in Zimbabwe and charged with aiding a coup plot against another African country. ... Amid reports he has homes in South Africa and in Hampshire, Mann’s nationality remains unclear. The army will sign-up those Britons with dual nationality and citizens from the Commonwealth but has not confirmed Mann was a member of the forces. He is said to be Sandhurst-trained and to have served in Northern Ireland with the Scots Guards and later in the 1990 Gulf War as an intelligence officer in Riyadh. His father is said to be the late George Mann, president of the Marylebone Cricket Club and a former captain of England’s cricket team. Since leaving the army, Mann has been employed as a computer consultant and linked to a number of ‘private military’ firms, including Sandline International and Executive Outcomes.

I love how hard he tries to turn the guy into a victim. Come on Christian, you're talking about a dog of war - a tough guy trained by the SAS and who makes his living organizing coups, killing people. And don't repeat that he's LINKED to a number of PM firms. Just say that he was he was one of the founders of Executive Outcomes and everybody will understand. But thank you for bringing us up to date about his film career. I didn't know he played Colonel Wilford in Bloody Sunday. I'll watch the DVD to check how the guy looks like.
http://africanoilpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_africanoilpolitics_a ...

And now to Kathryn Cramer's blog.

First of all, N4610 isn't just any random former US cargo plane. Rather it is a specific military plane with a specific history which is relatively easy to find out on the web. As is widely reported, the plane was registered to Dodson Aviation, Inc. of Ottawa, Kansas. Jetliners.com lists the plane as operated by the U. S. Air Force. It also gives additional information: that the plane is a specific type of Boeing cargo plane, a C-22B, and it gives an additional identification number 83-4610. Airlink has a nice factsheet with a picture of the type of plane, a Boeing 727-100 modified for air national guard support missions.
<snip>
The plane in question was on display at the Andrews AFB, Department of Defense Open House on May 15, 1999. The records of the airshow suggest that it was also assigned to the 201st Airlift Squadron, District of Columbia Air National Guard.
The State Department disingenuous claim -- endlessly repeated in news stories around the globe -- is that they have " no indication this aircraft is connected to the U.S. government."
http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000457.html

Oh my!
http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/examples.osi.html
http://www.moveon.org/censure/caughtonvideo /

Cde Mohadi said Mann had revealed that the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), America*s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Spanish Secret Service aided the group.
The secret services persuaded the Equatorial Guinea service chiefs, that is the head of police and commander of the army, not to put up any resistance.
They were promised cabinet posts in Moto*s government.
The agencies were responsible for the hiring of the Boeing 727-100 from Dodson Aviation and they also provided satellite communication system to link up Moto in Spain, Mann and du Toit in South Africa and Bonds in Malabo.
United States forces are reportedly carrying out military exercises around Equatorial Guinea.
http://allafrica.com/stories/200403100875.html



Surely this is is all an unfortunate coincidence.
There is NOTHING to link N4610 acts of international terrorism
such as the attacks in New York and Washington DC
by N334AA and N644AA.
Surely the 1/14/2002 FAA cancellation dates on
these three aircraft is just happenstance, or a mere coincidence.
OK,
so Auric Goldfinger stated bluntly that
"one is happenstance, two is coincidence, but three is enemy action"
but he is NOT a reliable source of information since Ian Fleming pulled a Jack Kelley when he came up with that quote.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/2004-03-18-2004-03-18_kelleymain_x.htm?cs ...

Equatorial Guinea's state radio said Moto had paid South African Nick du Toit, 48, the leader of the advance party in Equatorial Guinea, $10-million (about R67-million).
Speaking on state television, Du Toit said the advance party would take strategic targets such as the presidency, the military barracks, police posts and the residences of government members.
South African security sources say the Zimbabwean group was heading to a covert military training camp in Cameroon that was to be the staging point for a seaborne assault.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=68&art_id=vn20040312035832269C ...

DAMN AL QAEDA.
SHUT DOWN THEIR TRAINING CAMPS.
WE DO NOT NEED TO DISCUSS INNOCENCE OR GUILT.
WE KNOW THEY ARE GUILTY.
HAND THEM OVER.
RIGHT NOW.

This is the US State Department 1996 report concerning
the Current Administration of President Teodoro Obiang, who,
"together with his associates, dominates the Government. The President's Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) controls the judiciary and the legislature, the latter through fraudulent elections. "

d. Arbitrary Arrest, Detention, or Exile
Police routinely hold persons in incommunicado detention. The government arrested political figures and detained them for indeterminate periods. There were also credible reports that around five members of the Movement for the Autodetermination of the Island of Bioko (MAIB), an ethnically based political opposition group, were detained in prison for several weeks. At least 15 members of the opposition were arrested for political activity during the year.

In February, opposition leader Severo Moto and nine additional opposition and military figures were arrested and charged with treason.
At their trial in April (which lasted only 7 hours), one defendant was acquitted. The others were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Moto received a 28-year sentence. The trial was held in a military court which did not have jurisdiction over Moto, a civilian.
After extensive international criticism and an international campaign for his release, he and his fellow defendants were pardoned and released in August. Although the Government did not force Moto to leave the country, he left to reside abroad soon after his release.

There are nominal but unenforced legal procedural safeguards regarding detention, the need for search warrants, and other protections of prisoners' rights. Judicial warrants are required. Generally, however, the police arrest suspects without having obtained warrants.
Authorities also continued to hold citizens of Nigeria, Ghana, Gabon, and other countries to secure bribes.
The Government does not force citizens into exile.
http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/democracy/1995_hrp_report/95hrp_report_a ...

WHAT BARBARISM.
Thank God for our freedoms.

NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - The euro rose against the dollar in early New York trade on Friday on reports of a bomb threat to Washington DC schools, traders said.
http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/newswire/2004/03/19/rtr1305198.html

SO WHAT?
We are still WAY better than those heathens.

The Zimbabwe government said Simon Mann, an additional alleged plotter who had met the plane at the airport Sunday in Harare, confessed to having backing from London, Washington and Madrid.
Both British and U.S. officials, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, said they knew nothing about the plane or the plot. Spain, named as a co-conspirator and home of purported coup plotter Moto, threatened to file a formal complaint with Zimbabwe's government.
Questions remain
What happens next to the alleged mercenaries in Zimbabwe remains unclear. So far there appears to be little evidence that the men committed any crime beyond lying about the number of passengers on the flight, which Boshoff called "a small technical issue."
"You have to prove conspiracy, and that's not easy," he said. "What did they do wrong? That's my question."
Plenty of other questions remain as well. Could the apparent planned arms sale in Zimbabwe have been part of an entrapment plot, aimed at embarrassing Mugabe's enemies in the West? Was a flight plan filed in South Africa, indicating the plane was headed to Burundi, a smokescreen?
As South Africa's Star newspaper noted this week, "the solution . . . is easy. Frederick Forsyth just needs to write `Dogs of War II.'"
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0403120249mar12,1,1 ...






Here the Washington Post story: US Ready to Fine Riggs Bank

Strangely enough, I don't think they mention the Bush connection. But, Tony Pierce does: Jonathan Bush not only works for Riggs, he is President and CEO of Riggs Investment Management.

According to Pierce:

Uncle Jonathan works for Riggs Investment Management, a "major" arm of Riggs Bank, who was fined Thursday for a record $25 million for violating anti-money laundering laws when it failed to report millions of dollars of cash withdrawls from Saudi accounts.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&conten ...




U.S. Ready To Fine Riggs Bank
Saudi Embassy Money Reports Scrutinized
By Kathleen Day and Terence O'Hara
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A01


Federal bank regulators are preparing to impose fines on Riggs Bank as soon as this week for not reporting millions of dollars in suspicious transactions at its embassy banking division, and have notified bank officers and directors that they may be sanctioned individually, according to people familiar with the investigation.



Those notified include Chairman Robert L. Allbritton; his mother, Barbara B. Allbritton, a director; and the nine other members of the bank's board, according to the sources.

The penalties would come as the FBI, bank regulators and three congressional committees continue to delve into Riggs's international banking relationships, particularly its two-decade role as chief banker for the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington.

Investigators are looking at the Saudi accounts for evidence of money laundering, which is the use of complex transactions to hide the origin or destination of funds related to illegal activities such as drug smuggling or terrorist acts. The investigators have reached no conclusions about the reasons for the transactions in the embassy accounts, including the personal accounts of the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan.

more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&conten ...

SAUDIS DON'T NEED KID GLOVES

New revelations regarding the Saudi Embassy's relationship with Riggs Bank should intensify our skepticism. Reports indicate that Riggs allowed Saudi nationals to engage in puzzling patterns of deposits, withdrawals and transfers without vetting or reporting the transactions as required by law. Reports further show that Saudi accounts were used to fund known supporters of terrorism and others who are currently being investigated for terror links.

The Saudis quickly absolved themselves of responsibility for any problems at Riggs and advised us that "it's not fair to apply American standards to this." Nevertheless, the reports of freewheeling cash transfers are troublesome, especially considering allegations that the Saudi embassy has been used to launder money for terrorists in the past, and that nearly 70 Saudi diplomats were expelled from the U.S. just this year due to their deep involvement in extremist activities.

Dealing as we are with a government perched atop a tinderbox of its own making, our actions should continue to reflect delicate political realities. But our delicacy must not convert to diffidence, and therefore we must challenge the Saudi belief that our demands for action can be subdued with thin facades of responsiveness.

A good next step would be establishing a clear expectation of near-term action in corralling their terror-linked charities. We also must fully explore the Riggs case and Saudi cash transfers occurring under our own nose. Finally, we must not waver in our determination to consistently refine our abilities to analyze and fracture terror funding networks. The PATRIOT Act has been a critical tool in this effort, and we must not dawdle in renewing the law and updating its capabilities to reflect ever-changing funding techniques

more
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/24197.htm


Corporate Art Lovers Who Hate That Big Tax Bill

This hush-hush world, its boundaries defined by handsome East Side avenues and Chelsea and SoHo side streets, is far removed from the gavels, cellphones and hubbub of the major auction houses. It is frequented by major art collectors like Joe L. Allbritton, the biggest shareholder of the Riggs National Corporation and that bank's former chief executive.
more
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/09/business/yourmoney/09paint.html?ex=1 ...




Unravelling the riddle of Simon Mann

Rory Carroll and Jamie Wilson

19 May 2004 12:47


Perched on the banks of the river Beaulieu in Hampshire is a rambling house named Inchmery. Today its eight hectares of pasture are placid, but half a century ago they were a training ground for Polish paratroopers preparing for D-Day. When an old pine tree blew over in a storm several years ago it was found to be riddled with bullets from the Poles' target practice. For a man in search of a life less ordinary, the intrigue attached to the property must have seemed irresistible. In 1997, Simon Mann bought it.

Spring may be turning to summer, but Mann can only imagine the clear views across the mouth of the Beaulieu river and the Solent to the Isle of Wight. Since March 7 his home has been a 4m by 1,5m solitary confinement cell in Chikurubi prison, a maximum-security facility outside the Zimbabwean capital of Harare, where, his lawyer claims, he has been tortured, assaulted by prison officers, suffered lice, inedible food and general deprivation.

Mann is accused of planning to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea by leading a mercenary force into the capital, Malabo, and kidnapping or killing the president. His lawyers are fighting a formal extradition request from the West African country, where, it is safe to assume, prison conditions will be no better.

It is a story with implausible characters and plot twists. There is the alleged cannibal dictator, his playboy son and scheming relatives. There is the offshore oil waiting to make millionaires out of those audacious or desperate enough to seize it. There is the exiled politician and the Chelsea plutocrat. There is the planeload of mercenaries stopping in Harare to pick up weapons. And, at the heart of it all, there is Simon Mann. How the plot went awry and landed this unusual Englishman in manacles may come to be judged as the end of an era of white buccaneers who thought they ruled Africa.


and much more at:

http://mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=66566

Extensive bio. Plenty of merc/BFEE/oil/gold/SAS/CIA/BCCI/Riggs fodder for google. Just spent about an hour on Mann's Sandline, which leads to Sr. and Barrick--same guys.

KR:Iraq a land of opportunity for South Africa's apartheid-era troops


Iraq a land of opportunity for South Africa's apartheid-era troops

Knight Ridder - Sunday, May 16, 2004

By Sudarsan Raghavan

PRETORIA, South Africa _ A decade after the end of white rule, the war in Iraq is reminding South Africans of yet another uncomfortable legacy from the brutal days of apartheid _ South Africa's role in providing mercenaries to a wide range of military causes throughout the world.

Hundreds of former South African soldiers and police officers are serving in Iraq now as private security contractors. South Africans are among the private soldiers who guard L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. envoy to Iraq, and patrol the heavily fortified Green Zone, where the U.S. command is headquartered.

...

In March, 70 suspected mercenaries _ South Africans, Angolans and other nationalities _ flew from South Africa en route to allegedly overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea.

...

Many were ex-members of the 32 Battalion and were allegedly going to be paid $1.9 million and given oil concessions. They were charged with conspiring to commit a coup, which they have denied.

...

One security guard killed in Iraq confessed to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he was part of an apartheid death squad that committed human rights atrocities.

....

http://www.menafn.com/qn_news_story.asp?StoryId=CqkBNqeicu09vveHbrLjjq ...



