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Title: FBI Director Nominee Mueller Helped FBI and DOJ Cover Up Evidence on Waco, Ruby Ridge, OKC Bombing
Source: Washington Times / Patrick B. Briley
URL Source: http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/690785/posts
Published: Aug 1, 2001
Author: Patrick Downes and Patrick B. Briley
Post Date: 2017-06-13 00:53:32 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: DRAIN, THE, SWAMP, NOW
Views: 269
Comments: 7

FBI Director Nominee Mueller Helped FBI and DOJ Cover Up Evidence on Waco, Ruby Ridge, OKC Bombing

The Washington Times
By Patrick Downes and Patrick Briley
August 1, 2001

This article presents, analyzes and adds important new information about a recent letter to the editor of the Washington Times concerning the nominee for FBI Director, Robert Mueller. The letter was published on page A-11 of the Times on July 28, 2001 and was written by Patrick Downes of Boston. His letter was entitled “FBI Appointment Needs More Investigation”. While Downes letter is to the editor, it provides valuable information about Mueller’s previous role in DOJ collusion to help facilitate FBI and DOJ corruption in mishandling evidence in important cases.

The text of the letter is first reproduced and then my new information and analysis follows after the letter text. Downes’ letter and my information and analysis provide important insights into the story behind Mueller’s and Attorney General Ashcroft’s handling of the corruption at DOJ and FBI concerning Waco, Ruby Ridge and the OKC bombing.

TEXT OF DOWNES’ LETTER:

President Bush’s nomination of Robert S. Mueller III to become the director of the FBI should have raised a few more eyebrows than it did.

Mr. Mueller’s record as a prosecutor should bring into question his ability and willingness to correct some of the long-standing problems facing the FBI. In particular, Mr. Mueller’s record as a prosecutor is not that of someone who has demanded that government be more open and accountable and that it practice fair disclosure of evidence weighed against defendants.

While serving in the northern district of California, ,Mr. Mueller instituted a policy known as a “Brady waiver” that institutes and protects the federal government from a defendant’s due-process guarantee as afforded by the U.S. Constitution.

The waiver requires defendants who plead guilty to a crime to forgo a defendant’s constitutional right to present evidence of their evidence at a later date. Furthermore, the waiver would be enforceable even if it were established that the government withheld evidence in its possession before, during or after a trial that indicated a defendant is innocent of the charges brought against him or her.

At WACO, RUBY RIDGE and most recently during the trial of OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER, Timothy McVeigh, the FBI failed to properly disclose all of the evidence in a timely and credible manner. The FBI’s credibility as it relates to the fair and proper disclosure of evidence against criminal defendants is in ruins.

Given that Mr. Mueller instituted a policy that effectively shields the government from accepting responsibility for withholding and concealing evidence, its questionable whether he is the right person to become director at this critical juncture in the FBI’s history.

MY ADDITIONAL INFORMATION AND ANALYSIS

Even while US Attorney in San Francisco, Mueller worked to cover-up the OKC bombing, Waco and Ruby Ridge evidence by changing the rules of evidence so that the FBI and prosecution did not have to share as much evidence with defense attorneys in the cases as would have been required in the past. He changed the Brady rules of evidence in concert with the US prosecutor Beth Wilkinson in the McVeigh and Nichols case who had assumed a position in the same department at DOJ that Mueller had worked earlier.

Mueller was brought into DC to head the transition team for Ashcroft and Mueller proceeded to steer Ashcroft through the cover-ups by FBI and DOJ on the OKC bombing case. Mueller did such a superb job that Ashcroft personally nominated Mueller to Bush for FBI director to help perpetuate the FBI and DOJ cover-ups of Waco, Ruby Ridge and the OKC bombing.

For some of the details of the FBI and DOJ cover-up of the OKC bombing please read my article Ashcroft Relies On Evidence Obstructed by the FBI and US Prosecutors In OKC Bombing Case which was posted on the FreeRepublic.com on May 29, 2001.

The FBI and DOJ colluded to lie before the court during the trials, to falsify FBI 302 reports, to withhold 302 reports, to falsely rewrite 302 reports, to deliberately not write 302 reports, to doctor and withhold key surveillance tape evidence, and to threaten key John Doe and foreknowledge witnesses including law enforcement and military personnel in OKC.

Mueller was also involved in covering up the Noriega, BCCI and BNL scandals of Bush Senior. Mueller worked with Wilkinson on the Noriega case. Mueller also worked closely at several points with Larry Potts, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, who was kicked out of the FBI for lying about the FBI having Vickie Weaver murdered.

The head of the OKC FBI office, Marquise worked directly with Mueller on the Pan Am 103 bombing and Marquise is to be given the AG Distinguished service award by Ashcroft. Marquise verbally attacked four FBI agents who were on 60 minutes II last month describing the FBI cover-up in the OKC bombing.

If Ashcroft continues to allow himself to be led around by the nose by FBI and DOJ holdovers from the previous administration, such as Robert Mueller, then Ashcroft himself will be rendered useless and will himself become part of the corruption problem plaguing the DOJ and FBI.

It has been six weeks since Ashcroft was hand delivered a letter written by OKC bombing witness Gloria Smith describing three John Does in the case that the FBI deliberately covered-up. Ashcroft has failed to take action to have these John Does adequately investigated, apprehended or questioned and he has not had anyone contact Gloria Smith.

The story of the John Does and Gloria Smith’s letter to Ashcroft was reported in my article OKC Bombing Witness Requests Ashcroft Action On Three John Does which was posted on the FreeRepublic.com on June 14, 2001.

If Ahscroft is relying on DOJ personnel such as Sean Connelly or Beth Wilkinson and especially FBI Director designee Robert Mueller and others involved in the FBI cover-up, then it is doubtful that Ashcroft, the FBI or the DOJ will do anything adequate about Gloria Smith’s John Does or will really investigate the FBI and DOJ cover-ups in the OKC bombing.

Senators Hatch and Leahy have gushed over Mueller in confirmation hearings and recently said that Congress will not need to continue close oversight of the FBI once Mueller is in charge for a while. This is an absolute abdication of the Senate’s role to continue indefinitely overseeing the FBI and is a blank check that should never be given to the FBI and particularly to “Mr. evidence cover-up artist” Robert Mueller.

Even former FBI agent Gary Aldrich who wrote “Unlimited Access” just advocated in his newsletter ( from the Patrick Henry Center) giving Robert Mueller “a blank check” (these are Aldrich’s exact words) to run and cleanup the FBI. Aldrich is like the Senators who really do not want to oversee the FBI, they just want to create the allusion that the FBI can run itself without oversight once a few cosmetic changes are made. They like Mueller so far are still perpetuating the FBI status quo of corrupt policies that endanger the American people and threaten their freedoms and lives.


