There's a wealth of detail here that's worth reconnecting with what we've learned since. For instance, it wasn't revealed until recent years that then CIA Director George H.W. Bush made a political deal in mid-1976 with the head of Saudi external intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal, to allow the Saudis to finance and run the sort of covert operations that the Democratic Congress banned after the Church Committee hearings. That deal with code-named, Safari Club. BCCI was the funding vehicle for that illegal operation. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

The result was a series of massive financial rip-offs, development of a Saudi paramilitary capability that became al-Qaeda, and the AQ Khan nuclear network, all of which the Bush wing of the CIA quietly facilitated. The Safari Club was also the start of Saudi penetration of the US political and banking systems, and huge support of the GOP.

What's useful is to look at the details of old news reports, since the corporate media used to actually report a lot of useful details. For instance, after he was fired as CIA Director by President Carter in early 1977, Bush was appointed Director of Houston-based First International Bankshares, owned in part by Joe Allbriton, with foreign offices in London and Luxembourg. BCCI had its major offices in the same locations. After Bush became VP, Allbriton sold out his shares in First Interbank to his crony, Jim Baker III, who owned Republic Bank. The merger went bankrupt a few years later, which became the largest financial bail-out in US history. That set the model for the S&L rip-off, which was also centered in Southwest bank chains in whch BCCI and the Bush clan had a vested interest. Allbriton went on to buy DC-based Riggs Bank, that along with UBS and other BCCI-linked banks, dispersed much of the funds held in diplomatic accounts by the Saudi Embassy in the name of the wife of Prince Bandar (an old friend of the Bush family) to support al-Qaeda cell members in the U.S. who attacked the US on 9/11. It's a small world, after all.

Thanks for posting that.

Another illegal CIA domestic operation. Is the CIA going to lose control of this one, as well?

The CIA ran the al-Qaeda operatives inside the U.S. who carried out the 9/11 attacks. It was an illegal and highly-classified joint-operation with the Saudis and Pakistanis. See, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S002...

It was illegal for several reasons. First, after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, CIA was forced to cut UBL loose, even though he was an important operational asset against the Russians in Bosnia and Chechnya. Even after the '98 East Africa embassy bombings, the US continued to run many of his operatives in various operations. They didn't learn from those lessons.

Second, the CIA continued to bring many of these Islamic fighters into the U.S. after Operation Cyclone was officially closed down after the '93 WTC bombing. The guys who designed and built that bomb were double-agents, but somehow the bomb worked, anyway. They didn't learn from that lesson, either.

The FBI had the formal lead role in domestic counter-terrorism operations, but CIA refused to fully cooperate with the FBI in dealing with the Agency's own assets and programs. No lessons learned, here.

Third, the CIA did not seek FISA warrants to surveil these assets inside the U.S. We now know that FISA is a dead issue.

No top-ranking U.S. intelligence official is going to blow such a program just because he perceives there are risks attached. Even if they know an MEK team were wandering around lose, would they even do anything to stop them without White House orders?

The U.S. still has not admitted it aided either the Bosnian or the Chechyan militants. What about this operation?

Do you understand why nobody would do anything to shut this monster down until and unless the President ordered it?

the keys" for the US Intelligence Community (IC), and knows precisely what electronic surveillance was (and was not) directed at the al-Qaeda cells known to operating inside the country before the attacks, and what was carried out with FISA warrants and what wasn't; (2) he has convinced Congressional overseers and his uniformed colleagues that he, and those immediately under his command, operated properly under the circumstances.

Any pre-9/11 illegalities involving the NSA, such as warrantless phone and internet surveillance, was systematic and approved at the highest levels of the White House (both Clinton and Bush) with Congressional notification.

The decisions to violate FISA were made "above his pay grade", and his Agency carried out what it was told to do.

All this will be coming out. In the meantime, read this for the details: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S002...

It turns out that Scott Ritter was likely the original source for the "mobile bioweapons labs" myth that formed a major part of the Administration' WMD case again Saddam. Ritter admits that the idea for such nonexistent Iraqi equipment was speculation among western weapons inspectors, and that in 1997 he passed this information on to Ahmad Chalabi in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Chalabi's INC organization produced "Curveball", the sham defector who pretended to have first-hand information about such germ warfare trailers. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/06/0...

Similarly, it's fascinating to read David Albright's condemnation of CIA weapons expert David Kay's role in pushing the aluminum tubes theory that also supported Bush's rush to invade Iraq. See, http://www.isis-online.org/publications/ir...

Now, this. Ritter attacks Albright for trumping up evidence about Iran's alleged nuclear program. http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/0... /

A wilderness of mirrors.

The Senate and House leadership (majority AND minority leadership, and heads of both Intel Committees) were in on warrantless wiretapping from 2003 on, just as they were briefed about new torture procedures long before it was revealed in the media. Like the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation techniques", FISA violations went on for years with the Congressional leadership's knowledge before the public learned about it.

Under present law, without change, that makes some very powerful Senators and House leaders – along with White House figures and telco executives -- criminally and civilly liable, and subject to years of being named in law suits and, possible indictment. They know this, and so should you.

