The Crimes and Cover-Ups of John McCain

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The Crimes and Cover-Ups of John McCain

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:01 am

Part 1: McCain's Role in the WMD Cover up

Monday, 9 June 2008, 12:34 am
Column: Mark G. Levey
The Crimes and Cover-Ups of John McCain Part 1



McCain's Role in the WMD Cover up


John McCain and Charlie Black’s War
How a Senator and a Lobbyist Led the Deception Campaign
that Tricked the U.S.
By Mark G. Levey
Part 2, Part 3

Who’s responsible for the “intelligence failure” that plunged the U.S. into the Iraq War? As much as anyone else, that distinction is shared by two Americans who discovered and nurtured Ahmad Chalabi and “Curveball”, and pushed their fortunes in Washington.

One of those men is currently the presumptive Republican candidate for President of the United States, and the other is his chief political fixer.

This is the story about how they did it, and then shifted the spotlight of intelligence failure, political scandal, and criminal conspiracy off themselves.

***
Here are some key events to keep in mind as the Iraq War deception unfolds:

1998-2003 - John McCain enthusiastically espoused the delusion about cheap and easy Middle East wars, and sponsored Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.) organization, even though the CIA had cut it off for producing faulty intelligence.
1998 - McCain was a co-sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act that led to the creation of a false intelligence factory that replaced CIA Iraq reporting. He led charges in the Senate about Iraqi WMD programs that U.S. intelligence was reporting didn’t exist.
2001-2003 - Using $100 million allocated by the Act cosponsored by McCain, Ahmed Chalabi’s I.N.C. generated the false intelligence about nonexistent mobile bioweapons labs cited as part of the case for the Iraq invasion. I.N.C. Chalabi’s group was paid $335,000 a month in the lead-up to the Iraq war to gather intelligence.
2003 - McCain and four other Republican Senators made an appeal to Bush to “personally clear the bureaucratic roadblocks within the State Department” that stood in the way of even more funding for the I.N.C. McCain acted as a character witness for Chalabi, stating “He’s a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart.”
Prior to advocating in favor of the October, 2002 Iraq War Resolution, McCain read the classified CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), and was briefed on multiple occasions about it. While he knew that U.S. intelligence was split over Iraq WMDs, McCain never said anything publicly about the other view contained in the classified documents in which he had been given special access.
05/03 – present - Even after the Iraq WMD deception and failed occupation became clear, McCain has refused to acknowledge that he had been wrong all along about the justifications for the Iraq War, and says he would vote again for that war, and again vote to fund Chalabi.
Senator McCain still avoids taking responsibility for his role in the Iraq intelligence failure, perhaps for no better reason than he kept some distance between himself and operatives at the Pentagon and in the Office of the Vice President who actually carried out the policy, some of whom were later convicted of espionage and related charges.
1997-present - The McCain campaign’s chief publicist, Charlie Black, a powerful GOP lobbyist, has protected and promoted the cause of Ahmad Chalabi’s I.N.C. organization in Washington since 1997, and also played a major role in spreading I.N.C. disinformation.
1997-present – As the Iraq War plan developed, Black’s lobbying firm has received hundreds of millions from U.S. companies doing Iraq War related business, a substantial portion of the profits from which Black has funneled back to McCain and other prominent GOP leaders
Iraq War: Made in the USA

The conventional telling of the Iraq War story starts and stops with a motley group of exiled Iraqi businessmen, dissident scientists and professional conmen associated with the Iraqi National Congress (I.N.C.).

Most Americans instantly recognize only two names in connection with the Iraq WMD “intelligence failure”: Ahmad Chalabi, the group’s leader and “Curveball”, an engineer who claimed to have been working inside Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons programs at the time of his defection to Germany in 1998.

The I.N.C. exiles are often portrayed as masters of deception who by their own home-made ingenuity cooked up the raw intelligence that tricked much of the Washington establishment. We are expected to believe that, they alone, made Senators and spies believe – incorrectly -- that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and “mushroom clouds” would soon be seen over American cities.

The story being told about Saddam Hussein’s WMD was, of course, a lie. And, the easiest thing to do after it was found out was to attach blame for the “intelligence failure” onto a shady cell of foreign outcasts and Arabic-speaking oddballs bearing false documents and phony eyewitness accounts.

The truth is, the Iraq “intelligence failure” was more than anything else a case of deliberate and willful self-deception and bullying by a group of powerful Washington insiders – led by Vice President Dick Cheney, along with John McCain on Capitol Hill, and Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon -- who wanted to demonstrate that they, rather than the professional military and CIA, knew best how to start, fight, and (they thought) quickly and easily win wars in the Middle East.