THE BCCI AFFAIR


Wall Street Journal: FBI Director Mueller Should Resign


J. Edgar Mueller - By William Safire - The New York Times


FBI HEADS SHOULD ROLL


THE FBI AND THE MAD BOMBERS Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Tapes in Bombing Plot Show Informer and F.B.I. at Odds
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The New York Times
Section A; Page 1; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk
October 27, 1993, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final


The informer at the center of the Government's case in the plot to bomb New York City landmarks had a volatile relationship with his handlers, often quarreling with F.B.I. agents who used him to infiltrate a group of Muslim extremists who have been charged in the plot, according to transcripts of secretly taped conversations.


"You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and that's that. That's why I feel so bad."
Transcripts of the hundreds of hours of tapes -- which were recorded by the informer, Emad A. Salem, without the knowledge of the F.B.I. -- were distributed to defense lawyers yesterday. Although Judge Michael B. Mukasey ordered the lawyers to keep them secret, a copy of the transcripts was made available to The New York Times.

The tapes offer a rare glimpse into the sensitive relationship between the confidential informer and the law-enforcement officals with whom he worked. They also reveal for the first time how Federal and police agents instructed him to "pump up" a suspect for information and negotiate a $1 million fee from the Government for his services.

Scattered through the hundreds of pages of transcripts are many instances in which the Government agents appear to encourage Mr. Salem to lead the suspects to incriminate themselves. Defense lawyers have long contended that the Government crossed a legal line, instructing Mr. Salem in a fishing expedition that became entrapment. Although the bulk of the transcripts does not appear to show the agents steering Mr. Salem toward improper or illegal conduct, whether they did so finally will be resolved in court.

Many New Details

Among the details included in the transcripts are the following:

*A reference by Mr. Salem to 12 possible bombs and hitherto unmentioned targets, including Grand Central Terminal, the Empire State Building and Times Square.

*A New York City police detective working with the F.B.I. told Mr. Salem, who was getting $500 a week from the Government, that if he wanted a $1 million informer's fee, he should press for $1.5 million and then negotiate.

*An unusual suggestion that some of the money sought by Mr. Salem was going to be put up by private individuals.

*A reference from Mr. Salem, in a conversation with an F.B.I. agent, to an argument between F.B.I. officials over whether Mr. Salem should remain an unidentified informer or surface as a witness to testify at trial.

*A major defendant in the World Trade Center trial was tipped off by a neighbor to an elaborate F.B.I. ruse to search the Brooklyn apartment of another suspect, Mahmud Abouhalima, and replace explosives in his apartment with false explosives supplied by the F.B.I.

*Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a defendant in the second bombing case, was using a fax machine to command anti-Communist Muslim rebels, moving forces from Pakistan to Afghanistan and dealing with a code-named agent from Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, Mr. Salem told the F.B.I.

The transcripts cover Mr. Salem's dealings with the suspects and his work for the Government over a period of at least two years, going back to the trial in the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Mr. Salem recorded the conversations with Government agents on his own, without the knowledge or consent of his contacts in the F.B.I., apparently to use as an insurance policy to hold the Government to its promises of money and protection.

Some of the most striking passages in the transcripts show Mr. Salem agonizing over what he suggests was the failure of the F.B.I., despite his information, to halt the Feb. 26 bombing of the trade center, in which six people were killed. Although Mr. Salem is not a witness in that case, he was working with the Government at that time.

"They told me that 'we want to set this,' " Mr. Salem said, referring to the bomb in a conversation on April 1 with John Anticev, one of the F.B.I. agents he reported to, and sometimes complained to others about. " 'What's the right place to put this?' "

Then he added, still speaking to the agent: "You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and that's that. That's why I feel so bad."

Federal officials have acknowledged in the past that they dropped Mr. Salem as an informer sometime before the trade center bombing over what they said was his reluctance to wear a body recorder, as well as other disagreements. They said he never provided detailed information of the attack in advance but that they began using his services again after the bombing and credited him with foiling the related but separate plot to bomb the United Nations, Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the Federal building housing the F.B.I. in Manhattan.

The case is expected to come to trial next year, perhaps shortly after the end of the related trial of four men charged with bombing the World Trade Center. As the most important witness, Mr. Salem is expected to be called upon to verify tapes he made of conversations with suspects and testify on his dealings with them.

In several instances, the transcripts show Mr. Salem lecturing Federal agents on how to do their jobs, criticizing their surveillance and interview techniques. In one instance, he suggests that they tell a possible source that his phone was tapped, when in fact it was not, and that they confront the man and push him hard for information. "Don't give him a chance to think," Mr. Salem is quoted as saying. "If he will think it's, 'I want my lawyer.' Then bingo, you are gone."

Aid for Defense?

By creating the so-called bootleg tapes, Mr. Salem has given ammunition to defense lawyers who argue that he entrapped the 15 defendants charged with conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks.

In one instance that shows how Mr. Salem was prompted by Federal agents, Mr. Anticev is quoted as saying, "You know, pump, maybe kind of pump him up a little bit." The agent tells Mr. Salem to stress "the loyalty to his cousin." The target in that instance, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, is a cousin of the man who was charged with shooting Mr. Kahane and now a defendant in a plot to bomb New York City targets.

In another instance, Mr. Anticev is quoted as instructing Mr. Salem to press to learn whether Mr. Elgabrowny or his associates were hiding explosives. He is quoted as telling Mr. Salem not to worry about being exposed as the source of the information. "We'll just know where stuff exists and where it is," Mr. Anticev is quoted as saying. "And then we'll make our move."

"There's no danger, you know," he says later. "We can be sneaky and take our time."

Mr. Salem has dropped from sight since the June arrests, and an effort to get in touch with him through the witness protection program of the Federal Marshals Service was rejected. But a member of the defense team said he was spotted within the last month in Manhattan.

Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer and confidant of the radical Egyptian cleric, Mr. Abdel Rahman, surfaced as the Government's mole after a June 24 F.B.I. raid on a Queens garage that the Government said smashed an extremist Muslim plot to blow up the United Nations, Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the Manhattan Federal building housing the F.B.I., and to assassinate Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato and State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, among other targets.

The unauthorized tapes came to light immediately after the raid as Mr. Salem hurriedly evacuated his West Side Manhattan apartment and was quickly identified by associates of the sheik and by law-enforcement authorities as the "confidential informant" who had secretly gathered evidence, including many tape-recorded conversations, against those later charged as conspirators in the case.

Tapes Left Behind

In the belongings Mr. Salem left behind either carelessly or by design were cassettes of the tapes he had secretly recorded with the F.B.I.

Because these could shed light on the prosecution's evidence-gathering methods to the point of possible entrapment, defense lawyers convinced Judge Mukasey that they should gain access to this material as well as to Mr. Salem's authorized recordings, turned over earlier.

Even before he came in from the cold of his undercover role in June, the burly, bearded Mr. Salem was an enigmatic figure, a private investigator who supported himself as a jewelry designer, a security guard for the sheik who freely gave interviews to news reporters.