The push for amnesty is pure CYA, all the way around. That's why the senior members are now pushing for telco amnesty, while the incumbent President will sign it, knowing that the next one – President Barack Obama -- has vowed not to.

Consider this: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics...




Is FISA reform really necessary now to protect the public? No, of course not. As the NYT explained when the mass eavesdropping was first revealed:



But, it is necessary to save a handful of the most powerful figures in Washington from the legal consequences of some very bad decisions they made in secret during the early years of the Global War on Terrorism. Should they be held accountable for that?

That’s a decision the courts and the people of the United States should make, not those who violated the law.

Don't look the other way because you, too, don't want to know what's going on.

STOP THE FISA REFORM BILL.

The New York Times is trying to sell the story that Iran was the primary client of the A.Q. Khan nuclear network, and received miniaturized warhead designs. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/world/as... That is about as accurate as Judith Miller's stories that Iraq had WMDs.

The fact is, Khan's nuclear program was originally part of the 1976 deal that CIA Director George H.W. Bush made with Princes Kamal Adham and Turki al-Faisal, co-heads of Saudi external intelligence, the GID. In exchange for Saudi funding of U.S. intelligence operations banned by the Democratic Congress since the Church Commmittee hearings, the Agency looked the other way as the Saudis implemented their own covert operations around the world, including Pakistan's bomb program, influence operations and financial frauds inside the U.S., which included BCCI and the S&L scandals.


BCCI was created as the funding vehicle for this joint intelligence operation, called the Safari Club. In addition to bank takeovers, BCCI funded Khan's program to build the Islamic atomic bomb and the develpment of a global Jihadist paramilitary, programs managed by Pakistani ISI intelligence. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

The Pakistanis developed a working bomb during the Reagan-Bush era. Khan then began peddling uranium enrichment centrifuges. Customers included North Korea, Iran, and Libya. These machines were of poor quality, broke down constantly, and generally delayed the progress of those who operated them. Khan's machines also required specialized parts manufactured in third-countries, the importation which the CIA used to monitor the progress of Khan's customers. Khan also peddled A-bomb plans of dubious quality - the North Korean device tested in October 2006 didn't work. The CIA, which worked with Khan, tried to do the same with Iran in the late 1990s -- this was called Operation Merlin -- but the Iranians caught on that the plans were bogus. When Cheney outed Plame, he destroyed the CIA unit that was working with Khan on these Clinton-era deception operations. See, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...

The paramilitary aspect of this also deserves mention. In the late 1970s, the CIA commenced Operation Cyclone , working with GID and ISI to train and equip Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, operations that continued in Bosnia as it eventually morphed into what we know today as al-Qaeda. Key 9/11 leaders were part of ongoing joint CIA-ISI-GID operations in the secret war against the Russians in Chechnya, which allowed these al-Qaeda operatives to freely travel in and out of the US under the sponsorship of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center. The failure of Bush to roll up these CIA-ISI-GID paramilitary operations inside the US -- in spite of the urgings to do so by the CIA during the summer of 2001 -- was the direct cause of the 9/11 attacks. http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

Iran is entirely peripheral to all this.

Just like these:

I. Background: GOP Foreign Influence Peddling

Senator John McCain has proved to be Jack Abramoff’s best friend.

As Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee from 2005-2007, McCain was instrumental in suppressing evidence of Jack Abramoff’s role in directing illegal foreign payoffs to ranking members of the Republican Party.



McCain also did a big favor for Abramoff’s principal partners in crime, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed , identified in the 2006 Committee report as key players in the Choctaw Indian and Marianas Island scandals. Not one of the principal witnesses in the matter were compelled to publicly testify by McCain's panel. The Committee also sequestered 99 percent of the documents it received, and these remain locked away, unseen by the public, in Senate files.

But there’s much more to the scandal than the Indian tribes rip-off McCain did disclose. The strand that runs through all the Abramoff-McCain relationship is foreign money – many, many millions – that Jack, Grover and Ralph funneled to GOP leaders from some of the world’s worst bad guys as part of a foreign influence-peddling operation.

Until Jack was finally indicted on August 11, 2005, he did some truly sinister deals with a long list of bad guys, from al-Qaeda bankers, to Russian intelligence officers, to a South Asian leader involved with rogue nuclear programs. McCain’s role was to limit the disclosures and the political damage that still threaten to destroy the GOP’s foreign funding base and the party’ hopes of ever regaining control in Washington.