Second only to scapegoating Iraqis, the official Washington narrative contains another deceptive subtext: everyone wants to pretend the Iraq WMD operation was somehow free of any partisan motivation. That too, as we shall see, is a g-d damned lie, papered over by the active participation of neoconservative Democrats, particularly Joe Lieberman. Ranking GOP Senators and Congressmen, along with their aides and allies in the network of conservative Republican dominated think-tanks and lobbying shops were instrumental in creating I.N.C., and keeping it generously funded during the 1990s until the disaster in Iraq was fully realized in 2005.

In starkest, bottom-line terms, the U.S. went to war in 2003 as the result of frustration by GOP Congressional leaders and neoconservative operatives at what they viewed as the Clinton Administration’s refusal to “finish off” Saddam Hussein. Starting in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was defeated, lobbying started for regime change in Baghdad. Of course, Bush, Sr. and his advisors had quite intentionally avoided overthrowing Saddam. In 1991, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was quoted by the New York Times as saying,
If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

Nonetheless, almost immediately after Clinton took office, voices were raised calling for regime change. Conservative critics in Washington intensified their crusade in the second term as Hussein retained his grasp despite sanctions and periodic air strikes against of his remaining defenses in Operation Desert Fox. In 1997, after a failed uprising and incompetent coup attempt launched by Chalabi’s orders, against the advice of U.S. officials, the CIA cut-off I.N.C. As Robert Baer, who was the CIA officer on the ground in Iraq, Chalabi essentially sacrificed the Kurdish resistance in defiance of Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake.

The response of the Washington political establishment was passage in 1998 of the Iraq Liberation Act, which mandated even greater spending on I.N.C. and six other opposition groups. During hearings on the Iraq Liberation Act, a parade of ranking U.S. military and intelligence officers led by Gen, Anthony Zinni clearly warned Congress of the dangers and futility of the plan to overthrow Saddam’s government by “regime change”.

Leading the charge on Capitol Hill was Senator McCain, along with his colleague, Joseph Lieberman, both vociferous advocates of regime change, focusing from an early date on the danger they described about Iraq’ arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Here’s McCain and Lieberman at a January 28, 1999 hearing:

Sen. McCain also pressed Zinni as to what Operation Desert Fox had
achieved, asking about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs,
"How much has that been set back?" Zinni replied, "We didn't attack
that. That's very difficult because many of the plants that could
produce that are pharmaceutical plants or agricultural chemical
production plants. It's easy in dual-use facilities like that, to
produce it. Biological it's even less difficult in labs."
McCain asked, "So conceivably they could continue their development
of biological and chemical weapons, put it on a Scud missile and attack
Israel?" Zinni replied, "That's possible, yes, sir."

Sen. Lieberman said, "The report that Mr. Butler of UNSCOM
submitted to the Security Council earlier this week just confirms all of
our fears that Saddam and Iraq remain a threat, that they have weapons
of mass destruction and capability to deliver them, and it gives--it
should give all of us a sense of real urgency about trying to deal with
this problem and him, particularly." Global Security

That's the political background against which one may understand, why, from Day One, the incoming Bush-Cheney White House was obsessed with invading Iraq. By a number of informed accounts, Iraq was all that Bush's national security team could think and talk about, ignoring expert advice to protect the country against other known threats, such as al-Qaeda cells inside the U.S.

Where Cheney and others could not find sufficient justification in intelligence findings to sell Congress and the UN on invading a sovereign country – a legal nicety that still could not be ignored, even after 9/11 – these officials were quite happy to have evidence manufactured for them by Chalabi’s network, and to loot the U.S. Treasury to pay for it. Those intelligence officers who questioned the construction within the Pentagon and CIA of elaborate stovepipes and “cells” generating falsified data were pushed aside, and those career officers, such as CIA officer Valerie Plame and Lt. Col. Karen Kwaitowski at DIA, who visibly resisted, had their programs and careers destroyed.

But, the story about the I.N.C.-OSP-OVP pipeline has been often told. What still needs to be examined – what avert their eyes from – is the part played by key Members of Congress, including John McCain, in laying the groundwork and funding the Iraq intelligence deception.

John McCain was certainly at the center of this. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, he was Chairman or Ranking Minority Member of the Senate Commerce Committee, as well as a sitting Member on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He used his particular credibility and influence with the U.S. military to sell a fraudulent intelligence product.

Indeed, the principal cause of the “intelligence failure” behind the Iraq war is much closer to home than is officially acknowledged, and the chief culprits speak imperfect English with an American Mid-western and Dixie accents. Among public office holders, the chief sponsors for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress in the years leading up to the 2003 invasion was a group of GOP leaders and Congressional Committee heads, including Tent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and John McCain.