Officials in Cairo say he entered the Egyptian Army as a private and during an 18-year career fought in the 1973 war with Israel and was "pensioned out" as a senior officer while continuing a relationship with Egyptian military intelligence. His American wife, from whom he was divorced this year but to whom he is still close, told New York Newsday last week that he had recently sent a set of the bootleg tapes home to Egyptian authorities with a visiting relative.

In the United States for about six years, he lived most recently in a fifth-floor suite at the Bretton Hall residence hotel at 2350 Broadway.

A news reporter invited to interview him there shortly after the World Trade Center bombing found herself on camera as Mr. Salem insisted videotaping the encounter.

He showed her photographs of what he said was his sandbagged bunker in the 1973 war, the reviewing stand where former President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and his grave site. He also showed pictures of people who had apparently been tortured: a woman with cigarette burns and a man confined in a cage.

He said that he prayed at the Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn and the al-Salaam mosque in Jersey City, where Sheik Omar often preached, and that he had known the cleric from Egypt. He said he was attracted by Mr. Rahman's aura of power and fearlessness.

Remembered as Benefactor

Associates in Jersey City said they remembered Mr. Salem as a generous benefactor of the mosques and of the sheik himself. He also collected money for the defense of El Sayyid A. Nosair, an Egyptian contractor charged in the 1990 assassination of the militant Jewish leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Mr. Nosair was acquitted of that killing but convicted of related assault and weapons charges. He is also one of the 15 defendants in the bombing conspiracy case.

Mr. Salem also had dealings with Mr.. Elgabrowny, a relative of Mr. Nosair for whom Mr. Salem said he helped obtain a pistol permit from the New York City Police Department.

Associates and lawyers of some of the defendants said that Mr. Salem appeared rather abruptly on the scene around the time of the Kahane killing and that they now suspect he was sent to infiltrate the circle around Mr. Nosair.


Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The New York Times
Section A; Page 1; Column 4; Metropolitan Desk
October 28, 1993, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
Correction Appended


L aw-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.


"Do you deny," Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, "your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?" Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. "We was handling the case perfectly well until the supervisor came and messed it up, upside down."
The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court in that attack.

Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian army officer, was used by the Government to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the trade center blast, he was feuding with the F.B.I.

Supervisor 'Messed It Up'

After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."

"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. "He requested to make me to testify and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."

The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

"He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C.," Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him.

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the New York people: "Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."

Mary Jo White, who, as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting defendants in two related bombing cases, declined yesterday to comment on the Salem allegations or any other aspect of the cases. An investigator close to the case who refused to be identified further said, "We wish he would have saved the world," but called Mr. Salem's claims "figments of his imagination."

The transcripts, which are stamped "draft" and compiled from 70 tapes recorded secretly during the last two years by Mr. Salem, were turned over to defense lawyers in the second bombing case by the Government on Tuesday under a judge's order barring lawyers from disseminating them. A large portion of the material was made available to The New York Times.

In a letter to Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Andrew C. McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney, said that he had learned of the tapes while debriefing Mr. Salem and that the informer had then voluntarily turned them over. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of "security and other issues," Mr. McCarthy said.

William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, "were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct." But citing the judge's order, he said he could not provide any details.

The transcripts do not make clear the extent to which Federal authorities knew that there was a plan to bomb the World Trade Center, merely that they knew that a bombing of some sort was being discussed. But Mr. Salem's evident anguish at not being able to thwart the trade center blast is a recurrent theme in the transcripts. In one of the first numbered tapes, Mr. Salem is quoted as telling agent Floyd: "Since the bomb went off I feel terrible. I feel bad. I feel here is people who don't listen."

Ms. Floyd seems to commiserate, saying, "hey, I mean it wasn't like you didn't try and I didn't try."

In an apparent reference to Mr. Salem's complaints about the supervisor, Agent Floyd adds, "You can't force people to do the right thing."

The investigator involved in the case who would not be quoted by name said that Mr. Salem may have been led to believe by the agents that they were blameless for any mistakes. It was a classic agent's tactic, he said, to "blame the boss for all that's bad and take credit for all the good things."

In another point in the transcripts, Mr. Salem recounts a conversation he said he had with Mr. Anticev, saying, "I said, 'Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both know that we could avoid that.' " At another point, Mr. Salem says, "You get paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening."

Mr. Salem talks of the plan to substitute harmless powder for explosives during another conversation with agent Floyd. In that conversation, he recalls a previous discussion with Mr. Anticev.

"Do you deny," Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, "your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?" Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. "We was handling the case perfectly well until the supervisor came and messed it up, upside down."

The transcripts reflect an effort to keep Mr. Salem as an intelligence asset who would not have to go public or testify.

A police detective working with the F.B.I., Louis Napoli, assures Mr. Salem in one conversation, "We can give you total immunity towards prosecution, towards, ah, ah, testifying." But he adds: "I still have to tell you that if you're the only game in town in regards to the information," then, he says, "you'll have to testify."

Studied for Signs of Illegality

The transcripts are being closely studied by lawyers looking for signs that Mr. Salem and the law enforcement officials, in their zeal to gather evidence, may have crossed the legal line into entrapment, a charge that defense counsel have already raised.

But the transcripts show that the officials were concerned that by associating with bombing defendants awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Mr. Salem might have been accused of spying on the defense.

In an undated conversation, Mr. Anticev tries to explain the perils.

"We're not allowed to have any information regarding that," he tells Mr. Salem. "That could jeopardize, you know, if you go see a lawyer, ah, you know, with the defendant's friend or whatever like that, and you're talking about things we're not suppose to, ah, condone that. We're not supposed to make people do that for us. That's like sacred ground. You can't be privileged, ah, you can't know what's being talked about at all."

Mr. Salem seems to bridle. "I, I, I don't think that's right," he says.

The agent insists: "Yeah, but that's just a guideline. If that ever happened, ah, you can back and reported on the meeting between, ah, you know, Kunstler and Mohammad A. Elgabrown. Forget about it. I mean a lot of people ah the case can get thrown out. You understand?" The references were to the defense lawyer, Mr. Kunstler, and his client in the second bomb case, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny.

Mr. Salem seems to reluctantly agree.

"They want you to have a hand in it," Mr. Anticev goes on, "but they're afraid that when you get that kind of, ah, too deep, like me, it's almost like, especially with all this legal stuff going on right now."

If it were just intelligence gathering, the agent says, "You can do anything you want. You could go crazy over there and have a good time. Do you know what I mean?"

The agent goes on: "But now that everything is going to court and there is legal stuff and it's just, it's just too hard. It's just too tricky, if, this, you know. And then there's the fact if you come by with the big information, he did this, ah, let me talk about this with the other people again."

"O.K.," Mr. Salem says. "All right. O.K."