II. Senator McCover-up: Why McCain Was Chosen by GOP Leadership to Oversee the Abramoff Investigation

By late 2005, it was becoming clear as the Justice Department started scratching the surface of Abamoff's influence-peddling network that its exposure was going to be politically explosive, and that it was going to blow up the Republicans. Details started coming out that showed the scandal was more sinister than the mere rip-off of Indian tribes by their Washington lobbyists. The Wall Street Journal, observed in article entitled, “Abramoff Scandal Threatens to Embroil GOP” :



The Republican Congressional leadership recognized the problem. McCain was perfectly positioned to be the one to manage it. He had previously served as the Chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, and most importantly, he had some credibility as a “maverick” reformer and a track record of highly publicized enmity with one of the primary suspects as a base to build on. McCain’s talent for damage-control was demonstrated early-on in his Senate career, when he survived his involvement in the Keating Savings & Loan scandal. (See, Pt. 2, http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... )

IV. McCain Covered Up the Malfeasances of his Fellow Senators

So, in 2005, “Straight-Talk” McCain was the natural pick as Chairman of Indian Affairs to replace the former Chair Ben Nighthorse Campbell after his sudden resignation. Campbell’s sudden retirement from the Senate has never really been explained. What we do know is what followed: http://www.washingtonspectator.com/article...



The inquiry initially had a limited mandate. The committee stated it would look into the exploitation of several American Indian tribes by Abramoff and a close circle of GOP lobbyists, including Michael Scanlon, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. Amazingly, none were ever put on the stand under oath and publicly questioned by the Senate Committee. Norquist and Reed were never issued subpoenas to appear. Abramoff and Scanlon refused to testify after being subpoenaed. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/politics... Chairman McCain settled without much apparent fuss on hearing from a few underlings.

It was an obvious conflict of interest to allow McCain to head a body investigating Abramoff’s Indian lobbying, as he had headed the Committee in 1995-97, a time when Abramoff successfully lobbied on behalf of the Choctaw to exempt tribal wagering earnings from proposed federal taxes. http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/njwee...

Also perplexing is McCain’s decision in March to hire former Senator Conrad Burns, who had received $137,000 from Abramoff, as his Montana campaign chairman. Burns lobbied the Interior Committee to disperse some $3 million that had been set aside for underprivileged Indian schools to an Abramoff client, a relatively affluent tribal body in Michigan.
http://neighbors.denverpost.com/blog.php/2... /

Burns lost his seat in 2006, following publication of an article in The Wall Street Journal naming him, along with House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, Rep. Bob Ney (R., Ohio), Rep. John Doolittle (R., Calif.), as the subject of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into Abramoff’s lobbying activities. When allegations of his own wrongdoing spilled out, Burns was quoted as saying he wished Jack “had never been born.” http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/peop...

Oddly, such indiscretions and outbursts by his Senate colleagues don’t seem to bother the man who, after his close call with the Keating scandal, “reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/us/polit...

That McCain’s mission was primarily to contain political fallout and minimize damage to the GOP was never in doubt. Prior to hearings in 2005, Roll Call reported McCain “assured his colleagues that his expanding investigation into the activities of a former GOP lobbyist and a half-dozen of his tribal casino clients is not directed at revealing ethically questionable actions by Members of Congress.” Paul Kane, Roll Call, “McCain Won’t Target Members” ( March 9, 2005), http://www.rollcall.com/issues/50_85/news/... When a batch of Abramoff e-mails were released in March, 2006, McCain’s office redacted all the names of the members of Congress who had a “positive response” to Abramoff’s lobbying. http://wampum.wabanaki.net/vault/2006/03/0...


V. McCain’s Missing Documents

Indeed, the Abramoff scandal seems to have become “The Case of the Amazing Vanishing Corruption Investigation”, as Scott Horton recently described it in Harper’s. http://harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-900...

While the Committee never heard from the principals in the case, what it did receive were their records. As Committee Chairman, John McCain made shrewd use of Senate rules to subpoena 750,000 pages of documents related to Abramoff’s lobbying -- literally tons of Abramoff scandal documents – billing records, memos, appointment calendars -- keeping 99.7 percent of them out of the record, and buried the rest in locked files in the basement of the Hart Senate Office Building . http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/23/03...

This scandal eerily parallels an earlier betrayal of Native American peoples overseen by John McCain while he was Chairman of that Indian Affairs Committee. McCain has served on the Committee since 1987, and previously headed the committee between 1995 and 1997, a period when the Indian Lands Trust scandal was in full-bloom for the rip-off of billions of dollars worth of land leases supposedly held in trust by the federal government.

During that scandal, as well, McCain made many statements sympathetic to the plight of exploited native peoples, gaining his vaunted reputation as a “maverick” Republican, but nothing was really done for the victims by his committee. It was during this period that the tribes finally filed federal suit, Cobell v. Babbitt , and it was then learned that the Interior Department had destroyed 162 boxes of documents needed by plaintiffs to prove the cases in court. http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/usic.htm Further rounds of document destructions came to light, and the federal government has continued to resist settling the case. http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_i... This appalling breech of trust led to a comment in The National Catholic Observer: http://ncronline.org/NCR_Online/archives2/...



Next, we see how McCain misused his power as Chairman to limit the scope of public hearings into how Abramoff, Norquist and a circle of GOP lobbyists and politicians sucked up millions from foreign sources linked to terrorism and espionage, violated lobbying laws to change U.S. policy, and then funneled huge wads of cash back to the Bush White House along with Republican Congressional campaign coffers.