Victor Bout, Africa's merchant of death !!!!!!


UN names former KGB officer as millionaire gun-runner
The Guardian - December 23, 2000


Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday December 23, 2000

A Russian arms dealer and former KGB officer who is undermining international sanctions by supplying arms for diamonds to rebel forces in Africa is named and shamed in a ground-breaking report published by the UN yesterday.
Victor Anatoliyevich Bout, who holds at least five passports and uses as many as seven aliases, is identified as the businessman responsible for fuelling civil wars across Africa, including conflicts in Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is accused of ferrying heavy weapons, automatic rifles and ammunition from eastern Europe to rebel groups that control diamond mines.

Mr Bout's arms-dealing record in Africa was highlighted by the Guardian in January. Now, in extraordinarily detailed dossiers, the UN has exposed the use of forged end-user arms certificates by a secretive, commer cial network at the heart of some of the most protracted and destabilising conflicts in Africa. A UN report focusing on Angola alleges that Mr Bout sent 38 flights carrying heavy military equipment to the rebel movement Unita.

Mr Bout's network of companies has, allegedly, worked with a Briton, named in the report as Michael Harridine. He, it is said, was able to "obtain or change aircraft registration to certain 'less scrupulous' countries". Such "flags of convenience" allow paperwork to be circumvented, according to the UN.

At one stage Mr Harridine, along with Mr Bout's partner, a Belgian pilot by the name of Ronald De Smet, allegedly held the authority to conduct business in the UK on behalf of the Liberian aircraft register. Mr Harridine, who is said to work through a UK company based in Kent, Aircraft Registration Bureau, could not be contacted yesterday.

more
http://www.ruudleeuw.com/vbout2.htm

"Victor B watched for Taliban ties"
from The Washington Times,
22 July 2002
by Steve Park, The Washington Times

Prior to September 11, his name surfaced in reports by the United Nations and U.S. State Department as the key supplier of arms to guerrilla armies involved in nearly a dozen wars in Africa.

Viktor Vasilevich Butt, known more commonly as Viktor Bout, is often referred to in law enforcement circles as Victor B because he uses at least five aliases and different versions of his last name, said one U.N. Security Council report. The report finds Mr. Bout in violation of international arms embargoes, calling him a supplier of arms to guerrillas in Africa and claiming that he delivers the goods using his own fleet of more than 50 planes.

A State Department report says Mr. Bout also recruits East European mercenaries for African clients.

Mr. Bout's profile soared after September 11 with dozens of newspaper, magazine and television reports naming Mr. Bout as a supplier of arms to Afghanistan's Taliban rulers and possibly al Qaeda terrorists.

The Seattle Times reported in February that U.S. and European officials had gathered intelligence in Afghanistan and elsewhere suggesting that Mr. Bout was flying weapons into Afghanistan in the months before September 11.

more
http://www.fundforpeace.org/media/inthenews/itn20020722b.php

On the Trail of the Elusive Victor Bout

Hunted by Interpol, the Russian 'merchant of death' who helped arm the Taliban and al-Qaida is alive and well in Moscow

by Stephen Smith, Additional reporting by Afsane Bassir Pour in New York, Natalie Nougayrede in Moscow, Jean-Philippe Remy in Nairobi and Jean-Pierre Stroobants in Brussels
The Guardian Weekly
April 17, 2002



A 35-year-old Russian, Victor Anatolyevich Bout, is believed to be the main supplier of arms to the Taliban and the al-Qaida network. According to United States and British intelligence, he was delivering weapons -- and even toxic gas -- to Kabul until just before September 11. With the global war against terrorism at its height, one would imagine him to be a desperate and hunted man.

Not so. Despite being on Interpol's wanted list since February at the request of the Belgian police, he has revealed his whereabouts: he is alive and well -- and apparently under no risk of arrest -- in Moscow. His aim seems to be to trigger counter-investigations, of which he would be both the instigator and the subject. The shadowy Bout is looking for media exposure.

Peter Hain, the British minister for Europe, said in February that Bout was a "merchant of death" who supplied rebel or terrorist forces with arms in exchange for diamonds, and that he had also been the arms supplier of the Taliban and al-Qaida. "We are determined to put him out of business," Hain added. The United Nations has been trying to do just that for years, but with little success. In several reports detailing investigations into "blood diamonds" and into the violation of sanctions imposed on countries or armed factions in Africa, the UN has denounced Bout as a global mafioso who has ignored national borders and played cat and mouse with governments and their laws.

In December 2000 the UN revealed various well-financed and well-connected international networks that were capable of carrying illicit cargo all around the world without arousing suspicion. An organisation headed, or at least apparently controlled from outside, by an eastern European, Victor Bout, fell into that category.

The "eastern European" was in fact born in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, on January 13, 1967. An army officer of Russian nationality, Bout graduated from Moscow's prestigious Military Institute of Foreign Languages. In addition to Russian and his native Farsi, he speaks fluent English, French and Portuguese.

more
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/index.jsp


On the Bin Laden arms trail

Diamond trade

"His regiment was disbanded and essentially they went private," a Western intelligence official said recently. "It started with gun running to Afghanistan and then they discovered Africa."

The arrest warrant follows the capture in Belgium earlier this month of Sanjivan Ruprah who has been charged with criminal association and using a false passport.

Mr Ruprah is a potentially valuable informant because UN reports tie him to the illicit diamond trade in West Africa and to arrangements for Mr Bout's alleged weapons deliveries to be paid for with diamonds from Sierra Leone and Angola.

In particular, they will be looking to confirm previous reports linking al-Qaeda to an underground network stretching across Africa and trading in diamonds, weapons and other precious commodities.

more
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1847578.stm

Key figures on UN list
Victor Bout
A Ukrainian-born arms dealer.

Belgium issued a warrant for his arrest earlier this year, for allegedly selling weapons to the al-Qaeda network.

The United Nations has also accused him of breaking arms embargoes on Angola's Unita rebels and Liberia's President Charles Taylor.

British Minister for Europe, Peter Hain, called Mr Bout a "merchant of death".

Other key figures named are:


Zimbabwean Businessman John Bredenkamp
DR Congo Minister Mwenze Kongolo
Retired Zimbabwean General Sibusio Moyo
Retired Ugandan General Salim Saleh
Zimbabwean General Vitalis Zvinavashe
Director of DR Congo's National Intelligence Didier Kazadi Nyembwe
DR Congo's ambassador to Zimbabwe Mwana Mawapanga
Ugandan Colonel Dan Munyuza
Ugandan military intelligence chief Nobel Mayombo.
more
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2346707.stm


Guinea opposition leader may be plotting coup


By Peter Fabricius


Severo Moto, the exiled opposition leader of Equatorial Guinea, is plotting another coup on the island state, this time using Chilean mercenaries, security sources believe.

Moto, who is living in Spain, was widely believed to have been behind the alleged coup attempt in the country which was aborted in March.

Security sources say that Moto and several of his allies met in London last weekend and agreed that another operation to overthrow Equatorial Guinean president Nguema Mbasogo had to be launched a urgently.

Moto is believed to be considering recruiting former commandos from Chile's military era to conduct the coup. They speak Spanish, the lingua franca of Equatorial Guinea, sources say.

more
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=87&art_id=vn20040516103308962C ...


London - Britain has bowed to US pressure to keep the name of a notorious arms trafficker, allegedly involved in supplying coalition forces in Iraq, off a list of those subject to planned United Nations sanctions, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

"London had originally supported moves to freeze Mr (Victor) Bout's assets, but appeared to have reversed its view under pressure from Washington" the financial daily said, citing evidence from several western diplomats.

In 2000, Peter Hain, then British foreign office minister responsible for Africa, described Victor Bout as "the chief sanctions-buster and... a merchant of death who owns air companies that ferry in arms" rebel and government forces in several African conflicts, including Liberia, Angola and Sierra Leone.

In a March resolution, the UN Security Council agreed to freeze the assets of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now in exile.

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1528038,00.html


Equatorial Guinea also involved in the Riggs bank scandal


but laundering money for the government (Obiang) and likely paying out the bribes from the oil companies.

LA Times story (somewhere odd) has good details: http://www.ocnus.net/cgi-bin/exec/view.cgi?archive=43&num=11319&printe ...

That's the Jonathan Bush linked company that there were other stories about today and recently--funneling money from Saudi's to the West Coast 9/11 terrorist cell.

I don't yet get if or how the coup money would be related. Greg Wales doesn't google very well, for one. But naturally we have a Bush linked company doing something hokey with oil rich EG, so there's got to be more to it. From some reading today, I think the International arm of Riggs is based in Miami--maybe throw in some Jeb, Cubans, drugs or other crazy Florida stuff that always makes up a nice BFEE crime conspiracy. I'm catching a strong wiff of BCCI.

My statement concerned the American government murdering its own citizens on 9/11. The fact that we have sponsored and engaged in murdering those in other countries has no direct bearing on 9/11.

on it's own citizens.

...and it can be reasonably known ahead of time that they will. It's still murder, but can only be linked indirectly to the government's actions.

just who was in those towers?

and if you don't think bush knew then your not paying attention!

But then, that almost goes without saying.

LIHOP or MIHOP? I just can't make up my mind. But after reading Paul Thompson's timeline long ago, I became convinced it was one or the other. Currently, I lean strongly toward MIHOP

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=911_project

I can't make up my mind either and leaning towards MIHOP also.

georgie was on vaction 42% of the time before 9/11. With all the problems in the world ya think he might have wanted to do a little more work!

Please watch the video at the end of this. If our government has done this what makes you believe they would stop at killing American citizens?




The Invasion of Haiti Anthony Fenton interviews Stan Goff


The Invasion of Haiti
Anthony Fenton interviews Stan Goff

by Stan Goff and Anthony Fenton

Fenton: What kind of background should one be familiar with when undertaking this type of investigation?

Goff: There's been a longstanding relationship between the Dominican military and the old military apparatus that developed after Papa Doc had his rapprochment with the Americans.

A lot of people think that Papa Doc was vaulted into power by the Americans, but actually, the opposite was true. The ideology of Papa Doc was one that grew out of a very xenophobic and nationalistic resistance against the Americans, and they in fact plotted a coup against him early on. There were two factions of the ruling class: one was was very much based on the old share-cropping land system and then there were the up and coming compradore class that were much more international and cosmopolitan in their outlook and they were the ones that were gaining the most from the military occupation - the 19 year military occupation from right after World War I, all the way up until the mid-30s, by the United States.

For 19 years the US Marines basically ran Haiti directly, and Papa Doc was vaulted into power in reaction to that because the Capitalist form of agriculture that was brought into Haiti was a real threat to this land tendency system, this share cropping system. This is really the social base of Papa Doc's movement was this landed class, the big land owners. One of the origins of the tonton macoutes was that this was a militia that he used to protect himself from an army that was still in many ways loyal to this competitor class, the compradors, and were politically unreliable until Papa Doc had time to affect his own transformation in the military.

This military that developed under Papa Doc had a relationship with the Dominican military. In fact , they sort of existed with one another as their raison d'etre. They both collaborated in a lot of ways: they collaborated in criminal enterprises, they collaborated in security issues, they collaborated politically, because both of them were sort of the armed enforcement wing of their respective states, and had a direct interest in stability on both sides of the border, and this relationship has lasted. The Dominicans themselves, the dominant Dominican elites, were not at all happy about Aristide, just as many members of the Dominican military were unhappy about Aristide dissolving the military {Aristide dissolved the military when he came back the first time}.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=55&ItemID=5557



Bushwhacked In the Caribbean

By Randall Robinson
Wednesday, May 19, 2004; Page A23

In addition, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice has warned Caricom leaders that if one U.S. soldier is killed in Haiti, Caribbean governments will be held responsible because the Aristide family was granted sanctuary in the region. In short, the Bush administration is strong-arming the Caribbean to confer on Haiti's new "government," headed by Gerard Latortue, a legitimacy it has not earned and does not deserve. Indeed, 33 of the 39 members of the Congressional Black Caucus stayed away from a recent Washington meeting arranged by two congressmen for Latortue.

The United States' demand that Caricom abandon its long-held insistence on democratic principles is psychic poison to the region. When Eastern Europe was going through its totalitarian nightmare, when coups and despotic rule were "normal" in Central and South America, and when civil strife and dictatorship wracked much of Africa and Asia, the Caribbean steadfastly upheld its democratic traditions -- and it continues to do so today. This is because of the region's well-educated populace and the caliber of its leaders; no military thugs in business suits here. From Rhodes Scholar-Prime Minister Percival J. Patterson of Jamaica in the north, to professor-lawyer Prime Minister Ralph Gonslaves in the south (St. Vincent-Grenadines), and from the physician Prime Minister Denzil Douglas in tiny St. Kitts-Nevis to the economist Prime Minister Owen Arthur in Barbados, Caribbean heads of government understand the lessons of history. They recognize the supremacy of the ballot. And they know that only democratic values will keep the Caribbean a zone of peace. Reinhold Niebuhr warned that man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but that man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. Yet the United States has unleashed its venom on Caribbean governments because they have proclaimed Caricom's democratic principles to be inviolable.