CORRECTION-DATE: October 29, 1993, Friday

CORRECTION:

An article yesterday about accounts of a plot to build a bomb that was eventually exploded at the World Trade Center referred imprecisely in some copies to what Federal officials knew about the plan before the blast. Transcripts of tapes made secretly by an informant, Emad A. Salem, quote him as saying he warned the Government that a bomb was being built. But the transcripts do not make clear the extent to which the Federal authorities knew that the target was the World Trade Center.


"We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country," FBI Director Louis Freeh - testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime on June 5, 1997.


Lawsuit charges DOJ collusion with Russian Mafia


An Inconvenient History - The Russian Money Laundering Pyramid


The Harvard Boys Do Russia

The Nation
June 1, 1998 Janine R. Wedel

Article in the June 1, 1998 issue of The Nation

The Harvard Boys Do Russia By Janine R. Wedel
After seven years of economic "reform" financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia's wealth.

The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais's drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he "may be the most despised man in Russia."

Essential to the implementation of Chubais's policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard's name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.'s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers' funds.

At the recent U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, made what might have seemed to many an impolite reference to his hosts. After castigating Chubais and his monetarist policies, Luzhkov, according to a report of the event, "singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the Russian economy by its advisers, who encouraged Chubais's misguided approach to privatization and monetarism." Luzhkov was referring to H.I.I.D. Chubais, who was delegated vast powers over the economy by Boris Yeltsin, was ousted in Yeltsin's March purge, but in May he was given an immensely lucrative post as head of Unified Energy System, the country's electricity monopoly. Some of the main actors with Harvard's Russia project have yet to face a reckoning, but this may change if a current investigation by the U.S. government results in prosecutions.

The activities of H.I.I.D. in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers. The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign policy disasters created by those said to be our "best and brightest."

Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia's economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar,Yeltsin's first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of "shock therapy" to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock-not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent-than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under seige, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar's principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin's economic czar. Chubais, committed to "radical reform," vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.

H.I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard's project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine.

Summers hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Lipton moved into Summers's old job, assuming "broad responsibility" for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting missions in Poland and Russia. "Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together," said a Russian representative at the International Monetary Fund. "They were like an inseparable couple." Sachs, who was named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D. grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997.

Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born emigre and already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.'s Russia project. Shleifer was also a protege of Summers, with whom he received at least one foundation grant. Summers wrote a promotional blurb for Privatizing Russia (a 1995 book co-written by Shleifer and subsidized by H.I.I.D.) declaring that "the authors did remarkable things in Russia, and now they have written a remarkable book."

Another Harvard player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow's Pushkin Institute for Russian Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state's new privatization committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.'s general director in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece.

H.I.I.D.'s first awards from U.S.A.I.D. for work in Russia came in 1992, during the Bush Administration. Over the next four years, with the endorsement of the Clinton Administration, the institute would be awarded $57.7 million- all but $17.4 million without competitive bidding. For example, in June 1994 Administration officials signed a waiver that enabled H.I.I.D. to receive $20 million for its Russian legal reform program. Approving such a large sum as a noncompetitive "amendment" to a much smaller award (the institute's original 1992 award was $2.1 million) was highly unusual, as was the citation of "foreign policy" considerations as the reason for the waiver. Nonetheless, the waiver was endorsed by five U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the National Security Council, two of the leading agencies formulating U.S. aid policy toward Russia. In addition to the millions it received directly, H.I.I.D. helped steer and coordinate some $300 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants to other contractors, such as the Big Six accounting firms and the giant Burson-Marsteller P.R. firm.

As Yeltsin's Russian government took over Soviet assets in late 1991 and early 1992, several privatization schemes were floated. The one the Supreme Soviet passed in 1992 was structured to prevent corruption, but the program Chubais eventually carried out instead encouraged the accumulation of property in a few hands and opened the door to widespread corruption. It was so controversial that Chubais ultimately had to rely largely on Yeltsin's presidential decrees, not parliamentary approval, for implementation. Many U.S. officials embraced this dictatorial modus operandi, and Jonathan Hay and his associates drafted many of the decrees. As U.S.A.I.D.'s Walter Coles, an early supporter of Chubais's privatization program, put it, "If we needed a decree, Chubais didn't have to go through the bureaucracy."

With help from his H.I.I.D. advisers and other Westerners, Chubais and his cronies set up a network of aid-funded "private" organizations that enabled them to bypass legitimate government agencies and circumvent the new parliament of the Russian Federation, the Duma. Through this network, two of Chubais's associates, Maxim Boycko (who co-wrote Privatizing Russia with Shleifer) and Dmitry Vasiliev, oversaw almost a third of a billion dollars in aid money and millions more in loans from international financial institutions.

Much of this largesse flowed through the Moscow-based Russian Privatization Center (R.P.C.). Founded in 1992 under the direction of Chubais, who was chairman of its board even while head of the G.K.I., and Boycko, who was C.E.O. for most of its existence, the R.P.C. was legally a private, nonprofit, nongovernmental organization. In fact, it was established by another Yeltsin decree and helped carry out government policy on inflation and other macroeconomic issues and also negotiated loans with international financial institutions. H.I.I.D. was a founder of the R.P.C., and Andrei Shleifer served on the board of directors. Its other members were recruited by Chubais, according to Ira Lieberman, a senior manager in the private-sector development department of the World Bank who helped design the R.P.C. With H.I.I.D.'s help, the R.P.C. received some $45 million from U.S.A.I.D. and millions from the European Union, individual European governments, Japan and other countries, as well as loans from the World Bank ($59 million) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ($43 million), which must be repaid by the Russian people. One result of this funding was the enrichment, political and financial, of Chubais and his allies.

H.I.I.D. helped create several more aid-funded institutions. One was the Federal Commission on Securities, a rough equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.). It too was established by presidential decree, and it was run by Chubais protege Dmitry Vasiliev. The commission had very limited enforcement powers and funding, but U.S.A.I.D. supplied the cash through two Harvard-created institutions run by Hay, Vasiliev and other members of the Harvard-Chubais coterie.

One of these was the Institute for Law-Based Economy, funded by both the World Bank and U.S.A.I.D. This institute, set up to help develop a legal and regulatory framework for markets, evolved to encompass drafting decrees for the Russian government; it got nearly $20 million from U.S.A.I.D. Last August, the Russian directors of I.L.B.E. were caught removing $500,000 worth of U.S. office equipment from the organization's Moscow office; the equipment was returned only after weeks of U.S. pressure. When auditors from U.S.A.I.D.'s inspector general's office sought records and documents regarding I.L.B.E. operations, the organization refused to turn them over.