VI. McCain’s Trusted Role in Protecting the GOP Foreign-Money Machine.

Abramoff and Norquist operated a foreign influence-peddling network that funneled money to the Bush White House and selected Republican Congressmen from the dirtiest of dirty money sources, including terrorist bankers and ex-KGB oil barons. According to Newsweek: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506Y....



In addition, between 1999 and 2005, Abramoff, entities under his control, and his clients “gave a total of $4.4 million to more than 240 members of Congress.” http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-0... The largest recipient of that largesse was Arizona Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth, who received $101,620, before he was defeated in the 2006 election. Large amounts of cash, $217,000, even filtered down to two GOP Arizona State Senators. http://www.azcongresswatch.com/?p=922

Much of that money came out of GOP slush funds controlled by Abramoff and his confederates. What the public wasn’t told by McCain was that a large portion of the income taken in by Abramoff and others came from sources under investigation by U.S intelligence and counter-terrorism. McCain withheld from public release the vast bulk of subpoenaed lobbying records related to a period when Abramoff engaged in extremely serious improprieties on behalf of those non-Indian tribe clients, including:

• In the months immediately after 9/11, Abramoff worked with Grover Norquist to lobby the Bush Administration on behalf of a Saudi banker, Saleh Abdullah Kamel, Chairman of Dallah al Baraka Group (DBG), accused of being a longtime financier of Osama bin Laden. Kamel, who is worth a reported $2.6 billion, was the primary owner of the Sudanese and Saudi banks used by bin Laden to build his al-Qaeda network after his 1991 expulsion from Saudi Arabia. As owner of Dallah Avco, Kamel employed Omar al-Bayoumi, who shepherded the Flight 77 hijackers immediately after their arrival in the U.S. http://houseoflabor.tpmcafe.com/story/2005... ; reproduced at: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu... ? The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Kamel’s name nor Dallah al Baraka. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

• In 2002, Abramoff and Scanlon received a $1.2 million fee to set up a White House meeting between George W. Bush and the leader of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamed, who was viewed as persona nongratis by some in the State Dept. for human rights abuses and his oft-repeated condemnations of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0... Mohamed’s visit, which was arranged with the help of Karl Rove, was also resisted by some in U.S. intelligence and law enforcement as Malaysia had not been fully cooperative in counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda, including its allegedly botched surveillance of the al-Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur in early January 2000, at which the 9/11 and USS Cole attacks were planned. http://web.archive.org/web/20030812200356/... ; c.f., http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/lsr32/artic... Malaysia was also a hub of the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan. http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0... Western intelligence services linked a Malaysian holding company, Kaspudu Sendirian Berhad, which is owned by the Malaysian prime minister’s only son, Kamaluddin Abdullah, to Khan’s network. Time Magazine reported that Abdullah’s holding, Scomi Precision Engineering, fulfilled a $3.5 million contract to build components for 14 uranium enrichment centrifuges that ended up being shipped to Libya’s nuclear program. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/... The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Mohamed’s name nor makes reference to Rove’s involvement. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

* Abramoff and Scanlon set themselves up as intermediaries for deals involving Malaysian gas and oil interests in Sudan, where U.S. companies are legally banned from doing business. The Washington Post stated, “Another Abramoff financial vehicle was the nonprofit American International Center, a Rehoboth Beach, Del., ‘think tank’ set up by Scanlon, who staffed it with beach friends from his summer job as a lifeguard. The center became a means for Abramoff and Scanlon to take money from foreign clients that they did not want to officially represent. Some of the funds came from the government of Malaysia. Banks and oil companies there were making deals in Sudan, where U.S. companies were barred on human rights grounds. Sudan was among several oil-rich nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East that Abramoff eyed as venues for lucrative energy deals. Abramoff told associates he wanted to become a go-to person for U.S. companies seeking to do business with oil-patch nations.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte... The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report makes no mention of Abramoff’s lobbying on behalf of Malaysian interests in Sudan. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

• The fees paid Abramoff and Scanlon by Malaysia funneled through AIC were allegedly laundered through Edward Fuelner, President of the Heritage Foundation. A report issued on May 12, 2005 by Democrats.org stated that Fuelner had previously done business with Abramoff with Malaysian clients: “In August 2001, DeLay led a delegation to Malaysia where he attended informal meetings and a fancy dinner in his honor given by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in Kuala Lumpur. Jack Abramoff attended the dinner thrown in DeLay's honor. Edwin Feulner was president of the Heritage foundation at the time of the trip. Feulner also went to Malaysia , saying that, "I sat by the pool while they played golf." Feulner worked for Belle Haven Consultants as a senior advisor. Official travel disclosure stated that the Heritage Foundation sponsored the travel. However, Time magazine reported that former Wyoming Senator Malcolm Wallop, a Heritage senior fellow who was on the trip, said Heritage did not pay for the trip and that Belle Haven Consultants, a for-profit, Hong Kong-based firm linked to the Malaysian government, played a key role. According to Wallop, "Heritage had nothing to do with it… Belle Haven did." Both DeLay's office and the Heritage Foundation insist Heritage paid for the trip. (Time, 4/25/05; Washington Post, 4/17/05; Member Travel Disclosure Form, 3/19/02]. “ http://www.democrats.org/a/2005/05/abramof... The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Fuelner’s name, the Heritage Foundation, nor Belle Haven Consultants. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