In October, 1998, after the CIA cut its funding of Chalabi’s group because it was producing unreliable intelligence and a series of disastrous failed rebellions inside Iraq, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, handing the I.N.C. $97 million to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The funding attached to this Bill, which John McCain co-sponsored, was based on little more than a vaguely defined plan to carry out “regime change”, a plan that Chalabi scratched out with a group of neoconservatives working at Washington and Jerusalem think-tanks.

McCain’s other role as a propagandist during the lead up to the Iraq War has also been soft-peddled and largely forgotten in recent years, since attention has focused on the middle to endgame “Surge”, for which he is, also, provides the face.

McCain, among others in Congress, repeated without reservation that Saddam Hussein threatened the American heartland with WMD. McCain read the classified version of the October 2002 CIA NIE on Iraq, yet never even hinted at the fact that U.S. intelligence was far from unanimous that Iraq had mobile bioweapons trailers and uranium enrichment facilities claimed by the Bush Administration. According to Politico, Link
John McCain, whose spokeswoman, Eileen McMenamin, e-mails that "Sen. McCain was briefed on the NIE numerous times and read the Executive Summary."

Furthermore, John McCain betrayed the special trust that many Americans had in him. McCain had a practically unique claim to military expertise combined with a sense of moral certainty about him that many, especially in the military, found unusually compelling. He often repeated in terms of Puritan clarity that the invasion of Iraq was a necessary and just war to “disarm” Saddam, a message that worked like a charm. In a New York Times op-ed, “The Right War for the Right Reasons”, John McCain wrote on March 12, 2003, a week before the invasion: New York Times

"American armed forces will likely soon begin to disarm Iraq by destroying the regime of Saddam Hussein. We do not know whether they will have the explicit authorization of veto-wielding members of the United Nations Security Council. But either way, the men and women ordered to undertake this mission can take pride in the justice of their cause.
"Critics argue that the military destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime would be, in a word, unjust. This opposition has coalesced around a set of principles of ''just war'' -- principles that they feel would be violated if the United States used force against Iraq.

"The main contention is that we have not exhausted all nonviolent means to encourage Iraq's disarmament. They have a point, if to not exhaust means that America will not tolerate the failure of nonviolent means indefinitely. After 12 years of economic sanctions, two different arms-inspection forces, several Security Council resolutions and, now, with more than 200,000 American and British troops at his doorstep, Saddam Hussein still refuses to give up his weapons of mass destruction.

SNIP

"The force our military uses will be less than proportional to the threat of injury we can expect to face should Saddam Hussein continue to build an arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons.

SNIP

"Both houses of Congress, by substantial margins, granted the president authority to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein. That is all the authority he requires.

"Many critics suggest that disarming Iraq through regime change would not result in an improved peace. There are risks in this endeavor, to be sure. But no one can plausibly argue that ridding the world of Saddam Hussein will not significantly improve the stability of the region and the security of American interests and values. Saddam Hussein is a risk-taking aggressor who has attacked four countries, used chemical weapons against his own people, professed a desire to harm the United States and its allies and, even faced with the prospect of his regime's imminent destruction, has still refused to abide by Security Council demands that he disarm.

"Isn't it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness? Wouldn't people subjected to brutal governments be encouraged to see the human rights of Muslims valiantly secured by Americans -- rights that are assigned rather cheap value by the critics' definition of justice?

'Our armed forces will fight for peace in Iraq -- a peace built on more secure foundations than are found today in the Middle East. Even more important, they will fight for the two human conditions of even greater value than peace: liberty and justice.

SNIP

"The one risk that John McCain didn’t mention was the risk that the often-described Iraqi arsenal of the world's most destructive weapons” didn’t actually exist. The good Senator gave no hint amid his public display of moral certitude about “just war” that he had any awareness of an underlying risk of self-deception and deception within the government.

'Fourteen months later, Congressional hearings commenced into the failure to find Weapons of Mass Destruction. Responses fell neatly down party lines. McCain used the opportunity to reassert his assumed moral certitude and appearance of military expertise to continue to support the decision to invade Iraq: In his questioning of Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group that had finally published its long-delayed report. After Duelfer concluded Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were "essentially" destroyed since the 1991 Gulf War, McCain responded: Link
"SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Knowing the history of Saddam Hussein, his use of weapons of mass destruction... he had them in 1991, is there any doubt in your mind that if Saddam Hussein were in power today and there were no restrictions or sanctions placed on him, that he would be attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Duelfer?