The Bush administration, however, has been implacable. Its officials were to have come to the Caribbean in April and May to discuss, among other things, terrorism, but the administration presented Caribbean governments with an ultimatum: no recognition of Latortue, no meetings between the United States and the Caribbean leaders. Caricom reminded U.S. officials that Latortue was not elected by anyone. And so the meetings are off. Why is the unelected Latortue more important to the Bush administration than the Caribbean's 14 democratically elected governments?

Americans must speak out against their government's behavior abroad. And they must recognize that the atrocities inflicted by U.S. soldiers on Iraqi prisoners grow out of a hubris and contempt that far too many U.S. officials display when dealing with much of the rest of the world. If stable Caribbean democracies are being slapped around by America because they uphold democratic values, who is safe in this unipolar world? Certainly not the American people, who are being made targets of global rage because of these tactics.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38008-2004May18.html


Haitian Police kill peaceful demonstrators

Haitian Police kill peaceful demonstrators
by Anthony Fenton Thursday May 20, 2004 at 12:18 PM
apfenton@ualberta.ca

Chile is part of an illegal occupation that has overseen the slaughter of as many as 3000 Haitians since February 29th. Emerging evidence shows that the destabilization and coup d'etat began in 2000, planned and executed by the US, UN, Canada, France, EU, and the Dominican. Empires and vassals. The same forces that helped overthrow Allende have repeated history in Haiti!!!


by the Haiti Information Project

May 18, 2004
Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Special Forces units (CIMO) of the Haitian National Police (PNH) killed Lavalas demonstra-tors today in Port-au-Prince as a larger U.S. Marine "peacekeeping" force of about 50 soldiers stood by.

About 6,000 Lavalas demonstrators in one of many separate marches tried to converge near the Champ De Mars for a larger demonstration. The march had been planned for some time and the organizations that planned the march received written approval by the PNH to hold this demonstration on Haitian Flag Day.

It is hard to estimate the actual size of the demonstration but figures of 30,000 to 60,000 different demonstrators in various parts of the city seem credible.

A contingent of about 50 U.S. Marines patroled every hour at the start of one march in Bel-Air trying to intimidate the population there. One of the marines officers in command tried to threaten an American journalist who was filming the action. Whenever, any of the groups of marchers tried to reach Champ de Mars a CIMO unit would "appear out of nowhere" and commence shooting into the crowds of demonstrators.

Reports of similar killing is coming in from different areas of the city. At 10PM in Haiti, there were nine verified dead by the U.S. trained killers. The Marine's seem to be coordinating this carnage, and are standing by with heavy artillery in case the population tries to stop the killers.

Recently the U.S. Marines have been directly involved in the current violent political repression of Lavalas activists. Last week the Marines used explosives to gain access to Annette Auguste's home before they arrested her and her family on the pretense that she was arming Lavalas militants to attack the Marines during Haitian Solidarity Week. No weapons were witnessed or found in possession of any of the protesters today.

Even though the demonstrators were rather angry no rocks were thrown or violence was witnessed to provoke the shooting.

One demonstrator who was shot 30 yards in front of the journalist lay dying of a gunshot wound to the head. The only item in his possession was a Walkman disk player. The CIMO unit that shot the non-violent Lavalasien drove up in a red truck license plate: 1-0060.

Later reports indicate that the U.S. Marines have begun reprisals for the large show of solidarity, once darkness descended on Port-au-Prince

fair use


Haitian leader misses Flag Day celebration

Staff report
Posted May 20 2004

Pompano Beach · The aftermath of violent political protests in Haiti kept Prime Minister Gérard Latortue from keeping an appointment to celebrate Haitian Flag Day at the Worldwide Christian Church Center on Wednesday night.

The church, along with the Louverture Center for Freedom and Development, scheduled a week of special events and services to commemorate Flag Day, which was Tuesday. Latortue was scheduled to pick up the Louverture Haiti Renaissance Award. Gov. Jeb Bush, who could not attend, was given the Star of Freedom Award.


On Tuesday, the Westminster Academy Haiti Missions Team from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and Jean Colin, executive director of the Haitian Health Foundation of South Florida, were given the Spirit of Excellence Award during a celebration sponsored by Minority Development and Empowerment Inc

more
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-cflag20xmay20,0,788 ...


At least 9 demonstrators killed during huge march on Haiti’s Flag Day



This pro-Aristide demonstrator, Titus Simpson, 23, was shot by Haitian Special Forces (CIMO) less than 30 yards in front of an American journalist covering Tuesday’s march celebrating Haiti’s Flag Day. U.S. Marines threatened the journalist with arrest for filming the events, and he was shot at twice. Simpson was unarmed, the only item in his possession a Walkman disk player.

Marchers face down US Marines, shout ‘Liberty or death,’ ‘Bring back Aristide’

by Marguerite Laurent, J.D.

Haitian Lawyers Leadership

This pro-Aristide demonstrator, Titus Simpson, 23, was shot by Haitian Special Forces (CIMO) less than 30 yards in front of an American journalist covering Tuesday’s march celebrating Haiti’s Flag Day. U.S. Marines threatened the journalist with arrest for filming the events, and he was shot at twice. Simpson was unarmed, the only item in his possession a Walkman disk player.
May 18 is Haiti’s Flag Day, and a demonstration was planned and authorized by the police authorities. Copies of the authorization letter, dated May 10, were sent by Fanmi Lavalas to the United Nations, OAS and CARICOM.

Yet today the Haitian police, along with U.S. Marines, shot indiscriminately into the crowd aiming to break up the demonstration.

“They slapped us hard today,” one of the demonstrators stated over the phone from Port-au-Prince. “But we slapped them right back because they thought all their killings of Lavalas and torturing had intimidated us all into hiding in our own country. They did not expect so many of us to take to the street to ask for the return of President Aristide and the disbanding of the army soldiers who are now running the Haitian National Police. That’s why we slapped them back.”

more
http://www.sfbayview.com/051904/haitisflagday051904.shtml


Thousands demonstrate in call for return of Aristide to power

Supporters of former President Jean Bertrand Aristide march during a demonstration celebrating the 201st birthday of the Haitian flag in Port-au-Prince, Haiti Tuesday, May 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040518/API/4051 ...


Pro-Aristide March Turns Violent in Haiti

By AMY BRACKEN
Associated Press Writer

Supporters of former President Jean Bertrand Aristide march during a demonstration celebrating the 201st birthday of the Haitian flag in Port-au-Prince, Haiti Tuesday, May 18, 2004. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Thousands of demonstrators called for the return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide during a Flag Day rally Tuesday that turned violent, leaving at least one man dead.

Waving flags and carrying umbrellas bearing Aristide's smiling face, the demonstrators marched from the pro-Aristide stronghold of Belair toward the National Palace, just blocks away from a cathedral where interim President Boniface Alexandre was attending a Mass.

As the protesters neared the cathedral, riot police fired tear gas and then warning shots to disperse the crowd, which reacted by pelting government vehicles with rocks.

A 23-year-old demonstrator was shot and killed. It was unclear who fired the fatal shot, and police were not immediately available for comment.

more
http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040518/API/4051 ...


Thousands demonstrate in call for return of Aristide to power

As the protesters neared the cathedral, riot police fired tear gas and then warning shots to disperse the crowd, which reacted by pelting government vehicles with rocks.

Demonstrator Titus Simpton, 23, was shot and killed. It was unclear who fired the fatal shot, and police were not immediately available for comment.

U.S. Marines helped the police by conducting patrols but did not fire any rounds, according to Colonel David Lapan, a spokesman for the U.S.-led multinational force that will be replaced by a U.N. force. Peacekeepers and international police are scheduled to start arriving on June 1.

Aristide claims that the United States forced him to resign amid a spreading three-week revolt on February 29, a claim the United States denies.

The 15-nation Caribbean Community, which has refused to recognize Haiti's interim government because of the allegations that Aristide has made, has asked the Organization of American States to investigate the circumstances of Aristide's departure.

more
http://www.etaiwannews.com/World/2004/05/20/1085022289.htm


Former Rebels Form New Political Party in Haiti

VOA News
20 May 2004, 14:13 UTC



AP
Guy Philippe
(File photo)
Former Haitian rebels who played a major role in February's ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide say they have formed a new political party.
The former members of the National Resistance Front have created a group called the National Reconstruction Front.

Former rebel leader Guy Philippe is expected to have a lead role in the party, which says it will field candidates in Haiti's general elections next year.

The announcement was made Tuesday in Haiti's fourth-largest city, Gonaives, which the rebels held during the armed revolt that led to Mr. Aristide's departure.

more
http://www.voanews.com/article.cfm?objectID=824A0A42-8743-4347-B23447C ...



Rebel commander Wilfort Ferdinand, also known by the nickname Ti-Wil, greets leader Guy Philippe, right, with an affectionate pat as he arrives with a group of rebel troops in Cap Haitien, Haiti, Saturday. (AP /Pablo Aneli).


Haitian rebels form political party
Rebel leader Guy Philippe, 36, who was sacked by the Aristide government for plotting a coup, Winter Etienne, 40, and Buteur Metayer, 32, will hold respectively the roles of secretary general, general coordinator and president.

Mr Etienne is a supporter of fellow rebel leader and former death squad member Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1993 murder of Mr Aristide's financier Antoine Izmery.

Mr Metary is the leader of the Cannibal Army gang in the northern city of Gonaives and a former Aristide supporter

Tuesday's announcement was made before a crowd of 1,000 in Gonaives, held by the FRN rebels during the armed insurgency against Mr Aristide.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1112625.htm



In Haiti's chaos, rape without punishment was norm

"It was worse than I have ever seen," said Yolette Jeanty, director of the women's rights group Kay Fanm. "At least before, there were some ways to get justice."

Rape has always carried a certain level of impunity in Haiti. Even the concept of rape is often limited to young victims.

"The adult women, they don't consider it rape," Jeanty said. "There is this mentality that if you're not a virgin, it's not a rape."

By law, it is considered a crime against honor - a squandering of virginity that can often be settled with a payment to the victim's family.

"Sometimes the judge will even suggest as a reparation that the rapist marry the girl," Jeanty said.

more
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0520HaitiRape20-ON.html



Haiti: Marines arrest woman leader on Mother’s Day

U.S. Marines invaded the home of renowned entertainer and community leader Annette Auguste after midnight May 9, arresting and detaining everyone present including four great-grandchildren, TransAfrica said, citing reports from Haiti.

While the others were later released, Ms. Auguste, known as So Ann, was interrogated throughout the night without counsel or anyone present except herself and the Marines. She was then transferred to the Haitian National Police where she was still detained late last week.

The Marines breached her gate with explosives, shot and killed the household dogs and ransacked the home, searching for non-existent weapons.

TransAfrica said it believes Ms. Auguste was arrested because “she is a prominent leader of Haitians who understand and object that the right-wing elite has returned to Haiti behind the guns of convicted criminals and death squad thugs, with the blessing of their right-wing allies here in the United States.”

more
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/5264/1/216


Chile Approves Troops For Haiti Peacekeeping

Thursday, May 20, 2004; Page A26

SANTIAGO, Chile -- Chile's Senate agreed Wednesday to send 650 troops to Haiti as part of a U.N. peacekeeping mission that will take over the task of restoring stability from a U.S.-led multinational force on June 1.

Chile, a member of the U.N. Security Council, deployed 130 troops in March after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled Haiti under international pressure as an armed rebellion threatened the capital, Port-au-Prince.

That Chilean deployment is due to end in June. The new contingent, approved by a vote of 27 to 0 with 15 abstentions, adds to that military presence and includes 38 members from the national police force.

The Security Council unanimously approved on April 30 the new mission of up to 5,700 U.N. troops and as many as 1,622 police officers.

more
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41466-2004May19.html


Brazil to send 1,200 troops to Haiti

Brazilian soldiers receive training in Brasilia, Brazil, before their Haiti deployment.

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) -- Brazil's Senate agreed late Wednesday to send 1,200 troops to Haiti to lead a U.N peacekeeping mission as Brazil seeks to build a role as a regional crisis mediator.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has championed the interests of the world's poorest nations since taking office, offered Brazil's biggest ever U.N. peacekeeping force to head the mission.

The Senate vote was the last hurdle for deployment. It was approved with 38 votes for and 10 votes against.

Lula, who objected to the U.S.-led war on Iraq last year, conditioned Brazilian leadership of the mission on international support to build a democracy in Haiti after two U.S.

more
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/americas/05/20/brazil.haiti.reut /



Haitian Police kill peaceful demonstrators
by Anthony Fenton Thursday May 20, 2004 at 12:18 PM
apfenton@ualberta.ca

Chile is part of an illegal occupation that has overseen the slaughter of as many as 3000 Haitians since February 29th. Emerging evidence shows that the destabilization and coup d'etat began in 2000, planned and executed by the US, UN, Canada, France, EU, and the Dominican. Empires and vassals. The same forces that helped overthrow Allende have repeated history in Haiti!!!

by the Haiti Information Project

May 18, 2004
Port-au-Prince, Haiti

Special Forces units (CIMO) of the Haitian National Police (PNH) killed Lavalas demonstra-tors today in Port-au-Prince as a larger U.S. Marine "peacekeeping" force of about 50 soldiers stood by.

About 6,000 Lavalas demonstrators in one of many separate marches tried to converge near the Champ De Mars for a larger demonstration. The march had been planned for some time and the organizations that planned the march received written approval by the PNH to hold this demonstration on Haitian Flag Day.