* Also withheld by McCain were documents related to $3.4 million in fees received from executives of NaftaSib, a Russia energy company. According to The Washington Post, NaftaSib “has business ties with Russian security institutions.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A... Other sources specify that Abamoff and DeLay received that money from operatives working for the GRU (Russian military intelligence) as part of an influence operation. http://www.afpc.org/rrm/rrm302.htm Abramoff worked from 1997-2005 with former Tom DeLay advisor Ed Buckham. About $60,000 was spent on a six-day 1997 Russian trip for Tom DeLay, Buckham, and Abramoff. In 1998, $1 million was sent to Buckham via his organization U.S. Family Network to "influence DeLay's vote in 1998 on legislation that helped make it possible for the IMF to bail out the faltering Russian economy." DeLay voted for the legislation. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic... The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report makes no reference to Abramoff’s Russian lobbying, Russian intelligence, or to NaftaSib. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

• Naftasib executives later assisted DeLay in obtaining sniper equipment and evading U.S. export license requirements for shipment to settlers groups on the West Bank. . http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/... A footnote in the report makes a brief reference to the diversion of funds from Indian tribes to purchase sniper equipment for export to Israeli settlers. The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report makes no reference to Abramoff’s Russian lobbying nor to the role of NaftaSib in his efforts to evade U.S. arms export regulations. (See, http://indian.senate.gov/public/_files/Rep... )

McCain’s inquiry touched on issues that went far astray from a look into the exploitation of several American Indian tribes by Abramoff and a close circle of GOP lobbyists, including Robert Scanlon, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. However, where the investigation unearthed other, more serious illegalities, these were simply skipped over, and omitted from the record.

About a year after it began its formal investigation, however, the Committee subpoenaed all of Jack Abramoff’s recent lobbying records, along with those of Norquist, Reed and Scanlon. The Committee staff received the electronic files from Jack’s former employers: the lobbying firm, Preston Gates, from 1995 to 2000, and Greenberg Traurig, LLP, a law firm with close GOP ties, where Abramoff worked from 2000 to 2004. These firms were tied to the scandal and McCain held their fate in his hands. When printed out, these amounted to an estimated 750,000 pages. McCain’s Committee would end up releasing only a small faction of these, a mere 4800 pages. Dozens of boxes of documents remain sequestered in Committee files pursuant to arrangements that McCain and the GOP majority imposed on the committee. See, page 6 of the Final Report; also, see, Dennis Greenia (“dengre”), Daily Kos, Jack Abramoff: John McCain’s other Lobbyist problem, ( Feb 22, 2008), http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/2/23/03...

VII. Conclusion

By withholding most of the evidence received in response to his broad subpoena, McCain managed to cover-up the larger picture of the political work Abramoff did for his clients, some of which was clearly contrary to the U.S. national interest. This has thwarted the efforts of investigators outside McCain’s committee to independently examine the bulk of the record, which remains hidden.

However, it is completely consistent with McCain’s role as a career cover-up specialist for the foreign influence-peddling and financial frauds of the Republican Party.
_________________________________________
Copyright 2008. Mark G. Levey

Part 2: McCain’s 30-Years of Service to Saudi Bank Raiders and Junk Bond Kings

From BCCI, to Milken’s Junk Bond Kings, to Jack Abramoff, Senator John McCain has long provided the clean All-American face to the dirty job of cleaning up after the looting of America.

Senator John McCain has made a career out of serving the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its army of lobbyists, bagmen, and corrupt bankers during the last three decades.

In the process, he has done his part to cover-up BCCI’s looting of American banks and S&Ls, helped Ahmed Chalabi sell phony Iraq WMD information to Senate colleagues and to his constituents (see, Part 1, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... ), and more than anyone else, limited the public’s awareness of Jack Abamoff’s wholesale foreign buyout of the GOP, activities that individually have killed the careers of other Washington luminaries. Yet, somehow, John McCain remains the last man standing. He even appears to keep his hands clean.



The Saudi-Manchurian Candidate

The Senator’s patented role as All-American influence peddler to the world now includes the latest flap over his national campaign finance co-chair’s lucrative deals as a Saudi lobbyist and revelations about possible violations of federal campaign laws.

Tom Loeffler, McCain’s finance co-chair received $15 million from Saudi clients since 2002, is just part of a long conduit in the petrodollar pipeline from Riyadh to the Senator from Arizona. The Loeffler Group, which he founded, has also represented the People’s Republic of China.

Under Loeffler, the campaign has brought in more than $50 million for McCain so far this year, far more than was raised during all of 2007 when the GOP candidate faced a weak field of primary competitors. OpenSecrets.com shows that Loeffler and his wife, Nancy, have made a total of fifteen $2,300 maximum personal contributions to McCain during the past year.