The device of setting up private organizations backed by the power of the Yeltsin government and maintaining close ties to H.I.I.D. was a way of insuring deniability. Shleifer, Hay and other Harvard principals, all U.S. citizens, were "Russian" when convenient. Hay, for example, served alternately and sometimes simultaneously as aid contractor, manager of other contractors and representative of the Russian government. If Western donors were attacked for funding controversial privatization practices of the state, the donors could claim they were funding "private" organizations, even if these organizations were controlled or strongly influenced by key state officials. If the Chubais circle came under fire for misuse of funds, they could claim that Americans made the decisions. Foreign donors could insist that the Russians acted on their own.

Against the backdrop of Russia's Klondike capitalism, which they were helping create and Chubais and his team were supposedly regulating, the H.I.I.D. advisers exploited their intimate ties with Chubais and the government and were allegedly able to conduct business activities for their own enrichment. According to sources close to the U.S. government's investigation, Hay used his influence, as well as U.S.A.I.D.-financed resources, to help his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, set up a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia. Pallada became the first mutual fund to be licensed by Vasiliev's Federal Commission on Securities. Vasiliev approved Pallada ahead of Credit Suisse First Boston and Pioneer First Voucher, much larger and more established financial institutions.

After Pallada was set up, Hebert, Hay, Shleifer and Vasiliev looked for ways to continue their activities as aid funds dwindled. Using I.L.B.E. resources and funding, they established a private consulting firm with taxpayer money. One of the firm's first clients was Shleifer's wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a Boston-based hedge fund that traded heavily in Russian bonds. According to Russian registration documents, Zimmerman's company set up a Russian firm with Sergei Shishkin, the I.L.B.E. chief, as general director. Corporate documents on file in Moscow showed that the address and phone number of the company and the I.L.B.E. were the same.

Then there is the First Russian Specialized Depository, which holds the records and assets of mutual fund investors. This institution, funded by a World Bank loan, also worked to the benefit of Hay, Vasiliev, Hebert and another associate, Julia Zagachin. According to sources close to the U.S. government's investigation, Zagachin, an American married to a Russian, was selected to run the depository even though she lacked the required capital. Ostensibly, there was to be total separation between the depository and any mutual fund using its services. But the selection of Zagachin defied this tenet of open markets: Pallada and the depository were run by people with ties to each other through H.I.I.D. Thus the very people who were supposed to be the trustees of the system not only undercut the aid program's stated goal of building independent institutions but replicated the Soviet practice of skimming assets to benefit the nomenklatura.

Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.'s advisers and their supposed clients-the Russian people-in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university's endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia's second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia's high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros's July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank's Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin's government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S.assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia's nascent markets.

Despite exposure of this corruption in the Russian media (and, far more hesitantly, in the U.S. media), the H.I.I.D.-Chubais clique remained until recently the major instrument of U.S. economic aid policy to Russia. It even used the high-level Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which helped orchestrate the cooperation of U.S.-Russian oil deals and the Mir space station. The commission's now-defunct Capital Markets Forum was chaired on the Russian side by Chubais and Vasiliev, and on the U.S. side by S.E.C. chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Andrei Shleifer was named special coordinator to all four of the Capital Markets Forum's working subgroups. Hebert, Hay's girlfriend, served on two of the subgroups, as did the C.E.O.s of Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other powerful Wall Street investment houses. When The Nation contacted the S.E.C. for information about Capital Markets, we were told to call Shleifer for comment. Shleifer, who is under investigation by U.S.A.I.D.'s inspector general for misuse of funds, declined to be interviewed for this article. A U.S. Treasury spokesman said Shleifer and Hebert were appointed to Capital Markets by the Chubais group-specifically, according to other sources, by Dmitry Vasiliev.

In fact, H.I.I.D. projects were never adequately monitored by U.S.A.I.D. In 1996, a General Accounting Office report described U.S.A.I.D.'s management and oversight of H.I.I.D. as "lax." In early 1997, U.S.A.I.D.'s inspector general received incriminating documents about H.I.I.D.'s activities in Russia and began investigating. In May Shleifer and Hay lost their projects when the agency canceled most of the $14 million still earmarked for H.I.I.D., citing evidence that the two managers were engaged in activities for "private gain." The men had allegedly used their positions to profit from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private enterprises. According to sources close to the U.S. investigation, while advising the Russian government on capital markets, for example, Hay and his father allegedly used inside information to invest in Russian government bonds. Hay and Shleifer may ultimately face criminal and/or civil prosecution. Shleifer remains a tenured professor at Harvard, and Hay continues to work with members of the Chubais clique in Russia. Sachs, who has stated he never invests in countries where he advises and who is not implicated in the current U.S. government investigation, remains head of H.I.I.D. After Yeltsin's Cabinet shakeup in March, Chubais was moved to a new position of prominence. His role in Russia's political-economic affairs had been tarnished by reports of personal enrichment. Two examples:

x In February 1996, Chubais's Foundation for the Protection of Private Property received a five-year, $2.9 million unsecured interest-free loan. According to the pro-Yeltsin, pro-reform Izvestia, Stolichny Bank, an institution that enjoys lines of credit from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank, made the loan in return for a small percentage of the Sibneft oil company when it was sold at auction, and for later control of one of the state's largest banks. Chubais defended himself by saying such practices were common in the West, but failed to provide any reasonable explanation for some $300,000 in 1996 income not accounted for by his government salary.

x During Yeltsin's 1996 presidential campaign, security officials apprehended two close associates of Chubais as they were walking out of a main government building with a box containing more than $500,000 in cash for Yeltsin's campaign. According to tapes of a later meeting recorded by a member of one of Russia's security services, Chubais and his cronies strategized about burying evidence of any illegal transaction, while publicly claiming that any allegations of chicanery were the work of political enemies. A protracted, lackadaisical investigation began but was eventually dropped-more evidence of Chubais's remarkable resilience. He remained valuable to Yeltsin largely because of his perceived ability to deal with the West, where many still regard him as a symbol of Russian reform.

During the five years that the Chubais clique presided over Western economic aid and policy in Russia, they did enormous harm. By unconditionally backing Chubais and his associates, the Harvard operatives, their U.S. government patrons and Western donors may have reinforced the new post-Soviet oligarchical system. Shleifer acknowledged as much in Privatizing Russia, the book he wrote with Chubais crony Maxim Boycko, who with his patron would later be caught in another financial indiscretion involving taking a "veiled bribe" in the form of advances on a book on the history of Russian privatization. "Aid can change the political equilibrium," they said, "by explicitly helping free-market reformers to defeat their opponents."

Richard Morningstar, U.S. aid coordinator for the former Soviet Union, stands by this approach: "If we hadn't been there to provide funding to Chubais, could we have won the battle to carry out privatization? Probably not. When you're talking about a few hundred million dollars, you're not going to change the country, but you can provide targeted assistance to help Chubais." In early 1996, after he was temporarily removed from high office by Yeltsin because he represented unpopular economic policies, H.I.I.D. came to his rescue by placing him on its U.S.A.I.D.-funded payroll, a show of loyalty that former U.S.A.I.D. assistant administrator Thomas Dine says he supported. Western policy-makers like Morningstar and Dine have depicted Chubais as a selfless visionary battling reactionary forces. In the spring of 1997, Summers called him and his associates a "dream team." With few exceptions, the U.S. mainstream media have promulgated this view.