It is hard to estimate the actual size of the demonstration but figures of 30,000 to 60,000 different demonstrators in various parts of the city seem credible.

A contingent of about 50 U.S. Marines patroled every hour at the start of one march in Bel-Air trying to intimidate the population there. One of the marines officers in command tried to threaten an American journalist who was filming the action. Whenever, any of the groups of marchers tried to reach Champ de Mars a CIMO unit would "appear out of nowhere" and commence shooting into the crowds of demonstrators.

Reports of similar killing is coming in from different areas of the city. At 10PM in Haiti, there were nine verified dead by the U.S. trained killers. The Marine's seem to be coordinating this carnage, and are standing by with heavy artillery in case the population tries to stop the killers.

Recently the U.S. Marines have been directly involved in the current violent political repression of Lavalas activists. Last week the Marines used explosives to gain access to Annette Auguste's home before they arrested her and her family on the pretense that she was arming Lavalas militants to attack the Marines during Haitian Solidarity Week. No weapons were witnessed or found in possession of any of the protesters today.

Even though the demonstrators were rather angry no rocks were thrown or violence was witnessed to provoke the shooting.

One demonstrator who was shot 30 yards in front of the journalist lay dying of a gunshot wound to the head. The only item in his possession was a Walkman disk player. The CIMO unit that shot the non-violent Lavalasien drove up in a red truck license plate: 1-0060.

Later reports indicate that the U.S. Marines have begun reprisals for the large show of solidarity, once darkness descended on Port-au-Prince

More details on this tragic event later.
http://chile.indymedia.org/news/2004/05/18974.php
fair use


WATCH THIS VIDEO



EVERY DEATH CREATES NEW ENEMIES
MORE TERRORISTS
MORE DANGER
MORE DEATH
AND REMEMBER...
HE IS JUST GETTING STARTED...
BUSH'S PLAN FOR PEACE
IS THE PEACE OF THE COMMON GRAVE

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

http://www.bushflash.com/pax.html



Let America be America Again...by Langston Hughes


Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

It has no direct bearing on the government's involvement or lack of involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

How's this for year-old news?

U.S. Citizen Among Those Killed In Yemen Predator Missile Strike

By Dana Priest
THE WASHINGTON POST -- washington

A U.S. citizen was among those killed in the pilotless missile strike on suspected al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen Sunday, administration officials confirmed Thursday, adding a new element to an attack that reflects the evolving nature of the U.S. war on terrorism around the world.

Ahmed Hijazi and five other suspected al-Qaida operatives were killed by a five-foot long Hellfire missile shot from a remote controlled CIA Predator aircraft as they rode in a vehicle 100 miles east of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

Hijazi held U.S. citizenship and was also a citizen of an unidentified Middle Eastern country, a senior administration official confirmed. He was not born in the United States, but resided here for an unknown period of time, the official said.

With him in the vehicle, according to Yemeni and U.S. government officials, was a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is suspected of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole.

CONTINUED...

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N54/long4-54.54w.html

Kissinger Watch #5 - 03



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

by ICAI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



OVERVIEW - Kissinger Watch #5



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

2. Kissinger admits possible errors on Vietnam

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

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

5. REASONS for refusing the issue of a warrant

6. Why Milosevic, but not Kissinger?

7. Kissinger testimony pleas refused

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

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

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

11. Spanish superjudge asks USA for permission to quiz Kissinger


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



All this right up Bush's Terrorist John Negroponte's alley


The perfect choice I guess


Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq


Iraqi ambassador pick grilled on hand-over




By Steven Weisman
The New York Times

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

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





Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq


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


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

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

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

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

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

Bush's Terrorist: John Negroponte Sent to Iraq




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


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

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


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

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



Face-off: Bush's Foreign Policy Warriors


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

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

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

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

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

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


NEGROPONTE - Sleeping Ambassador or Death Squad Diplomat?

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

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

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

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

US nuns murdered in El Salvador 4

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

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

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

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

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


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

How is this evidence that the government is responsible for perpetrating the 9/11 attacks? I'll accept (as I have for the past three decades or so) that the government has done some pretty awful things. However, that doesn't automatically make them guilty of 3,000 counts of murder.

As a matter of interest, would you be drawing the same conclusions if this happened on Clinton's watch? My position would be the same given the same evidence.

I usually can tell alot about a person by the questions asked.

I can usually tell about alot about a person by the answers they give. Is cryptic time over?

Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen

The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime

by Samantha Power

.....


I. People Sitting in Offices


n the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: "Never Again Again" (March 14, 2002)
Samantha Power, the author of "A Problem From Hell," explores why America—the home of Holocaust awareness—did all but nothing to stop the genocides of the twentieth century So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda. Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/power.htm

The fact that the US Government let things happen in other countries has no bearing on whether it was involved with the 9/11 attacks.

Edit: See post #46, please.

If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the color of the evening sun
Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay

Perhaps this final act was meant
To clinch a lifetime's argument
That nothing comes from violence
and nothing ever could
For all those born beneath an angry star
Lest we forget how fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are
How fragile we are

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are
How fragile we are

Sting

WITHOUT SANCTUARY


Lynchers often paraded their victim down the main street, through black neighborhoods, and in front of "colored schools" that were in session.

Jesse Washington, seventeen years old, was the chief suspect in the May 8, 1916, murder of Lucy Fryer of Robinson, Texas, on whose farm he worked as a laborer. After the lynching, Washington's corpse was placed in a burlap bag and dragged around City Hall Plaza, through the main streets of Waco, and seven miles to Robinson, where a large black population resided.

His charred corpse was hung for public display in front of a blacksmith shop. The sender of this card, Joe Meyers, an oiler at the Bellmead car department and a Waco resident, marked his photo with a cross (now an ink smudge to left of victim).


This card bears the advertising stamp, "katy electric studio temple texas. h. lippe prop." inscribed in brown ink: "This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe."

Repeated references to eating are found in lynching-related correspondence, such as "coon cooking," "barbecue," and "main fare."
http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

So a man murdered in a small Texas town 88 years ago means that the Bush Administration is capable of perpetrating 9/11? That would appear to make no sense. Not to mention that the government didn't murder the unfortunate in your photo.

sound familiar? LIHOP


Do you honestly think it was only one man? Note the date

The corpse of Clyde Johnson. August 3, 1935 . Yreka, California.

Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 3.1/2 x 5 3/8 in.

Etched in the negative, "Killer of Jack Daw Aug 3, 1935 vengence in Siskiyou County."




At the funeral of Dunsmuir, Oregon's Chief of Police, F. R. Daw, a number of mourners planned the lynching of his alleged murderer, Clyde Johnson. Early on the morning of August 3, 1935, the masked mob, estimated as large as fifty, forcibly removed Johnson from his jail cell and dragged him three miles south of town where they hung him from a pine tree. Local and state officials expressed mixed reaction to news of the lynching.

District Attorney James Davis declared that he would open an investigation and "do everything the law requires to apprehend members of the mob." On the other hand, the California Attorney General, referring to the recently delayed execution of an accused murderer, stated that the "uncontrollable unrest" was a natural result of the "apathy of the Supreme Court of the United States."

http://www.musarium.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html

Conflict in Congo has killed 4.7m, charity says

Starvation and disease multiply toll from fighting

James Astill in Bukavu and Isabelle Chevallot
Tuesday April 8, 2003
The Guardian

A total of 4.7 million people have died as a direct result of the Democratic Republic of Congo's civil war in the past four and a half years, according to a report released today by the International Rescue Committee, a leading aid agency.
By the IRC's methodical calculations, Congo's convoluted war - one barely mentioned in the western media - has claimed far more lives than any other conflict since the second world war.

"This is the worst calamity in Africa this century, and one which the world has consistently found reasons to overlook," David Johnson, the director of IRC's operations in eastern Congo, said yesterday.

"Over the past three years our figures have been consistent and clear. Congo's war is the tragedy of modern times."

With a margin for error of 1.6m - a standard proportion is applied to areas too dangerous for researchers to reach - IRC admits its estimate is approximate. Yet few aid workers in eastern Congo doubt that a total death toll of 4.7m is possible.

more
http://www.guardian.co.uk/congo/story/0,12292,932034,00.html

abuse of the national security classification system to literally get away with murder and circumvent law enforcement and prosecution. I can state that as a fact long known to many social networks of all concerned.

NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.

bobthedrummer

When George H. W. Bush was Director/ CIA about the only known thing


was that he increased the use of secrecy contracts throughout government, aside from that known fact he was the most secretive Director of all.

That's why this is a major impediment to the many law enforcement professionals that have horrific investigations and cases unable to proceed-that's got to stop.

The criminal element of BFEE must be prosecuted, they cannot use the National Security umbrella any longer-a good start to this would be the prosecution of the military intelligence, intelligence, and mercenaries involved in the Iraqi prison torture case, which does include a murder according to S/Sgt Frederick II.

A lot of GI's are getting killed or wounded as a direct result of the behavior of national security criminals imo.


bobthedrummer

This includes the use of mercenaries and Private Military Companies.


There's been an intelligence failure since it's creation in the 1947 National Security Act when real Nazis that had been "recruited" and given identities and jobs as Americans working national security were formally brought into the very foundation of the US intelligence community.

These Nazis found a political home in the RW of the Republican Party.
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/ratlines.htm

That was treasonous imo, there must be prosecution for crimes committed by national security since then.


Octafish

And THAT's the secret they want covered up the most.


The original sin, the KKK and billionaires joined forces with their spiritual kin, the NAZÎs and the Mafia through their secret government, crafted in large part by the Dulles Brothers and Clark Clifford. Nice people, these, who really believe in Feudalism.

bobthedrummer

That's a fact, Jack!


That's why DYN CORP has the contract for law enforcement and corrections in Iraq, just like they did in Bosnia-it's EVIL when organized crime is law enforcement hiding behind national security-that's the BFEE indeed.




seemslikeadream

BRAZIL MARKS 40th ANNIVERSARY OF MILITARY COUP

DECLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS SHED LIGHT ON U.S. ROLE

Audio tape: President Johnson urged taking "every step that we can" to support overthrow of Joao Goulart

U.S. Ambassador Requested Pre-positioned Armaments to aid Golpistas; Acknowledged covert operations backing street demonstrations, civic forces and resistance groups

Edited by Peter Kornbluh
pkorn@gwu.edu / 202 994-7116


Washington D.C., 31 March 2004 - "I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do," President Johnson instructed his aides regarding preparations for a coup in Brazil on March 31, 1964. On the 40th anniversary of the military putsch, the National Security Archive today posted recently declassified documents on U.S. policy deliberations and operations leading up to the overthrow of the Goulart government on April 1, 1964. The documents reveal new details on U.S. readiness to back the coup forces.

The Archive's posting includes a declassified audio tape of Lyndon Johnson being briefed by phone at his Texas ranch, as the Brazilian military mobilized against Goulart. "I'd put everybody that had any imagination or ingenuity… McCone… McNamara" on making sure the coup went forward, Johnson is heard to instruct undersecretary of State George Ball. "We just can't take this one," the tape records LBJ's opinion. "I'd get right on top of it and stick my neck out a little."

Among the documents are Top Secret cables sent by U.S. Ambassador Lincoln Gordon who forcefully pressed Washington for direct involvement in supporting coup plotters led by Army Chief of Staff General Humberto Castello Branco. "If our influence is to be brought to bear to help avert a major disaster here-which might make Brazil the China of the 1960s-this is where both I and all my senior advisors believe our support should be placed," Gordon wrote to high State Department, White House and CIA officials on March 27, 1964.

To assure the success of the coup, Gordon recommended "that measures be taken soonest to prepare for a clandestine delivery of arms of non-US origin, to be made available to Castello Branco supporters in Sao Paulo." In a subsequent cable, declassified just last month, Gordon suggested that these weapons be "pre-positioned prior any outbreak of violence," to be used by paramilitary units and "friendly military against hostile military if necessary." To conceal the U.S. role, Gordon recommended the arms be delivered via "unmarked submarine to be off-loaded at night in isolated shore spots in state of Sao Paulo south of Santos."


more
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm


seemslikeadream

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. OLIVER L. NORTH


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. OLIVER L. NORTH, Defendant


63. On April 26, U.S. Ambassador Negroponte notified McFarlane that President Suazo had called Negroponte immediately after Suazo's telephone conversation with President Reagan to say that Suazo was satisfied with the U.S. government commitment to continue support for the Resistance. President Suazo told Ambassador Negroponte that he (Suazo) had assured President Reagan of his full support and had promised that he (Suazo) would check into the interdicted munitions shipment, which he did immediately after the conversation with President Reagan by calling a senior Honduran military official. Suazo told Negroponte that Honduras supported the Resistance fully, and Suazo asked that Negroponte convey his strongest assurances to President Reagan that Honduras would not let down the Resistance. Ambassador Negroponte recommended under the circumstances that the Honduran delegation be received in Washington by Vice President Bush in President Reagan's absence.

78. In mid-January 1986, LtCol North prepared talking points for a meeting between Admiral Poindexter, Vice President Bush, and Honduran President Azcona. North recommended that Admiral Poindexter and Vice President Bush tell President Azcona of the need for Honduras to work with the U.S. government on increasing regional involvement with and support for the Resistance. Poindexter and Bush were also to raise the subject of better U.S. government support for the states bordering Nicaragua.