The latest revelation of McCain’s connection to Arab oil money, and corruption within his campaign, came after the May 17 issue of NEWSWEEK reported: http://www.newsweek.com/id/137522



Burgeson reportedly represented the Gulf emirate state of Qatar, along with several major multinational energy companies. See, http://radio.weblogs.com/0145903/2008/05/2...

McCain is, indeed, in good favor among the Saudi and Gulf elites. Bloomberg reports: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...



When McCain belatedly ordered his campaign to sever Loeffler, Nelson and Burgeson he may have wished he could so easily jettison the rest of the crude oil covered skeletons from his closet.

Like the Bush Family, McCain had his Hand in the BCCI and S&L Scandals

McCain claims that his involvement in the Keating S&L scandal wasn’t really much to worry ourselves about. He was all but exonerated by his Senate colleagues, he says, let off with the political equivalent of a warning at a traffic stop. In fact, the Senate Ethics Committee was rather lenient with all five caught up in the scandal. But, that says more about the nature of the Senate than it does about the actual damage done to the American public by the financial crimes that led to the S&L collapse, itself.

The S&L crisis was all about oil, junk bonds, and deregulation that allowed the two to mix. That volatile brew is still actively bubbling over,and taxpayers are still paying $30 billion annual installments toward the trillion dollar bailout.

Here's how you got stuck paying the bill, courtesy of the Bush family and John McCain.

In the mid-1980s, world oil prices plunged which set off a long series of bankruptcies and financial takeovers when overvalued Texas and southwestern land prices collapsed. The financial panic of 1988 also followed the “reform” of federal banking rules that had allowed bank managers to trade in risky new derivatives and junk bonds.

This tidal wave of bankruptcies in the oil patch created a huge buying opportunity for anyone with ready cash. The problem was, these were hard times on Wall Street after the sudden panic sell-off on October 1987. But, someone did step in once prices were sufficiently discounted. Huge bank holding companies scooped up looted banks and S&Ls (along with their land deeds and oil rights), bought out for pennies on the dollar after they went belly-up. The federal government even subsidized many of these purchases. The American taxpayer was left with an estimated $1 trillion bailout cost. The epicenters of this late 20th Century white collar crime wave were in Houston and Phoenix, home base for two highly ambitious GOP politicians. One was named George H.W. Bush, and the other John McCain, III.

McCain and BCCI, the Bush Bank

Before he was selected to as Ronald Reagan’s 1980 running mate, George H.W. Bush had a short and little-known career as an international banker. That effectively started in 1976, while Bush was still CIA Director, a post he held for part of the Nixon and Ford Administration. In the final months of the Ford presidency, Bush made a deal with the newly-appointed head of Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Prince Turki al-Faisal. The two spy chiefs agreed the CIA would look the other way while the Saudis ran their own global operations. In exchange, the Saudis financed the sort of black ops that had been banned by the Democratic Congress after Watergate and the Church Committee hearings. The arrangement was called “The Safari Club” , and the funding mechanism for this was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “BCCI”. See, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/8/146... ; http://www.saudiembassy.net/2006News/State...

Newly-elected President Jimmy Carter fired the CIA Director. In early 1977, Houston banker Joe Allbritton appointed Bush to direct his First International Bancshares (dba, First Interbank) and its London and Luxembourg affiliates. According to Kevin Phillips, Bush’s bank was among the first outposts in America for BCCI. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0111-0... In the early 1980s, Allbritton followed G.H.W. to Washington, purchasing Riggs Bank, installing brother Jonathan Bush as a Director.

Riggs closed in 2004 after being fined $25 million dollars for violation of federal money laundering and anti-terrorism laws. Riggs had catered to high-end foreign customers and the diplomatic trade in Washington, as well as having “a relationship” with the CIA. http://www.slate.com/id/2112015 / After 9/11, the bank was found to have transferred money from Saudi Embassy accounts that ended up supporting two of the 9/11 hijackers, Flt. 77 leaders Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khaleed al-Midhar after their arrival in the U.S. See, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/b...

Know Your Banking Customer: Salem Bin Laden

Meanwhile, back in Texas, First Interbank merged with Jim Baker’s Republic Bank, in which the Saudis had taken a stake with the 1978 purchase of the bank’ headquarters building by members of the Bin-Laden and bin-Mahfouz families. The merger of these two Texas banks several years later created the largest regional financial institution in the U.S. Infused with capital from Saudi Arabia, First RepublicBank went on a massive bargain buying binge in the Southwest oil patch. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2004/mar/3...

This Saudi-financed merger of the Bush bank with the Baker bank created the nation’s largest bank holding company, and soon the largest bank failure, resulting in a $1 billion tax-payer funded bailout in 1987. This was to become a pattern for the trillion dollar rip-off to come. See, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...

McCain's Role in Covering Up the The Trillion Dollar Bank Heist

It’s been said that the American people didn’t become very angry about the S&L crisis because the explanations given for what caused it were too complicated for many to comprehend. That seems to have set a pattern for financial scandals to follow. Nobody dared tell the American public – although the 1992 Kerry Commission report came close -- that their financial system was being looted by a well-funded, highly-organized global criminal organization with ties to half a dozen of the world’s most powerful intelligence services, including elements of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. They didn't name CIA Headquarters, "The George H.W. Bush Intelligence Center" for nothing. See,
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b...