United States policy toward Russia requires a full-scale Congressional investigation. The General Accounting Office did investigate H.I.I.D.'s Russian and Ukrainian projects in 1996, but the findings were largely suppressed by the agency's timid management. The audit team concluded, for example, that the U.S. government exercised "favoritism" toward Harvard, but this conclusion and the supporting documentation were removed from the final report. Last fall Congress asked the G.A.O. to look into Eastern European aid programs and Shleifer's role in the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission. Such questions need to be answered, but any serious inquiry must go beyond individual corruption and examine how U.S. policy, using tens of millions in taxpayer dollars, helped deform democracy and economic reform in Russia and helped create a fat-cat oligarchy run amok. Janine R. Wedel is an anthropologist and associate research professor and research fellow at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at The George Washington University. Her new book, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe 1989-1998, will be published by St. Martin's later this year.


The fallout from the Clinton Administration's criminal foreign policy of neo-mercantilism has only just begun and extends much further than China.

Today the Russian ruble is poised for devaluation, foreigners are fleeing both Russian bond and equity markets, taxes cannot be collected for Yeltsin's buffoons and incompetents, the IMF continues to pour your money into a corrupt regime for the sustenance of an incompetent oligarchy and a series of spontaneous workers' protests that include the blocking of the Trans-Siberian are rolling across that vast land.

There are two victims to this story - the Russian people first who were swindled out of their national legacy and secondly US taxpayers whose resources were used to betray a people's trust and to dishonor their good intentions.

I know this was a long read, but it's a long weekend and if you want to know more about the engine of theft at Harvard and their Russian purchases designed using US citizens' money for the purpose of fleecing a long-suffering people, then go to: bookagency.com/oligarchy.html. Anti-Americanism is at an alltime high, but thanks to the Clinton Administration and Harvard University opportunists, we've got enemies again -- and they do have a point -- and the fireworks are just beginning. What goes around, comes around.


FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY - Remarks by U.S. Representative Bob Barr - 1999

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#1. To: Uncle Bill (#0)

Great to see you back contributing Uncle Bill! Your Style and Format is as clear and concise as always!

For all the Newbies out there who aren't familiar with Uncle Bill PAY ATTENTION and start a file or series of files by topic for his info.

He has access to LEXIS-NEXIS (look it up:-). History should NOT be Repeated when it comes to Corruption!

"If we don’t adhere to the Constitution on matters as significant as presidential eligibility, then the Constitution ceases to be a meaningful document for guiding our nation."

ndcorup  posted on  2017-06-13   6:41:52 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: Uncle Bill (#0)

Sara Carter and Sean Hannity Are Being Played By James Comey

U.S. Constitution - Article IV, Section 4: NO BORDERS + NO LAWS = NO COUNTRY

HAPPY2BME-4UM  posted on  2017-06-13   6:57:33 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: ALL, christine (#2)

Trey Gowdy Praises Robert Mueller, Gives Him Vote Of Confidence [VIDEO]


Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said he has confidence in Special Counsel Robert Mueller and praised his service record Wednesday on “America’s Newsroom.”

“This is a really difficult political environment we’re in. I’m not sure you could find anyone not named Jesus that everyone would be happy with. I actually am satisfied with Robert Muller,” Gowdy said during the Fox News interview.

Gowdy said it shouldn’t matter who leads an investigation into the Uranium One deal because it should ultimately follow the facts to a logical conclusion.

“Investigations should follow facts and it really shouldn’t matter who’s leading them. Facts are what direct it,” he said. “I know I’m in a small group among Republicans but I actually have confidence he’s going to reach the right conclusions for the right reasons and he’ll have credibility with the American people when he’s done.”

He added Mueller’s service record speaks for itself and said the former FBI director has given a lifetime of “solid service” to the country.


In Case You Missed It: Robert Mueller Was FBI Director During The Russia Uranium Investigation


A Russian nuclear firm under FBI investigation was allowed to purchase US uranium supply


The FBI told Newsweek it had no comment as to whether Mueller had alerted senior Obama administration officials, including Clinton, about the ongoing FBI investigation before they brokered the deal.

the Obama administration knew the Russians were engaged in bribery, kickbacks and extortion in order to gain control of US atomic resources — yet still OK’d that 2010 deal to give Moscow control of one-fifth of America’s uranium. This reeks. Peter Schweizer got onto part of the scandal in his 2015 book, “Clinton Cash”: the gifts of $145 million to the Clinton Foundation, and the $500,000 fee to Bill for a single speech, by individuals involved in a deal that required Hillary Clinton’s approval.

NOTE: Obama administration knew about Russian bribery plot before uranium deal


Hillary "I Don't Recall" Clinton

FROM THE WASHINGTON TIMES: In the portions of President Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition that have been made public in the Paula Jones case, his memory failed him 267 times. This is a list of his answers and how many times he gave each one.

I don’t remember - 71
I don’t know - 62
I’m not sure - 17
I have no idea - 10
I don’t believe so - 9
I don’t recall - 8
I don’t think so - 8
I don’t have any specific recollection - 6
I have no recollection - 4
Not to my knowledge - 4
I just don’t remember - 4
I don’t believe - 4
I have no specific recollection - 3
I might have - 3
I don’t have any recollection of that - 2 I don’t have a specific memory - 2
I don’t have any memory of that - 2
I just can’t say - 2
I have no direct knowledge of that - 2
I don’t have any idea - 2
Not that I recall - 2
I don’t believe I did - 2
I can’t remember - 2
I can’t say - 2
I do not remember doing so - 2
Not that I remember - 2
I’m not aware - 1
I honestly don’t know - 1
I don’t believe that I did - 1
I’m fairly sure - 1
I have no other recollection - 1
I’m not positive - 1
I certainly don’t think so - 1
I don’t really remember - 1
I would have no way of remembering that - 1
That’s what I believe happened - 1
To my knowledge, no - 1
To the best of my knowledge - 1
To the best of my memory - 1
I honestly don’t recall - 1
I honestly don’t remember - 1
That’s all I know - 1
I don’t have an independent recollection of that - 1
I don’t actually have an independent memory of that - 1
As far as I know - 1
I don’t believe I ever did that - 1
That’s all I know about that - 1
I’m just not sure - 1
Nothing that I remember - 1
I simply don’t know - 1
I would have no idea - 1
I don’t know anything about that - 1
I don’t have any direct knowledge of that - 1
I just don’t know - 1
I really don’t know - 1
I can’t deny that, I just — I have no memory of that at all - 1

Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation

Uncle Bill  posted on  2017-10-26   0:02:48 ET  (3 images) Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: All, christine (#3)

The swamp has been forming the cesspool of corruption to usher in the one world government for a long, long time. Stealing money from hard working Americans are a few strokes of a keyboard. It's win at all costs.