97. In late August 1986, North reported to Admiral Poindexter that a representative of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega had asked North to meet with him. Noriega's representative proposed that, in exchange for a promise from the USG to help clean up Noriega's image and a commitment to lift the USG ban on military sales to the Panamanian defense forces, Noriega would assassinate the Sandinista leadership for the U.S. government. North had told Noriega's representative that U.S. law forbade such actions. The representative responded that Noriega had numerous assets in place in Nicaragua and could accomplish many essential things, just as Noriega had helped the USG the previous year in blowing up a Sandinista arsenal.

102. In mid-September 1986, LtCol North advised Admiral Poindexter that former U.S. Ambassador Negroponte, General Gorman of SouthCom, senior CIA official Duane Clarridge, and LtCol North had worked out arrangements for support of the Resistance with General Bueso-Rosa, a former Honduran military officer who had recently been convicted of offenses in the U.S. LtCol North suggested that efforts be made on Bueso-Rosa behalf to deter him from disclosing details of the covert activities.

103. In late September 1986, LtCol North advised Admiral Poindexter that Costa Rican Interior Minister Garron had disclosed the existence of the Santa Elena airstrip. North stated that President Arias of Costa Rica had breached his understanding with the U.S. government. Assistant Secretary of State Abrams and Secretary of State Shultz wanted to cancel Arias' scheduled visit with President Reagan and replace his appointment by scheduling a meeting with President Cerezo of Guatemala. Admiral Poindexter agreed.

104. A U.S. official met with President Cerezo of Guatemala in September 1986. Cerezo told the U.S. official that he intended to pursue U.S. government goals in Central America, including specific support for the armed Resistance, but that he would seek additional military aid from the U.S. in return.

105. President Reagan, Vice President Bush, Shultz, Weinberger, and Poindexter were informed of the U.S. official's meeting with President Cerezo. It was reported to these officials that, in return for Guatemalan support for the Resistance, Cerezo would ask Secretary of State Shultz to triple military assistance to Guatemala, to double economic assistancs to Guatemala, and to undertake other forms of support for Guatemala.

106. In late September 1986, LtCol North reported to Admiral Poindexter on his London meeting with Noriega. Noriega would try to take immediate actions against the Sandinistas and offered a list of priorities including an oil refinery, an airport, and the Puerto Sandino off-load facility.

http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/stip.html



Octafish

The crook Ollie North sicced FBI on Sen. John Kerry.


... because Kerry actually had the temerity to investigate the Iran-Contra drug running trail that greased right through Ollie's White House subterranean bunker and straight into "Vice-president" George Bush's office.

OLLIE NORTH AND DRUGS

By Dennis Bernstein and Howard Levine
From The Texas Observer

EXCERPT...

If Iran-Contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh had wanted to know the extent of former Colonel Oliver North's involvement in the smuggling of drugs from Central America to the United States, Walsh might have made at least one phone call to Celerino 'Cele' Castillo in San Antonio.

Between 1985 to 1991, Castillo was the Drug Enforcement Administration's main agent in El Salvador, where, he says, he uncovered "and reported" a huge drug and gun smuggling operation that was run out of the Ilopango military airport by the 'North Network' and the CIA.

North, now the Republican nominee for the U. S. Senate in Virginia, prevailed at the nominating convention last weekend by positioning himself far to the right of his rival, former Reagan budget director James Miller III, promising that if elected he will work to "clean up the mess" in Washington, and cultivating the support of the same fundamentalist Christian Republicans who
responded to the direct-mail campaign to finance the North defense committee.

But Castillo, the first government official with first-hand knowledge of North's drug dealing to speak publicly about it, says North belongs in prison, not in the U.S. Senate. "We saw several packages of narcotics, we saw several boxes of U.S. currency, going from Ilopango to Panama," Castillo said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/961120.castillo....

Portraying North as a dung beatle rolling along on the turd that's the BFEE is pretty apt.


seemslikeadream

The Oliver North File:




His Diaries, E-Mail, and Memos on
the Kerry Report, Contras and Drugs

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 113

February 26, 2004
Washington D.C., 26 February 2004 - Diaries, e-mail, and memos of Iran-contra figure Oliver North, posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, directly contradict his criticisms yesterday of Sen. John Kerry's 1988 Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the ways that covert support for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s undermined the U.S. war on drugs.

Mr. North claimed to talk show hosts Hannity & Colmes that the Kerry report was "wrong," that Sen. Kerry "makes this stuff up and then he can't justify it," and that "The fact is nobody in the government of the United States, going all the way back to the earliest days of this under Jimmy Carter, ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. Nobody in the government of the United States. I will stand on that to my grave."

The Kerry subcommittee did not report that U.S. government officials ran drugs, but rather, that Mr. North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and other senior officials created a privatized contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the contras, and actively worked with known drug smugglers such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to assist the contras. The report cited former Drug Enforcement Administration head John Lawn testifying that Mr. North himself had prematurely leaked a DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents' lives, for political advantage in an upcoming Congressional vote on aid to the contras (p.121).

Among the documents posted today are:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB113/index.htm


Octafish

This sums up Ollie North, Murder Inc.


A Short History of Saddam-Bush-Noriega Business

(continued)

by CONSPIRACY PLANET

EXCERPT...

"Then in 1989 when the so-called Iraq Gate scandal began to break open, there were Congressional hearings about Bushonian mischief making with Saddam Hussein. But who remembers that now? Many senior Reagan-Bush people were inculpated in a scheme to illegally transfer non-conventional American weapons systems to Saddam."

"When Senator Christopher Dodd's committee attempted to subpoena Saddam Hussein, that subpoena was the only subpoena issued by the Iraq Gate investigating committee that was blocked by the Bush Regime. He was told to keep himself scarce and Saddam kept himself scarce when the Democratically controlled committee was investigating Bushonian involvement in the illicit transfer on non-conventional weapons systems to Iraq. That was when Saddam suddenly went on this holiday someplace in the Caspian Sea."

Al Martin's reference to "Saddam, Watch Out for That Soap" comes from the fact that Enemies of Bush have often died very "conveniently" at very "convenient" times.

"It should also be remembered how CIA doper George Morales supposedly slipped on a bar of soap in prison and was killed when his head hit the floor," Martin reminds his readers. "That was one day before he was due to be released -- when he was going to Washington to testify before the Kerry Committee hearing."

"So Saddam -- remember what happened to the other right wing dictators."

CONTINUED - - SOURCE (Al Martin, warning for the blue-blooded DUers):

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=2&contentid=1019...

More on the subject, courtesy of NSA and DUer extraordinaire seemslikeadream:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm


seemslikeadream

14 Million New Secrets Last Year:

Here's One of Them

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 90

Update - May 3, 2004


The U.S. government classified more than 14 million new national security secrets last year, up from 11 million in the previous year and 8 million the year before, according to the new annual report to President Bush from the oversight office for the national security secrecy system. Dated 31 March 2004 and made publicly available last week, the report provides the Information Security Oversight Office's best estimate of the rising tide of secrecy, and also warns that "Allowing information that will not cause damage to national security to remain in the classification system, or to enter the system in the first instance, places all classified information at needless increased risk."

The National Security Archive today posted on the Web one of the 14 million new secrets, a Biographical Sketch produced in 1975 by the Defense Intelligence Agency on the Chilean then-dictator, General Augusto Pinochet. The DIA blacked out large sections of the Sketch on ostensible national security grounds, including General Pinochet's liquor choices - "scotch and pisco sours" - when DIA released the document under the Freedom of Information Act last year.

Also posted today is the Pinochet Sketch as released in full, with no deletions, by President Clinton's 1999 declassification of U.S. documents related to human rights abuses in Chile. The document appears uncensored on pages 181-183 in the Archive book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, by Peter Kornbluh, which was published this past September by The New Press, New York, and was selected by the Los Angeles Times as a "Best Nonfiction Book of 2003."

"Pinochet's pisco sours are certainly not the only dubious secret among the 14 million new ones," commented Archive director Thomas Blanton. "The real question is whether the secrecy veil really makes us safer, or does it hide our country's vulnerabilities and policy problems when what we need to do is fix them?"

The Pinochet Sketch is also the subject of today's "In the Loop" column by Al Kamen of The Washington Post, under the headline "Millions of Secrets."


http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB90/index2.htm



Minstrel Boy

"What goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes."


So says former German Cabinet Minister Andreas von Buelow.


Q: You mean, the events of Sept. 11--

Von Buelow: --fit perfectly in the concept of the armaments industry, the intelligence agencies, the whole military-industrial-academic complex. This is in fact conspicuous. The huge raw materials reserves of the former Soviet Union are now at their disposal, also the pipeline routes and--

Q: Erich Follach described that at length in Spiegel: "It's a matter of military bases, drugs, oil and gas reserves."

Von Buelow: I can state: the planning of the attacks was technically and organizationally a master achievement. To hijack four huge airplanes within a few minutes and within one hour, to drive them into their targets, with complicated flight maneuvers! This is unthinkable, without years-long support from secret apparatuses of the state and industry.

...

Q: You wrote a book on the dealings of the CIA and Co. In the meantime, you have become an expert regarding the strange things related to intelligence services' work.

Von Buelow: "Strange things" is the wrong term. What has gone on, and goes on, in the name of intelligence services, are true crimes.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/VonBuelow.html





http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=1523760#1523820

Never, never our own.

"If you mean the Nazis, then you are again implying an equivalence between the current Administration and the Nazis which is not justified by the evidence."

You're saying so doesn't mean it is not justified.

BushCo outfascists the fascists. Its called a corporate coup d'etat.

Because the fortune he made in blood money - literally from concentration camp slave labor - is the money on which the Bush Criminal Empire was founded. Prescott & his buddies the Dulles brothers founded the CIA, which led to all the "black operations" that Poppy has been involved in over the years, from drug smuggling, to creation of the very terrorists we are now "at war" with, to his involvement with JFK's murder (level of which is unknown, but he WAS in Dallas that day. And in turn, the foundations set by Poppy's CIA, especially in the Middle East, are what enable Junior & PNAC's agenda today.

So it is indeed one continuous string of treason which has been taking place for nearly a century.

Your splitting hairs here.

after the Reichstag was torched by the Nazi's and the blame put on the Communists? Of course...by the time the poor citizens of Germany were let in on the "secret", millions had died and their country torn to smithereens by the Allies!
Can you possibly explain to me why the most powerful military in the world was told to "STAND DOWN" while our country was being attacked? Can you explain to me why the "Commander-in-Chief" sat on his ass in a school room reading a story about a goat while our country was being attacked? Answer these basic questions and I guarantee you I have a whole lot more you can answer!:grr:

...become equivalent to the Nazis? The answer is they aren't equivalent. They are disgusting to me in many, many ways, but they aren't even close to the Nazis.

I can't explain to you why the military is ever told anything. That is not evidence of anything sinister. In retrospect, it certainly seems inept. But unless someone can show that the military was told to stand down to allow the attacks to take place, then it is no more than trivial Monday morning quarterbacking.

Why did Bush stay in the school? Beats me. I fail to see how Bush's ineptness supports a government conspiracy. ???

ditto those of us who believe MIHOP. If you're right (and we're wrong) and Bushinc was innocent of causing 911, then GOOD!!! Cheers all round! pass the bottle! BUTT...
if you're wrong (and we're right) that bushinc CAUSED 911 and all that follows from it, then...
what?
think about the mess your type of complacency has led entire world into, if a murderous criminal organization as desperate and vicious as they'd necessarily must be now controls the most powerful police/military/propaganda machine in history....

Isn't that the exact same thinking that the Administration is using in the Wah on Terrah?

Do we know who perpetrated 9/11? The media has repeatedly TOLD us who did it, but there has never been a trial and the evidence supporting THEIR conspiracy isn't as plentiful as they would like us to believe. Even the FBI has admitted as such.

From what I can tell WE, the American people, including many within the government itself, do not know who the real perpetrators of 9/11 were. There is a lot of talk, a lot of assumptions, a lot of repeating what others said who should know what they are talking about, but there is damn little real evidence from the FBI or the intelligence communities that has been made publicly available.

Frankly, I find THAT absolutely INCREDIBLE. Talk about "guilty until proven innocent"--we have launched TWO WARS based on "guilty until proven innocent"

There are many many INCREDIBLE circumstances surrounding 9/11. And, whether a smoking gun exists or not, there is a point beyond which "incompetence" or "coincidence" or "chance" cease to serve as adequate explanations for the incredible. 9/11 pushes that WAY over the top. We need to know what operatives pulled this off -- who were they working for --and how did they do it, apparently fooling every branch of our government? And why have NO ONE been held accountable!? Not one person.

We have a RIGHT to know what happened on 9/11 -- what RALLY happened. And yet investigations into this subject are extremely controlled. You have to ask yourself WHY. The future of our Republic depends on the answers.

There's not going to be a trial. There is plenty of evidence that al-Queda is responsible, including a semi-admission (if memory serves) from bin-Laden himself.

What either of us find incredible has no bearing on the truth. Many of the coincidences are in the eye of the beholder. A basic trait of the human animal is to make patterns. Many times these patterns exist. Sometimes they do not. Using facts and logic we can tell with reasonable accuracy whether a pattern is real and meaningful or simply a problem of perception or exists but is meaningless.