Buried in all this muck is the thread running through all these financial scandals – from Keating to Silverado to First RepublicBank to BCCI to Enron -- has been corrupt management, corrupt officials, corrupt intelligence operatives, and corrupt auditors. See, http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/92jan/st...

As the group’s scams became more sophisticated and wide-ranging, the price tag for bail-outs escalated. The federal rescue of Neil Bush’ Silverado S&L cost the taxpayer $1.3 billion. The price tag for Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings & Loan bailout eventually reached $2.6 billion. http://www.slate.com/id/1004633 BCCI was termed “the $20-billion-plus heist.” (Beatty, Jonathan; S.C. Gwynne. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI Beard Books (1993)). Finally, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) estimated that Enron fleeced ratepayers of $30 billion, creating the 2001 California energy crisis. On November 15, 2005, FERC settled with Enron’s receivers for a mere $1.5 billion. http://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/in...

The Keating S&L scandal was part of a now-familiar pattern of transnational commodities price-fixing, land grabs, stock-price rigging, fraudulent audits, financial panic, and public bailouts, all carried out by an overlapping cast of characters with ties to foreign and domestic intelligence agencies. Amidst the financial panic of 1986-88 that followed the drop of a barrel of oil from $39 to $13, many of these banks and S&Ls (and their land deeds and oil rights) were bought out for pennies on the dollar. More than a thousand deregulated financial institutions went belly up and were looted. Deregulation allowed crooked bank managers to cash in on the junk bond craze that was sweeping Wall Street. Banks and S&Ls issued unsecured notes and plots of land and traded them in circles with other institutions to ring up the notional value to support cash-out loans for themselves and their partners.

This is precisely the sort of round-robin games that Neil Bush, Director of Silverado S&L played with Charles Keating and his partners, Saudi European Investment Corp’s board and officers – Roger Tamraz, Tolat Othman, Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, Abbas Gokal -- along with other BCCI players. All told, the S&L scandal left the American taxpayer holding the tab for an estimated $1 trillion bailout. See, Steven Wilmsen: Silverado: Neil Bush and the Savings & Loan Scandal, p. 81; http://www.netmagic.net/~franklin/SS1.html ;
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:IpskRJ... ;
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getc...

It was during this period that the Saudis and Gulf states leveraged their earnings from American bank acquisitions through junk-bond mills, and then moved on to the 1996 Chemical-Chase and Citi banks consolidations in New York. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html... Today, Prince Alaweed’s Kingdom Holdings owns a substantial and growing share of Citicorp, the largest bank in America, along with a portfolio of the nation’s largest financial, technology and media corporations. A similar process of slash and burn acquisition of the U.S. financial industry is now going on with the collapse of the U.S. mortgage and derivatives markets. See, http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/week... ; http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/business...

A major figure in the Keating S&L case was Carl Linder, known as the “father figure” to junk bond king Michael Milken, and the single largest purchaser of Milken’s junk bonds. http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_re...



To recap, the context of the Keating S&L scandal was manipulation of world oil prices following the 1979 Iranian revolution and a loosening of regulatory oversight that set off a wave of bank failures across the American oil patch. Into this mix enters BCCI’s global raiders and junk bond traders, who cash cow the giant bank holding companies and leverage their assets into a play to take over the American banking industry. Finally, to top it off, the Bush presidency and elements of U.S. intelligence engage in a massive cover up of these global financial mechanizations in an effort to protect their international partners. It’s in this context that one needs to re-examine the role of John McCain in the Keating S&L scandal. McCain has always been a conciliator and clean-up specialist – in the case of the Keating S&L, the purpose was to protect a group of junk bond salesmen and Arab bank raiders, but, most of all to shield the Bush wing of the CIA and corrupt lawmakers – and put an attractive, all-American face of “reform” on cleaning up the mess afterwards. This is precisely the coverup routine McCain repeated twenty years later in the Abramoff case.

McCain and Enron

Throughout his career, McCain has been an enthusiastic champion of financial industry deregulation as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee from 1997-2001 and 2003-2005. McCain voted, according to a Washington Post financial columnist, with his “campaign's general co-chairman and domestic policy adviser, former Texas senator Phil Gramm. The Politico's Lisa Lerer reports that not only did Gramm author the 1999 legislation that repealed Glass-Steagall, the New Deal law restricting the speculative activities of banks, but after Gramm left the Senate, he lobbied Congress on behalf of the Swiss bank UBS when the banking lobby wanted Congress to overturn state laws restricting predatory lending and the issuance of mortgages to prospective home owners who could not afford them.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte... McCain, like Gramm, has been a supporter of the “Enron Loophole” that allowed Amaranth Advisors hedge fund, a commodities futures trading company, to attempt in 2006 to corner the natural gas market, a criminal violation for which the fund was recently handed a $300 million fine. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/051908a...