INTRODUCTION
The Mafia, CIA and George Bush
Pete Brewton
(New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992)


Something very significant happened during our country's savings- and-loan crisis, the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. It happened quietly, secretly, without any fanfare and attention. It happened before our very eyes, yet we knew it not.

What we all missed was the massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to a select group of extremely rich, powerful people. What these people had in common -- unknown to the American public -- were their symbiotic relationships to the Mafia and the CIA, and to the two most prominent, powerful politicians from Texas, President George Bush and Senator Lloyd Bentsen.

This small cabal of businessmen realized that the S&Ls; were going the way of the dinosaurs. They recognized that S&Ls; couldn't survive under rapid inflation and high interest rates. So they decided to exploit the situation for their own purposes, with help from, and rewards for, the Mafia, the CIA and their favorite politicians. They probably figured that the insulation and protection these powerful institutions and individuals conferred upon them, in addition to all the endemic protections with the financial, judicial, political and journalistic systems, made them invulnerable. They were probably right.

For unlike Watergate and Iran-Contra, this was a bipartisan scandal. There was no opposition party to push for an independent investigation. In fact, the same group of wealthy, powerful businessmen, centered in Houston, that encircle Republicans like George Bush and James A. Baker III, also encircle Democrats like Jim Wright and Lloyd Bentsen.

This information enables one to view the 1988 elections, in which not one cross word was ever spoken about the savings-and-loan debacle, in a whole new perspective. It was not merely a fortuitous coincidence that both Bush, the Republican nominee for President, and Bentsen, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, were part of, and beholden to, the same group of Houston businessmen. Even if the Democrats lost that presidential election, as they did, Bentsen could still win re-election to his Senate seat under the so- called "LBJ rule." The Houston boys, as usual, had their bets covered.

(If the Democrats had won in 1988, this book would be entitled "The Mafia, the CIA and Lloyd Bentsen," for Bentsen and Bush are two interchangeable peas in a pod. They have many friends, business associates and campaign donors in common. The story of the most important one they share begins this book.)

But Bush won in 1988, and one of the reasons he did was his ability to keep the S&L; scandal out of the political debate. He was assisted in this by none other than Bentsen, as we shall see. They both had much to hid, Bush in particular. Not only were many of the President-to-be's friends involved -- along with two of his sons -- but Bush himself, as Vice President, had personally intervened in the federal regulation of a dirty Florida savings and loan that was being looted by people with connections to the Mafia and the CIA. This S&L; ultimately failed, costing taxpayers nearly $700 million.


The S&L; scandal is the vehicle for telling the story about these leading American politicians and businessmen. But the relationships between these individuals and how they control and manipulate public and private institutions is the bigger story. Unless we know who these people are and understand how they operate, we can all look forward to more S&L-type; debacles to come.

The S&L; scandal was almost the perfect crime. The layers of protection and insulation between what the public discovered was going on at the savings and loans and what actually happened with the money were so many and so thick that the crimes and theft would never be completely figured out. And even if the truth were ultimately unearthed, there were additional layers between that revelation and the bringing of those responsible to the bar of justice and recovering the money.

The first and foremost layer of protection is the difficulty in tracking the money from the savings and loans to its ultimate destination. That is why almost no FBI agent, federal prosecutor, S&L; regulator, congressional committee or journalist has been able to track the money. Yet where the money went is really the only thing that matters. The rest of the "facts" that, typically, got investigated, prosecuted and written about were mostly smoke and mirrors, set up to shield who really got the hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers must pay back and to hide what the money was used for.[1]
-----
[1]--A notable exception is the book Inside Job, by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker and Paul Muolo, which nailed down the fact that the savings-and- loan debacle was caused primarily by fraud.
----
The five years that went into this book represent my efforts to peel back all the layers of insulation and protection to get to the real culprits. I have organized this book with that process in mind, to help the reader understand a complicated and confusing subject.

In general, the bulk of the money lost in the S&L; crisis that American citizens must now pay for went to the owners of the property and assets that the more notorious borrowers purchased with money from S&Ls; run by equally infamous owners. This seems to be obvious, yet it somehow got lost in all the hype and hysteria. While Congress, the Justice Department and the press concentrated on the flamboyant borrowers and managers of the S&Ls;, the big recipients of the money -- the wealthy, powerful landowners and property owners -- crept off quietly with their profits.

In the second half of this book, a number of examples will be detailed to show how this happened, and who got the money. For example, one later chapter deals with a $200 million, 21,000-acre land transaction in Florida in which much of the borrowed S&L; money went to a paper company owned by the Du Pont empire, one of the oldest, richest, most powerful bastions of wealth in this country.

We know this because many of the lending documents were pursued by a lone, shrewd, tenacious federal regulator named Kenneth Cureton. However, the unraveling of this transaction was a rare and exceptional event. But even it could not be called a complete victory. The Department of Justice's International Division, the government body through which subpoenas to offshore banks must pass, inexplicably became a brick wall for Cureton's efforts to obtain records on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where a big chunk of the money went -- possibly to buy weapons for Iraq.

Since so many of the crucial documents in this scandal are not available, we are left with the second-best avenue of investigation: finding out who the original property owners were and everything we can about them, and then doing the same thing for the S&L; proprietors and borrowers. The bulk of this book consists of that enterprise.

The evidence uncovered is clear, convincing, and compelling: Members and associates of the Mafia and the United States Central Intelligence Agency were key participants in our nation's savings-and-loan debacle, and some of the richest, most powerful people in the country did business with these participants and profited from the S&L; crisis.

That members of the Mafia and the CIA, two organizations that operate in secrecy and whose members take sacred oaths -- one supposedly dedicated to national security, the other simply to their organizations' security -- may have been working together is not unprecedented in this country. But that fact doesn't make their cooperation any less outrageous.

It is well known that members of the Mafia and the CIA conspired to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. There are other, less substantiated, although credible, allegations regarding the two groups' involvement together in drug smuggling and money laundering in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Caribbean. [2]
----
[2]--The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); The Crimes of Patriots, by Jonathan Kwimy (New York: Norton, 1987); and In Banks We Trust, by Penny Lernoux (Penguin Books, 1986).
----
There are also some curious, ominous connections between members of these groups and JFK-assassination figures Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.


Drawing a straight, direct line from the CIA operatives discussed in this book to the top officials of the CIA and on to the President is extremely difficult because of the way the CIA works. Most of the characters in this book are not the card-carrying bureaucrats and bean counters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They are what are called CIA "assets," who can be someone who turns over an occasional piece of information to the CIA, without even knowing it is for the CIA, all the way up to someone who is continually working for the CIA in covert operations.