One of the problems with government conspiracy theories is that they present a false dichotomy from the outset. "If this didn't happen exactly the way that the government said it did, that means the government is complicit or trying hide something." Of course, that could well be true. OTOH, it could also mean that the government is mistaken on that point. Isn't that possible?

The whole thing reminds me a bit of the creationist/evolution argument where creationists will trot out some critter whose evolution hasn't been determined yet and claim that since biologists can't figure it out, that means God did it personally. It is simply sloppy thinking.

I have seen no hard evidence of government compicity in 9/11. The entire body of evidence presented by conspiracy theorists revolves around what *isn't* known, coincidence, innuendo, and more than a little anger.

This is starkly observable in this thread by the questions that I was asked and the answers that I was given: "How do you explain 'X'? It doesn't matter how I explain or fail to explain 'X'. What matters if one wants to show government complicity is the evidence that supports that premise. My inability to explain something is meaningless.

Clearly they aren't all dead. There are many who aided and abetted the identified "terrorists" who haven't even been questioned.

A semi admission from bin-Laden (and, indeed, it was "semi") is itself curious. Why would the US government feed us an obviously phony video of 'bin-Laden' taking credit for 9/11 and, then, when it is seen that its phoniness is apparent to most everyone, allow it to drop down the memory hole?

Please spare me your pop-psychology. 3000 people died and we don't know who and we don't know why. Worse yet, this ignorance has been perpetuated and used to further neocon agendas. We are being had. -- Correction, people like YOU are being had. Granted, some "conspiracy theorists" go off the deep end. However, those who counter "conspiracy theory" with a demand for "smoking guns" from arm-chair investigators are equally ridiculous. A proffesional INVESTIGATION with DoJ teeth demands the ability to ask serious questions; questions with consequences. Isn't it interesting that no such investigation is allowed into arguably the most traumatic event in our nations history? Isn't it equally interesting that you completely ignore the point that NOT ONE PERSON has been held responsible for 3000 deaths?

If we don't know and we haven't had an investigation, then how can you possibly know that I'm being had?

If there was a full open investigation would you accept it if they came to the exact same conclusions? Really? I suspect that it wouldn't daunt many conspiracy theorists, perhaps you're one of the few.

Also, I didn't ask for a smoking gun, if by smoking gun you mean iron-clad proof. I asked for evidence that unambiguously supports government complicity.

What you think I am ignoring is of little consequence. If you could prove your case you would provide such evidence rather than make personal judgements.

"Also, I didn't ask for a smoking gun, if by smoking gun you mean iron-clad proof. I asked for evidence that unambiguously supports government complicity."

?????????What's the difference????????

...without being proof. Circumstantial evidence can point unambiguously to a government conspiracy without being absolute proof. Such evidence may ultimately prove misleading but at least it's a somewhat reasonable basis for a belief. For example, a stand down order of the military has been touted as evidence of governmental complicity. However, it is at least as likely that such an order could be issued through confusion, ineptitude, or misunderstanding, and probably more likely.

As an aside: Perhaps a sufficient level of ineptitude shall be indistinguishable from a conpiracy. :)

Does that help?

Florida's "Felonious" Voter Rolls: They Knew It or They Blew It.
9/11: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Flight 93: They Knew it or They Blew It.
The Bin Laden Family's 9/12-9/14 Exit Flights: They Knew It or They Blew It.
The WTC Asbestos/Heavy Metal Cover Up: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Uncaught Anthrax Murderer: They Knew It or They Blew It.
The Patriot Act: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Total Information Awareness: They Knew It or They Blew It.
The CAPPS II Terrorist-Helping "No Fly" List: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Poindexter's Assassination "Futures" Market: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Fraud-o-Matic Voting Machines: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Osama's Tora Bora Escape: They Knew It or They Blew It.
US & Iraqi Depleted Uranium Exposure: They Knew it or They Blew it.
Iraqi WMDs: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Cheney's Millions in Halliburton Stock Options: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Poppy Bush's Carlyle Group War Profiteering: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Outing CIA Agent Valerie Plame: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Gutting the Freedom of Information Act: They Knew It or They Blew It.
The 9/11 Commission: They Knew It or They Blew It.
The UN Bombing: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Medicare PharmCorp Plundering: They Knew It or They Blew It.
US's Biggest Export = Jobs: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Enron (& other corporate insider) Scams: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Hedge/Mutual Fund Scams: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Energy Policy Written By Enron, et al: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Record Federal Government Growth: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Homeland Security Pork Barrel: They Knew It or They Blew It
False Employment Data: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Enemy Combatant Legal Limbo: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Cutting Veterans Benefits: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Destoying Reservists' Morale and Retainment Percentage: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Iraqi Prison Abuses: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Reclassification of Most of Reagan's & Bush I's Papers (which had been scheduled to be released): They Knew It or They Blew It.
Refusal To Release Documents to Congress, Courts or 9/11 Commission: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Wildly Misunderestimated Iraq War & Medicare Bill Costs: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Four Rounds of Surplus then Budget Busting Tax Breaks For Rich People & Corporations: They Knew It or They Blew It.
Countless Bullshit Terra Alerts: They Knew It or They Blew It.


Just how often are you willing to accept limitless incompetence as an excuse without getting just a tad suspicious?


Florida White Collar Vote Counting Riot: They staged it.
Supreme Court Decision: Supremely Bad Law
Wellstone's Crash: Pilot incapacitation makes more sense than pilot incompetence
The "Dirty Bomber" vs. 9/11 Family CSPAN Misdirection: They staged it.
The California "Energy Crisis": They staged, gamed, bilked amd Arnied it.
Saddam Statue Celebration: They staged it.
Mission Accomplished: They staged it.
The Gropinator Recall: They staged it.
The Plastic Turkey Thanksgiving Drop: They staged it.

Once again, I ask, why anyone should believe anything these guys say?

a single bullet killed John Kennedy? After reading several of your posts I think you need a glass bellybutton to see because your head seems to be buried deep in your ass!
http://www.jmasland.com

Al Qaeda or Bin Laden were responsible for 9-11. You have been told that by the media over and over and over. You have been given no evidence whatsoever, so your statement that "there is plenty of evidence that AlQaeda is responsible" is complete and utter nonsense.

Let me take you back to the threats against the Taliban. The US said, "turn over Bin Laden or we will bomb the fuck out of you." The Taliban responded as any sovereign would have to respond. They said, "show us some evidence that Bin Laden was involved, and we will give him to you." Simple enough, and quite resonable, don't you think?

Guess what. The only evidence we gave them was Moabs and carpet bombing. Not once did we present any evidence that Bin Laden did it.

As for your remark that Bin Laden "semi-admitted it", I presume you are talking about that fake videotape in which the real Bin Laden is no where to be seen.

Ask yourself why our government would knowingly present a fake Bin Laden videotape to the public?

Why don't you present to us all the evidence you know of that Bin Laden was responsible for 9-11? Good luck trying to find it.

"At the arraignment on the Second Superseding Indictment, Mr. Moussaoui admitted that he was a member of al Queda. (Transcript of Hearing on July 18, 2002, p. 26-27.) He stated that he had pledged “bayat” to Osama Bin Laden. (Id. at 27.) He stated that he was a participant in an ongoing conspiracy “who have started around 1995 . . . who intend to commit a terrorist act.” (Id. at 9-10, 12.) Though he admitted that he had knowledge about 9/11..."
http://notablecases.vaed.uscourts.gov/1:01-cr-00455/docs/66908/1.pdf

Mr. Moussaoui stated under oath that he knew about the 9/11 attacks prior to their occurence.

And when is the man going to get his trial, anyway?

This "evidence" (aka fourth generation hearsay) you have presented is so ridiculously flimsy I'm not sure whether to laugh at your argumentative ability or cry for my moronic country.

And I think I was right. I have already linked and synopsized what Moussaoui said, so that's been answered.

When he goes to trial is of no importance to the issue under discussion.

What does require an answer is the silly contention that it is fourth hand hearsay. It is sworn testimony. Oh...I know! The BFEE got in there and changed it on the off chance that I might be looking for it, right? lol

Do you dismiss all sworn confessions or just those that are inconvenient to your assertions?

What?

What words came out of his mouth?

I really want to know. Please help me find Moussaoui's "sworn testimony."

What?

Please explain after considering he is willing to let 800 plus get killed in a resource grab with untold thousands more casualties.

Our DU Brother bobthedrummer has:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=199853



"Ah'm always on de alert for trouble."

What, exactly?

on edit: It seems that you are unwilling to entertain any thoughts about any theory along these lines absent clear and convincing evidence in your posession. Is this not the same as claiming that until the government DOES murder its own citizens, and you personally see hard evidence of that fact, that you will deny any theory of such an occurrence has any merit whatsoever?

Wow... a tyrant couldn't ask for more!

... where the African American men were exposed to syphillis and WATCHED for decades, as their bodies atrophied and minds decayed.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762136.html

The poster also seems to have missed out on the radiation experiments, the ones in which adults and CHILDREN were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, just to see what would happen.

http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/

don't know what else to call it... besides fodder for tyrants.

and that most of the sensible users simply don't bother posting in inane threads like this one.

Remember, Smirko's the one who spent AUGUST 2001 in Crawford, the hottest and muggiest place on earth to vacation. It's also a pretty safe distance from the danger zone. While there, he WAS briefed about Al Qaeda hijacking airliners to attack targets in the US. Remember?



BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, rastignac5. Where ya been?

is a no no. I dont trust or like people who dont question.

"I don't believe that even this Administration will bomb its own citizens for political purposes."

and she was just one uppity hippy

It seems it's only terrorism when an enemy of the state does it. It's OK for our "friends" to bomb us, however. More hypocricy from the reich...

George H.W. Bush, the CIA & a Case of State Terrorism

By Robert Parry

In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

SNIP...

Nevertheless, the CIA – then under CIA director George H.W. Bush – leaked for public consumption an assessment clearing the Chilean government’s feared intelligence service, DINA, which was then run by Contreras.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/092300a.html

I would not put anything past the neocons controlling our government and neither should you. Nothing is impossible with these thugs. Think Iran/Contra and all the drug smuggling.

This is the guy Ollie the bucktoothed traitor craps his shorts over.

CONTRA-INTELLIGENCE
ON OLIVER L. NORTH

By Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd

Former Federal Drug Agent and Author of:
Powderburns- Cocaine, Contras & the Drug War

posted at DrugWar.com
May 12, 2004

"Armed speedboats and a helicopter launched from a CIA 'mother ship' attacked Nicaragua's Pacific port, Puerto Sandino, on a moonless New Year's night in 1984. A week later, the speedboats returned to mine the oil terminal. Over the next three months, they laid more than 30 mines in Puerto Sandino and in the harbors at Corinto and El Bluff. In air and sea raids on costal positions, Americans flew-and fired from-an armed helicopter that accompanied the U.S. financed Latino force, while a CIA plane provided sophisticated reconnaissance guidance for the nighttime attacks. The operation, outlined in a classified CIA document, marked the peak of U.S. involvement in the four-year guerrilla war in Nicaragua. The most celebrated attack, by armed speedboats, came Oct. 11, 1983, against oil facilities at Corinto. Three days later, Latino frogmen sabotaged an underwater pipeline at Puerto Sandino. The message wasn't lost on Exxon, Esso unit, and the international giant informed the Sandinista government that it would no longer provide tankers for transporting oil to Nicaragua."
The Wall Street Journal-March 6, 1985

---

Top Secret-
Office of
Independent Counsel
File # IC-600-1

Record of FBI Agent Michael S. Foster's interview with Walter L. Grasheim
Date of Transcription: January 3, 1991

"Grasheim came up with the idea to prepare a military raid on an airport in Nicaragua, using Tamarindo as a staging base. Grasheim told General Gorman this and then right after, Rodriguez came to see Grasheim without warning and asked to talk about the idea…Rodriguez told Grasheim that he was talking to the White House and the NSC…"

On September 10, 1985, NORTH wrote in his notebook:
"…Introduced by Wally Gresheim/Litton Calero/Bermudez visit to Ilopango to estab."

December 21, 1982, the first Boland Amendment became law. "None of the funds provided in this Act may be used by the CIA or the Dept. of Defense to furnish military equipment, military training or advice, or other support for military activities, to any group or individual…for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua. This act went into effect until Oct. 3, 1984, when it was superseded by a stronger prohibition known as "Boland II."

CONTINUED...

THIS IS A HELL OF A WEBSITE:

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonorthmay1104.shtm

DU, we need to spread the word about former DEA Agent Castillo. This guy testifies, and it's all over the BFEE. Let's protect him by spreading the word about who he is and what he knows. He's a patriot and a hero.

And have been rendered SIMPLY STUPID. :-(

would destroy bushco. if it happens, they won't be behind it.

in more detail here

It gives me several other useful and appreciated perspectives. I, too, hope these turds of the BFEE aren't so stupid. They've let me down at every turn, however. Perhaps if we stay vigilant, they won't play their murderous cards. Then, again...

smell the palpable, ghastly odor of burning human flesh


WOULD YOU HAVE HELPED?