McCain also has a direct connection with Enron, having received money in campaign contributions from Ken Lay’s Death Star. "We're all tainted by the millions and millions of dollars that were contributed by Enron executives," John McCain told CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. McCain then acknowledged receiving $9,500 from Enron in two campaigns. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/... Gramm’s wife, Wendy, was on the Enron Board of Directors, and Gramm was the architect of much of the “reform” while he chaired the Senate Banking Committee, including a move to exempt electronic trading of electricity from regulatory oversight. According to Time Magazine, Gramm and his wife were at the forefront of many of the illicit practices that led to the firm’s massive ripoffs and ultimate collapse:



McCain claims that his role in Keating was merely to help out a local constituent in dealing with Washington bank regulators. McCain, his current wife, and father-in-law were, in fact, Charles Keating’s business partners in a Phoenix shopping mall, received in excess of one hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions from Keating, and accompanied Keating on his private jet to his private resort in the Bahamas on multiple occasions, gifts which McCain did not report until they were discovered. Yet, McCain, hand-picked as Barry Goldwater’s successor, got a slap on the wrist from the Senate Ethics Committee when this came out in the Keating-Five inquiry.

A second Senate panel wasn’t so sanguine. The 1992 Kerry Commission report concluded that the Keating affair was far more serious than a mere domestic banking scandal: “the financial dealings of BCCI directors with Charles Keating and several Keating affiliates and front-companies, includ(e) the possibility that BCCI related entities may have laundered funds for Keating to move them outside the United States.” http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b... Out of the five Senators accused, only McCain and Glenn ever ran again for office, with McCain the sole survivor.
____________________________________________
2008. Mark G. Levey.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: McCain’s Coverup of Abramoff’s Foreign Money Pipeline to the GOP

who claim they didn't even bother to read the CIA documents, but went ahead anyway and advocated on the Senate floor in favor of the IWR?

What about them? If Bush committed mass murder, they must surely be held accountable as accessories to the same murders.

The Seven Sisters (actually, today, there are just four) still have a lock on refining and retailing. They buy crude in long-term contracts at a price set two or three years ago. Some of this, they sell on the NYMEX at spot market price to raise extra cash.

Buy low - sell high.

That's why they're making multi-billion dollar profits.

Oh, yes, the U.S. is still the world's third largest producer, 8.7 mbbl/day. Canada is our largest source of imports, and we could do without Saudi imports, altogether, if we had to. See below.

A strong Executive that wasn't in their pocket would have the oil company executives up against a wall with their pockets turned inside out.

Canada remained the largest exporter of total petroleum in March, exporting 2.303 million barrels per day to the United States, which is a decrease from last month (2.464 thousand barrels per day). The second largest exporter of total petroleum was Saudi Arabia with 1.542 million barrels per day.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petrole...


Crude Oil Imports (Top 15 Countries)
(Thousand Barrels per Day)
Country Mar-08 Feb-08 YTD 2008 Mar-07 YTD 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CANADA 1,727 1,920 1,863 1,780 1,825
SAUDI ARABIA 1,535 1,614 1,541 1,216 1,325
MEXICO 1,232 1,231 1,220 1,621 1,475
NIGERIA 1,138 982 1,097 1,290 1,156
VENEZUELA 858 945 980 1,036 1,033
IRAQ 773 780 697 523 464
ANGOLA 375 341 429 696 570
ALGERIA 232 191 264 501 484
ECUADOR 231 169 217 191 214
BRAZIL 188 169 175 209 174
KUWAIT 178 261 225 288 208
COLOMBIA 120 220 169 108 107
RUSSIA 108 80 68 193 92
CHAD 101 89 103 66 74
UNITED KINGDOM 95 60 80 77 90

So, this professor at Perdue, Alok Chaturvedi, and DARPA think they can map all of mankind and predict the future with a computer program, Sentient World Simulation (SWS)- just who does he think he is, Hari Seldon?

Foundation Review: Foundation marks the first of a series of tales set so far in the future that Earth is all but forgotten by humans who live throughout the galaxy. Yet all is not well with the Galactic Empire. Its vast size is crippling to it. In particular, the administrative planet, honeycombed and tunneled with offices and staff, is vulnerable to attack or breakdown. The only person willing to confront this imminent catastrophe is Hari Seldon, a psychohistorian and mathematician. Seldon can scientifically predict the future, and it doesn't look pretty: a new Dark Age is scheduled to send humanity into barbarism in 500 years. He concocts a scheme to save the knowledge of the race in an Encyclopedia Galactica. But this project will take generations to complete, and who will take up the torch after him? The first Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) won a Hugo Award in 1965 for "Best All-Time Series." It's science fiction on the grand scale; one of the classics of the field.

Read Asimov's Foundation (it's only about 3,000 pages) and then the article about Sentient World Simulation (3 pages), and you'll see what I'm saying: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/se... /

What a waste of resources: Seldon's efforts didn't save the Empire in Asimov's books, and soon this empire will also pass, forgotten, into a distant future. Watch out for The Mule.