A similar and, likewise, important cog in CIA operations is what is known as a cutout. A cutout is a front man or middle man set up to protect the identities of the primary participants. Like an asset, a cutout may or may not know for whom he is working and the actual purpose of his work. (The Mafia also makes use of such cutouts, except they call them "mustaches" or "beards.")

The CIA uses assets and cutouts to maintain one of its prime directives: plausible deniability, or, in other words, "Don't get caught embarrassing the President." (The CIA is the intelligence-gathering and covert-action arm of the President. Perhaps that is the definition journalists should always refer to, rather than just throwing the general term "CIA" around as if it were some sort of independently run mythical loose cannon.) So . . . if an asset or cutout is caught breaking the law, the CIA can deny that its operative was working for it at that particular time.

This leads to one difference between the Mafia and the CIA, particularly in this story. Once it is established that members and associates of the Mafia are involved in a failed savings and loan, that is usually enough to establish, prima facie, the involvement of the Mafia. Members and associates of the Mafia don't do such things without the knowledge, permission and the sharing of the spoils, with their superiors.

The destruction of the savings and loan industry in Texas, and in some other parts of the country, worked basically like an organized-crime bustout or burnout. This is a mob scam in which a failing company is taken over, built up on credit, then drained of all its assets and purposely put into bankruptcy, leaving the creditors holding the bag.

In the case of savings and loans, the credit was federally insured deposits injected by money brokers, like mob associate Mario Renda, and the creditors are the taxpayers. The front men, the cutouts and the "mustaches," like Don Dixon, Tyrell Barker, Ed McBirney, Jarrett Woods, Roy Dailey, Mike Adkinson and Robert Corson, are left to take the blame. But don't feel sorry for them, for they have usually skimmed enough off to offshore bank accounts to make it well worth a couple of years in jail, keeping their mouths shut.

However, because of the CIA's doctrine of plausible deniability, the involvement of a CIA asset in a failed savings and loan does not make a prima facie case for the involvement of the CIA. In fact, I know of no independent test a journalist can conduct to determine whether the involvement of a CIA asset means the CIA has sanctioned it or whether the asset is just freelancing for his own gain. Both possibilities would look the same to an outside observer.

The only way to tell would be if the CIA admitted its involvement or if there were unassailable, documented evidence sh owing S&L; money going from an asset to a CIA operation. This is attainable only by subpoena, if at all. Even in such a case the CIA might deny that it knew the asset was pumping money into the operation or that it knew money came from an S&L.; But if the CIA admitted that, it would be admitting that it is both incompetent and stupid.

In the case of the failed S&Ls;, the CIA has categorically denied its involvement. The CIA did admit to a congressional committee that it had a relationship to five individuals connected to failed savings and loans, and that it had also done business with four savings and loans that later failed. But the spy agency claimed that its business with these S&Ls; was legitimate. however, there are several cases in which there are clear indications that S&L; money went directly to operations that the CIA took part in, even if it didn't overtly control them -- for example, the cases of Iran-Contra and of weapons shipments to the Middle East.

but one thing we can say, categorically: The CIA either knew or didn't know what its operatives were doing at S&Ls.; If it knew, why didn't it stop them or alert the proper authorities? If it didn't know, how effective an intelligence agency could it really be?


Finally, a word about the circumstantial evidence in this book. Circumstantial evidence must necessarily be used because of the secretive nature of the CIA and the unavailability of S&L; documents. The evidence appears many times in this way: A failed S&L; was owned and controlled by people who have done business with Mafia associates and CIA operatives; many of the borrowers were Mafia and CIA associates; many of the original property owners have done business with Mafia and CIA operatives and some of the money disappears in foreign accounts controlled by Mafia and CIA associates.

What does such evidence prove? Based on my research and knowledge of the CIA, I believe it makes it more likely than not that someone in the CIA hierarchy knew about and approved, if not instigated, the S&L; actions of its operatives. In any event, journalists are not in the proof business, we are in the information business. Proof is for mathematicians and courts of law, and even in those arenas, there are great disputes about what constitutes proof. The readers of this book, and the American public, can evaluate the evidence and information in this book for themselves and decide whether it should be acted upon or ignored.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with circumstantial evidence. In our country's courts of law, fortunes and lives can be won or lost, fairly and squarely, on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Juries, as well as readers of this book, may infer facts and conclusions from circumstantial evidence. I have attempted to set out all the facts and circumstantial evidence that I know. In some cases the meanings are clear and conclusions can be drawn. In other places the going gets a little tough, because there is not enough data and evidence to draw meanings and reach conclusions. For this I apologize; i wish I had found more information.

In all, I have tried to follow the injunction of our forefathers, who in proclaiming their thesis in the Declaration of Independence, stated: ". . . let facts be submitted to a candid world."


Admittedly, it is easy to be cynical and discouraged about the situation presented in the following chapters. One question I am constantly asked is: "What can we, the American people, do about this?" There are no quick-and- easy solutions or panaceas. However, like our founding fathers, we should have faith in the liberating power of knowledge and information. If we know how and why something happened, and who benefitted by it, then we will know the right thing to do.


((((Silence of the lambs))))

The American Heritage Dictionary: Lamb - 3. One who can be fleeced, esp. in financial matters; dupe.

Where is the outcry? Where is the outrage? Where is the spirit of patriots of old that rises in the hearts of sober-minded men and women to throw the shackles of slavery off from the backs of the blind and the lost? What act, what deed, what crime, will awaken the hearts of these people and summon the fierce winds of freedom, liberty and justice to move upon the souls of America? Should we shrug off this criminality of the oppressors and the elite? What stronghold will they grab as this once beautiful nation runs to the feet of mammon, while sliding to the pit of corruption, criminality, evil and socialism? Where is the fight? The war was lost, yet not a shot was fired. Do we think these people will somehow just go away, just disappear? Why do men continually run to the keepers of slavery to slog through the mud of socialism and death for a piece of meat, some water and a hypocritical promise and kind word?

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." - Benjamin Franklin

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." - Samuel Adams (1780)

"God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it." - Daniel Webster

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." - Thomas Jefferson - Letter to William Ludlow, 1824

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend on God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die." - George Washington; 1776

"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom... go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels nor arms. May your chains set lightly upon you and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams; 1776

"No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country." - Daniel Webster

"Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world." - Daniel Webster, 1851

"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things." - Adolph Hitler

"Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary: what counts is the issue of control. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property-so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property." - Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff

A Problem With Guns?

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Uncle Bill  posted on  2017-10-29   2:48:00 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: All (#4)

Just close your eyes for a moment, and imagine that it was your child, your wife, your husband. your mom, your dad in the plane.......

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Uncle Bill  posted on  2017-10-29   3:01:24 ET  (1 image) Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: All (#5)

The FBI knows who murdered Kevin Ives & Don Henry

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Uncle Bill  posted on  2017-10-29   3:06:08 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: All (#6)

bttt

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Uncle Bill  posted on  2019-12-15   5:17:57 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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