Any of us who've read about that horrific era are terrified by the thought of it, the photographs, even by meeting people who lived through it. Our hearts break. We cannot possibly comprehend. How can we say, "We're sorry"? It is not enough.

But of what are we most afraid? I personally think what torments us most about that piece of charred history is our not really knowing how we'd have reacted had we been non-Jewish Germans living in Deutschland at that time. Oh, many of us loudly insist we'd have taken a stand, protested, put a stop to the slaughter of millions. In fact many did try, some were successful, but many ended paying the ultimate price for their heroism.

We are left wondering if we really would have had the courage to stand up to the black, brutal violence of Nazism, if we would have had the bravery to save even one life; Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, mentally or physically handicapped, or any marked for extermination in order that the so-called Aryan race be kept pure. Would we? Would you? Would I?

I've pondered on this problem a great deal over the years. I was alive, happy and thriving back in the 1930s and 40s while millions were dying in ways so horrible most of us cannot touch our minds to the thought of it for fear it will burn into the very core of our psyches. Children like me were being ripped to pieces. Who knew? Did you? Did we? Did I?

I wonder if I'd been a parent in Germany with a family I loved and knew what was happening, and yet because a horrible war was exploding all around me, would I have had the courage to scream "Stop!!"? Would I have taken the terrible chance that my family would be piled amongst the slaughtered because of my heroics? If I lived near a crematorium and could smell the palpable, ghastly odor of burning human flesh, would I have called a meeting of my neighbors, demanding to know what that was? Would I, like so many did, have spent my life protesting, "But we just didn't know!" Would I have put my beloved family at risk to save complete strangers?

more
http://www.vansavage.com/columns/holocaust.shtml

These are the same folks who make up the BFEE.

DUers who think the people who command the permanent government are benign:

CIA's Worst-Kept Secret

By Martin A. Lee
May 16, 2001

EXCERPT...

"The real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals, many of whom were able to escape justice because the East and West became so rapidly focused after the war on challenging each other," says Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations and America's chief Nazi hunter.

SNIP...

Many Nazi criminals "received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western spy agencies considered them useful assets in the Cold War," the IWG team stated after releasing 18,000 pages of redacted CIA material. (More installments are pending.)

These are "not just dry historical documents," insists former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the panel that examined the CIA files. As far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA papers raise critical questions about American foreign policy and the origins of the Cold War.

The decision to recruit Nazi operatives had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet relations and set the stage for Washington's tolerance of human rights' abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-Communism. With that fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA interventions around the world.

The Gehlen Org

The key figure on the German side of the CIA-Nazi tryst was General Reinhard Gehlen, who had served as Adolf Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy. During World War II, Gehlen oversaw all German military-intelligence operations in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

CONTINUED NAZI CRIMINALITY...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/051601a.html

And the genocide-in-progress in Iraq.

How do you committ genocide in the modern age without too much outrage, without most people noticing?

Radiate the entire area with DU, sterilize the entire population of Arabs.

Don't think they wouldn't do it.

..and so far all that supports the "our government bombed us!" claims is suspicion, speculation, innuendo and an attempt to jam square-peg evidence into a round hole theory. The evidence that we do have about 9/11 I believe more accurately supports the depraved indifference of the administration - they failed to take terror threats seirously, becuase they didn't care. I feel like I can PROVE depraved indifference with the evidence in hand, and I still do feel like I can prove MIHOP. I'm only interested in what I can prove, not what you speculatively believe.

So we'll keep looking, seeking, questioning, studying the facts, etc.

Nor does seemslikeadream or me or most any other DUer claim to know all the facts or just what role the government did play on 9-11. And I don't read where seemslike a dream nor most others on this thread have tried to jam square-peg evidence into round-hole theories. We're just sharing ideas and information.

Nevertheless, what should be clear, based on the evidence at hand and alluded to in this thread, is the highest level of the executive branch was receiving information from the day they "took" office that the threat from Al Quaeda was real. Yet, they did nothing to stop Al Qaeda.

Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke stated they made the threat from Al Qaeda crystal clear to Condescenda Rice and the incoming team. The incoming team even received warnings from the FBI about the terrorists at flights schools from Arizona to Minnesota to Florida and they didn't do squat.

Clarke said if he had received Crowley's memo, he might have been able to stop 9-11. Clarke called the late FBI counterterror expert John O'Neill a best friend, and if O'Neil knew about it, he didn't pass it on and it was his job to tell Clarke what he knew.

So the issue isn't why didn't they stop, or is it MIHOP or LIHOP. The question is how did the BFEE (the string pullers of the US government, for all intents and purposes) benefit from 9-11? My OPINION is 9-11 was the BFEE's Reichstagfeuer. That's a logical thesis based on the evidence.

rather than a logical thesis. But I agree with much of what you said just the same.

More info on P2 here (very interesting info on the Nazis and CIA involvement)

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/project_paperclip.htm


second -- there is a well known operation in Italy after WWII that had an unusual name which I cannot remember which essentially armed fascists for alleged anit-communist covert activities: it was something like "Gladio" or some Italian term related to fascism.

anyone remember this? It ties in and more should know about it.

Found with a simple google - but I thought the name was wrong

check it out: very scary

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

Operation Gladio

© 1997 David Guyatt
All Rights Reserved - Reprinted With Permission

When on the morning of 17 June 1982, the body of Roberto Calvi was found hanging beneath London's Blackfriars bridge, it was to speed a process that prised open a series of events spanning four decades. The circumstances of Calvi's death led knowledgeable observers to darkly whisper of a Masonic ritual slaying. With his hands tied behind his back and a brick thrust into his coat pocket, Calvi had been strangled, apparently by the rope that had been noosed around his neck. Moreover, the location itself was believed to be symbolic. Blackfriars bridge sits astride the border that connects the Masonically named "Square Mile" of the City of London to the rest of the Capital city.

The initial inquest into his death returned a verdict of suicide. Appealing against what they believed to be prejudice on the part of the Coroner - and suspicious of the Masonic affiliations of the City police - Calvi's family called for a second, more thorough inquest, which belatedly returned an open verdict. Meanwhile, Banco Ambrosiano, Calvi's massive, privately-owned bank, collapsed on the news of his death, revealing a huge "black hole" in the balance sheet amounting to $1.3 billion. A large proportion of the missing money was later located in accounts owned by the Vatican bank. The connections that unfolded in the wake of the Calvi "affair" were to link Masons with Mafiosi, Monks with Murder and Spies with wanted Nazi war criminals.

World War Two had barely ground to a final halt when, in 1947, Allied strategists set about planning for World War Three. Even as British and US intelligence officials scoured Europe seeking to apprehend Nazi's wanted on war crimes charges, other more secretive US and British intelligence units were actively engaged in helping those same Nazi's to escape.

Europe's "Stay Behind" Units

Italy was not alone in having covert "stay behind" units in operation. The operation encompassed all of western Europe. In France the unit was called "Glaive" - again named after a Gladiatorial sword. Austria's unit was named "Schwert," also meaning sword. In Turkey the unit was named "Red Sheepskin" and in Greece "Sheepskin." Sweden's unit was called "Sveaborg." In Switzerland it went by the title P26. Other units in Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and Holland remain unnamed. Not least, the United Kingdom's unit was simply known as "Stay Behind."

The means of escape were the Vatican run "Ratlines." Operated with the knowledge and blessing of highly placed US and British government officials, the Ratlines guided 30,000 wanted Nazi's to sanctuary. Safe haven locations included the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the favourite bolt hole of them all: South America.

CONTINUED...

http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/gladio.html

appreciate it

L.L. Lemnitzer Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (13 March 1962) - Natl. Security Agcy Archives, George Washington Univ.
Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf (link still good, though slow - 15 pages, 777k).

"A series of well-coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give the appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces."

Suggestions included:"(6) Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage)." and "We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba."
and most pertinently:
"Hijacking attempts against civil air and surface craft should appear to continue as harrassing measures condoned by the government of Cuba."

End quote.

See also articles from the Baltimore Sun (I have a link which is now dead - it was saved as of 28 Sep 01, and may have been from 24 Apr 01)
and ABC (link still good).

---

And you can find plenty on the Bologna bombing carried out by Reagan's friend as part of the CIA's "Strategy of Tension" (iirc) for Europe.

Last week Russia jailed an ex-KGB agent who got too close to the agency's involvement in the Sept. 1999 bombings blamed on Chechens, which brought Putin to power.
See

• Chicago Tribune "Verdict near on sleuth who talked too much" 18 May 04, sec. 1, p4 by Alex Rodriguez


• Chicago Tribune "Russia imprisons ex-intelligence agent for 4 years" 20 May 04, Chicago Tribune, sec. 1, p3 by Alex Rodriguez

You may still be able to get the 20 May story online: I think the Trib only holds them out there for a week, though the 18 May story has more details.

It's not a conspiracy theory anymore folks: governments commit terrorism.

The Joint Chiefs were fixated on Cuba.
Members of Congress were fixated on Cuba.
Members of the Cabinet were fixated on Cuba.
The right-wing was fixated on Cuba.
Nixon was fixated on Cuba.

About the only one who wasn't, was John F. Kennedy.

JFK said Cuba wasn't worth starting World War III over. He said so during the cursed Bay of Pigs fiasco and he said the same during the Missiles of October stand-off.

BTW: When JFK was assassinated, who did the US Government start to blame for the murder? Cuba!


ON THE ORIGINS OF THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK

James H. Fetzer

(Editor's Note: Perhaps without appreciating the importance of his discoveries for understanding the origins of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy, James Bamford's BODY OF SECRETS (2001) reveals the preoccupation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, especially its chairman, Lyman Lemnitzer, with invading Cuba and removing Castro, an approach to which President Kennedy proved an obstacle.)

James Bamford's BODY OF SECRETS (2001) appears to clarify and illuminate the origins of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Take a good look at pages 78 (bottom) to 91 (top), which discusses President Eisenhower's preoccupation with Cuba and his suggestion that, if no actual pretext for an attack were available, then a pretext (a phony event) might be created that could be used to justify an invasion of the island. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Lyman Lemnitzer, took this message to heart and became obsessed with the Communist threat and the destruction of Castro. Everyone who cares about our country needs to understand this development. It looks like a large piece of a very complex puzzle.

A report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to the President warned of the major problem with right-wing extremism running through the military. "Among the key targets of the extremists, the committee said, was the Kennedy administration's domestic social program, which many ultraconservatives accused of being communistic. The 'thesis of the nature of the Communist threat', the report warned, 'often is developed by equating social legislation with socialism, and the latter with Communism . . .

" . . . much of the administration's domestic legislative program, including continuation of the graduated income tax, expansion of social security (particularly medical care under social security), Federal aid to education, etc., under this philosophy would be characterized as steps toward Communism'. Thus, 'This view of the Communist menace renders foreign aid, cultural exchanges, disarmament negotiations, and other international programs as extremely wasteful if not actually subversive'."

He and Air Force General Edward Lansdale viewed Operation Mongoose, set up to take out Castro, as "a golden opportunity" for the military to show that it could succeed where the CIA (at the Bay of Pigs) had failed. Lemnitzer "was raging at the new and youthful Kennedy White House. He felt out of place and out of time in a culture that seemed suddenly to have turned its back on military traditions. Almost immediately he became, in the clinical sense, paranoid; he began secretly expressing his worries to other senior officers . . . "Lemnitzer had no respect for the civilians he reported to. He believed they interfered with the proper role of the military. The 'civilian' hierarchy was crippled not only by inexperience', he would later say, 'but also by arrogance arisnig from failure to recognize its own limitations. . . . The problem was simply that the civilians would not accept military judgments.'

CONTINUED...

http://www.assassinationresearch.com/articles/bodyofsecrets.htm

Here is another topic on this:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1309661#1309719


http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/15/lee2515.html
........Berlusconi's name was found on a list of P-2 initiates after a 1981 police raid in Tuscany. Of the 963 names on the P-2 roster, most were prominent Italians. The list also featured several dubious characters from Argentina, including: Gen. Juan Peron, the former president; Jose Lopez Rega, head of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, a notorious death squad; and Adm. Emilio Massera, a member of the military junta responsible for the disappearance of 30,000 people during the "dirty war" of the '70s and early '80s.
Convicted of making false statements about his P-2 membership, Berlusconi managed to escape unscathed from the scandal thanks largely to Socialist Party chief Bettino Craxi, who became Italy's prime minister in the mid-'80s. Craxi was the best man at Berlusconi's second wedding, and both men were adept at exploiting the lucrative system of political patronage and illicit pay-offs that flourished in postwar Italy. Craxi was instrumental in thwarting early attempts to rein in Berlusconi's media outlets, and Berlusconi, in turn, actively promoted Craxi on his TV stations.
During this period, Craxi and other right-wing political leaders in Italy knew they could count on unflinching support from Washington, which propped up a political order that was riddled with corruption in an all-out effort to keep the sizable Italian Communist Party from gaining power. But when the Cold War ended, so did the Communist threat, and the entire political edifice in Italy crumbled overnight........

The NAZIs first tried out their trick war machine on human beings on behalf of the Spanish right-wing during the Civil War in Spain. Who started that war? The right-wing bastards led by Gen. Francisco Franco. They killed millions of their fellow Spaniards, beginning with the Republicans -- those who believed in elected government. When the socialists won at the ballot box, Franco moved. He got help from his anti-communist buddy, Hitler.



Remind you of anyone?

The 9-11 cover up has worked. The truth has been buried.
Nobody cares. Even when the next terrorist attack enables BushCo to institute martial law, call off the elections, and make Patriot Act II operational, I'm afraid too many Americans have been so brainwashed by the Right Wing Propaganda Machine that the majority will go along with the program.

The re-education camps await us lefties. Let's hope they don't have "Chuckles" Graner and "Wicked Lyndie" England as the trustees.

Until then, the only way they'll get me in a concentration camp is me frogmarching Smirk and Sneer to their final home, where they will spend the rest of their natural days making little rocks out of big ones, and when they're broken-down sufficiently, license plates.



You know I want all this available online 24/7. Superprison TV.

PS: If we lose. Great. I'll try to tunnel out with ya. It'd be an honor, RBHam!

Thanks for bringing up P2, Octafish. It only sounds like a nightmare. It's real. I posted this a few months ago:


You know Michael Ledeen: arguably Washington's most influential neoconservative. Resident scholar of the senior neocon think tank, the American Enterprise Institute; regarded by keepers of the official story as one of the world's leading authorities on intelligence, counter-intelligence and international affairs. Ledeen is one of the leading champions of the "War on Terror."

Have you heard of Italy's "Strategy of Tension"? It was a campaign of false-flag terrorism in the late 1970s, waged by fascist groups which enjoyed CIA sponsorship - the Gladio Brigades and Licio Gelli's P2 Lodge - with aid of the Mafia and the connivance of elements of the Italian state. Its purpose was to discredit the increasingly popular Communist Party, and to ensure it would not take power, by staging terrorist acts in the name of the Left. The campaign culminated in the Bologna train station bombing of 1980.

Now, do you know where Michael Ledeen was during the Strategy of Tension, and what he was doing, and with whom he was consorting?

"...terrorism has been Ledeen's bread and butter since at least the late 1970s, when he consulted for Italian military intelligence."
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8249

From Asia Times:

"Ledeen's right-wing Italian connections - including alleged ties to the P2 Masonic Lodge that rocked Italy in the early 1980s - have long been a source of speculation and intrigue, but he returned to Washington in 1981 as "anti-terrorism" advisor to the new secretary of state, Al Haig.

"Over the next several years, Ledeen used his position as consultant to Haig, the Pentagon and the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan to boost the notion of a global terrorist conspiracy based in the Kremlin, whose KGB pulled the strings of all of the world's key terrorist groups, especially in the Middle East."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF26Ak03.html

"In 1980 he entered into a collaboration with Francesco Pazienza, an agent of the Italian secret service (SISMI) and a member of Rome's extreme right-wing Masonic Lodge, P2 (Propaganda Due), headed by the fascist Licio Gelli. In an Italian criminal court in 1985, Pazienza was judged guilty of political manipulation, forgery, and the protection of criminals and terrorists, among other offenses. Indeed, according to the findings of the court, Pazienza falsified information about the Bologna bombing in order to divert attention away from the real (right-wing) terrorists who had staged the attack."
(excerpt from Herman/O'Sullivan's The "Terrorism" Industry, 1989, quoted http://billmon.org/archives/000653.html ).

From Barbara Honegger's October Surprise, more on Ledeen and P2:

"When the Italian police raided (P2 Lodge founder) Gelli's home in March 1981, it was Michael Ledeen who, at the instigation of Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, offered to buy the list of 953 P2 members in an apparent attempt to keep it from becoming public. Henry Kissinger had also reportedly sent Ledeen to Italy to try to squash an investigation into his and Haig's involvement in the founding of P2.

"On the morning of August 2, 1980, a massive bomb since linked to Gelli...exploded in the waiting room of the central train station in Bologna, killing 81 people and injuring 200 others. General Santorito, the chief of Italy's military intelligence agency, SISMI, who was also reportedly a member of P2, testified in the wake of the bombing that it had been planned by the British-Swiss-American Montecarlo Comite, P2's "sister" organization based in Monaco. When P2 had come under increasing scrutiny in 1979, grandmaster Licio Gelli had reportedly made his base of operations the Montecarlo Comite.... Not surprisingly, reported members of the Montecarlo Comite are Gelli, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Michael Ledeen."

Now, here are Ledeen's own words, on a leadership trait he admires (from his book, Universal Fascism):

"In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging... we are rotten.... It’s true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led."
http://www.indymedia.ch/fr/2004/01/17406.shtml

And back to Italy, with his thoughts on the fascist era:

"...fascism nevertheless constituted a political revolution in Italy. For the first time, there was an attempt to mobilize the masses and to involve them in the political life of the country."

And on Mussolini himself:

"He never had enough confidence in the Italian people to permit them a genuine participation in fascism."

A translation of an Italian website,

"One of the most dangerous of these 'bad teachers' is Michael Ledeen, promoter of the the idea of 'universal fascism'. These days he does not stop threatening war against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, and has evidently been chosen once more by the establishment to manipulate institutions and threaten those who oppose his dangerous and wicked madness. On the other hand, Ledeen has a long history of interference in Italy's strategic choices. During the Moro case he was among those "most suspected" of having misled the enquiries, with the collaboration of the "bretheren" of the P2. It was wondered and it is still wondered why the Italian magistrates do not carry out adequate enquiries about him and his work".
http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/january03_index.php?l=36%82%22...

In the wake of Madrid, many are remembering the Bologna bombing, and seeing striking similarities. (See, for instance, this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic... ) Though the Madrid bombing, against expectation, drove enough of the public towards the left, it does well to remember, in the hysteria of the "war on terror," that false-flag operations are a proven strategy to manipulate opinion, and that one of the ablest manipulators is Michael Ledeen.

Some more links for the "Strategy of Tension":
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/gladio.htm
http://www.copi.com/articles/guyatt/gladio.html
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/stories/gladio.htm

Ugh. What a mighty turd of the BFEE he is.

Great post, Minstrelito! Thank YOU for remembering. For those new to the subject, a great overview:

Iran: First it was ‘October Surprise’ — now it’s No Surprise

William Bowles (20/06/03)

History is a great teacher but often, you’ve got to dig deep to find out what’s really going on and as the US propaganda machine gets into gear for ‘regime change’ in Iran, it’s already obvious that unlike the Iraqi invasion, the technique of the Big Lie is not working the way the White House would like it to. The coming Iran ‘adventure’, as with earlier essays I’ve penned, was triggered by names that I’ve had the dubyaous pleasure of typing before, most notably Michael Ledeen, doyen of the ultra-right, whose role on Iran-Contra and the October Surprise of the late 70s and eighties, was he hoped, lost in the mist of time, especially to our current, historically-challenged populace. As with DNA testing, it’s now possible to exhume events long thought dead, with the hope that this time round, we can get a conviction.

Our cast of characters

There are three major players in the current and evolving story of the Middle East; the US, Israel and Iran. There are also a number of ‘bit part’s’ and walk-ons scattered throughout the story. The connections go back a long way, in fact back to when the Shah Pavlevi was the US’s main man in Iran. In order to bring the story up-to-date, it’s necessary to unpack the events leading up to the present, how they interact and the role of the Bush ‘dynasty’ in the entire, sordid story. Over almost twenty years, the same names appear, occupying different roles but always with the same objective, furthering US strategic and economic aims.

It’s also a complicated story that requires an understanding of broader US and Israeli strategic objectives, as well as a recognition that many people, especially Americans, may find it difficult to swallow the fact that the leaders of the US were and are, quite prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own citizens, subvert the Constitution, break international laws, engage in acts that are in direct contradiction of its own publicly stated policies as well as US domestic laws including, assassinations, illegal trafficking in drugs, illegal sales of weapons, money laundering, suppression of evidence and misleading and lying to Congress in order to achieve its goals. The following account is well documented and can be backed up with the facts. None of the names have been changed to protect the guilty.

The Contra War

The story starts with the Reagan government’s illegal war against Nicaragua and when the US Congress passed a law (the Boland Amendment) prohibiting the sale of arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. In the words of Secretary of State George Shultz, at a June 1984 meeting where "third country" funding was proposed, "I would like to get money for the contras also, but ... Jim Baker said that if we go out and try to get money from third countries, it is an impeachable offense." Ollie North's notes of a June 25, 1984 meeting in the White House revealed that then-Chief of Staff James Baker considered such a clear attempt to circumvent the Boland Amendment as an impeachable offense. Reagan himself ordered third country aid kept secret because, if the story came out, "we'll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House." In order to circumvent this law, it was necessary to set up a covert network with which to supply the Contras, a network which needed a lot of cash in order to carry out its mission.

CONTINUED CRIMINALITY...

http://www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-040.html

Thanks, seemslikeadream, octafish and others. This reading should keep me busy for a while. Ten years ago you could inform a few thousand people. Now you can inform millions, maybe even tens of millions.

is good! :kick:

stay in office....he knows his days are numbered and is at his MOST dangerous imho.....desperate paople do desperate things!

he could cancel the elections and get his 4 more wars that way :scared:

Here's what the good folks at PNACinfo.com have to say about what's happening. They, like all good DUers and all good people, don't want the end of the world. -- Octafish

From the link below:


How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East?

Good question.

The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
The New York Times > Week in Review

By JOHN TIERNEY

Published: May 16, 2004

WASHINGTON — Not long ago, the word "triumphalist" was being applied to the neoconservatives and other intellectuals who championed the war in Iraq. Now the buzzwords are "depressed," "angst-ridden" and "going wobbly."

After the setbacks in Falluja and Najaf, followed by the prisoner abuse scandal, hawks are glumly trying to reconcile the reality in Iraq with the predictions they made before the war. A few have already given up on the idea of a stable democracy in Iraq, and many are predicting failure unless there's a dramatic change in policy - a new date for elections, a new secretary of defense, a new exit strategy.

Most blame the administration for botching the mission, and some are also questioning their own judgment. How, they wonder, did so many conservatives, who normally don't trust their government to run a public school down the street, come to believe that federal bureaucrats could transform an entire nation in the alien culture of the Middle East? To these self-doubting hawks, the conservatives now blaming American officials for Iraq's problems are reminiscent of the leftists who kept blaming incompetents in the Kremlin for the failure of Communism.

Some hawks are staying the course. Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, is still defended by The Wall Street Journal editorial page and columnists like Charles Krauthammer, of The Washington Post, and William Safire, of The New York Times, who has dismissed the idea of speeding the transition as "cut and walk fast." Rush Limbaugh has accused liberal journalists of overreacting to the prison scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.pnac.info/

ought to be a required part of EVERY High school curriculum. If there EVER was proof that citizens must question their government and its motives this is it. To think I considered myself fairly informed about our history, but I had never heard of this before I came here. No wonder that don't teach about this in school.

is a GOOD thing! :kick:

John F. Kennedy was proud to be a Liberal Democrat who was leading this nation to a better world.

The war party, or military-industrial complex, wanted war with the Soviet Union.

The War Party tried to have war over the Bay of Pigs; Kennedy said, "No. They tried to have war over the Cuban Missile Crisis; Kennedy said, "No.


The War Party tried to have war in southeast Asia; Kennedy said, "No."

The War Party presented Kennedy with a plan that required the US Government kill Americans and make it look like Cuba did it to make war with the Soviet Union; Kennedy said, "No."

After Kennedy was dead, the War Party made out like Lee Harvey Oswald did it.

And who was Oswald working for? According to the CIA, FBI and the Warren Commission - - Cuba.

PS: Vielen vielen dank für der Fußtritt , Karenina. My grandfather used to say: "An education is the only cure for poverty."

ANTHRAX

Who says our government wouldn't attack the people

... who was targeted for attack published this interestig shot:



The BFEE or someone actking in their behalf seems to have made an example of him. Here's a bit on that:

Rumor Mill News Reading Room Archive

SOME ANTHRAX-BUSH-CIA LINKS

Posted By: Phoenix
Date: Friday, 12 October 2001, 1:57 p.m.

CIA CONNECTIONS TO AMERICAN MEDIA, INC. LOCATION OF ANTHRAX ATTACK by BRASSCHECK

October 7, 2001

Alleged CIA front hit by Anthrax in FL

FACTS:

1. The man who died of Anthrax last week was a photo editor for the Sun, a tabloid.

2. A fellow employee there has been recently diagnosed with Anthrax as well

3. Inhaled Anthrax, the type these men have contracted, is exceedingly rare (only 18 cases in the US in the last 100 years)

4. Anthrax spores have been found in their workplace. The building which houses the Sun, the Globe and the National Enquirer has been closed as a result.

5. American Media Inc, the owner of the Sun etc., has connections to the US Central Intelligence Agency.

6. Boca Raton, the home of the Sun, is also the location of a plant owned by Product Ingredient Technologies, a company with links to the Bush Sr. White House that manufactured chemical warfare agents that were exported to Iraq with US government approval in the late 1980s.

Source: "Bringing the War Home" by William Thomas pp. 226-233

Under that same program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the US Army's high security
germ warfare labs.Ibid. pp. 234 - 235

CONTINUED...

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=12999

Guatemala:
Exhuming the Past


The skeletal remains of Francisco's brother, ready to be photographed by FAFG before they are shipped to the laboratory for examination.
http://www.elandar.com/Index_sections.html#sections