McCain Sponsored INC Disinformation Unit that Replaced CIA Iraq Intelligence Gathering

How did it come to be that McCain and the rest were seemingly so oblivious to the facts on the ground in Iraq? Much of this melts down to the fact that GOP lawmakers simply refused to believe what they were being told by American intelligence officers and international arms inspectors. They wanted a much more aggressive policy there. The response by McCain and others in Congress was to create an alternative intelligence gathering organization, one that would deliver an alternative reality in Iraq to the one being described by the CIA and IAEA.

Along with large piles of public money and the lies they repeated to bolster the case for war, Chalabi’s GOP allies in Congress pushed for I.N.C. to be given extraordinary powers as a sort of quasi-independent intelligence agency housed at the Pentagon under the roof of the Defense Intelligence Agency. After the Bush-Cheney Administration took power, a newly-create “Information Collection Agency” employing I.N.C. assets began to bypass and co-opt the intelligence gathering and analysis functions that had been previously carried out by professional analysts at DIA and CIA Near East desks.

Now safely in place under looser management, I.N.C. produced vast quantities of flawed “product”, raw intelligence and disinformation which it distributed to “US government recipients”, such as William Luti at the Pentagon Office of Special Plans (OSP) and John Hannah, Vice President Cheney’s special assistant for national security. Another recipient of I.N.C. materials was news media, including Judith Miller at the New York Times, who long before developed a close working relationship with Chalabi. On December 20, 2001, Judith Miller published a front-page story in the Times about an Iraqi engineer who claimed to have direct knowledge of twenty secret chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-weapons sites in Iraq. That source was, of course. Chalabi’s protégé, Code-name “Curveball”, and this launched the second Iraq War.

McCain and his Congressional colleagues voted Chalabi money and influence over Iraq intelligence based on a plan that ranking military and intelligence officers strongly and publicly opposed at the time. In open testimony to Congress, General Anthony Zinni, then commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East warned that the notion of cheap and easy invasion of Iraq was unworkable. Zinni called Chalabi’s regime change plan, “pie in the sky, a fairy tale.” Zinni said later, “They were saying if you put a thousand troops on the ground Saddam’s regime will collapse, they won’t fight.” See, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, “The Manipulator”, (May 29, 2004), Link

McCain fully embraced the delusion about cheap and easy Middle East wars, and was a co-sponsor of the Act that led to the creation of a false intelligence factory funded by the U.S. Congress to replace CIA Iraq reporting.

Even after the Iraq WMD deception and failed occupation became clear, McCain has refused to acknowledge that he had been wrong all along about Iraq.

Senator McCain still avoids taking responsibility for his role in the Iraq intelligence failure, perhaps for no better reason than he was smart enough to keep some distance between himself and the Pentagon operatives who actually carried out the policy. The Los Angeles Times observed about this: Link

"McCain did not publicly embrace or join the hard-core neoconservatives who pushed hardest to unleash the U.S. military against Baghdad before the war. But McCain backed many of the same policies.
"He repeatedly urged backing Iraqi émigré groups, internal dissidents and other proxy forces to overthrow Hussein. His hawkish views carried weight as a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon.

"In 1998, he was among the cosponsors of the Iraq Liberation Act. The law set "regime change" in Baghdad as U.S. policy and mandated support to opposition groups seeking to overthrow the dictator.

"Among the major beneficiaries was the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi…

McCain’s Success at Keeping His image clean is owed to Good PR and Charlie Black.

Five years, 4,000 US dead, and $600 billion later, John McCain continues to trade on his image as a maverick, a sophisticated military thinker and crusading fiscal conservative. In great part, he owes that lingering mirage to another key figure in this story, a powerful GOP strategist, and head of one of Washington’s wealthiest lobbying firm, BKSH Associates, a man with the appropriate name, Charlie Black. By one estimate, Black’s clients have paid him some $100 million for his peculiar talents in engineering wars, and keeping political events on track until they pay off with no-bid contracts.

To grasp the mutually profitable Peter-paid-Paul relationship between John McCain and Charlie Black, read this 2003 account of the role of lobbyists in drumming up federal contracts for “rebuilding” Iraq:

Lobbyists hustle for reconstruction business in Baghdad
By Peter H. Stone
National Journal Link
August 7, 2003
"Consider BKSH & Associates, the firm run by well-known GOP strategist Charlie Black. Over the past four years, BKSH has been boosting the interests of the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader, Ahmed Chalabi, was a key anti-Saddam opponent and now sits on the newly formed Iraqi Governing Council. Besides helping the INC - which has enjoyed extensive backing from the Pentagon but is quite controversial at the State Department and the CIA - BKSH has started to help open doors for such U.S. companies as AT&T, Cummins Engine, and Fluor that are seeking business in Iraq.

And there is this about Black's role as McCain's Washington fixer: Link

Charlie Black, John McCain Aide and Super-Lobbyist

John McCain's primary defender in the Lady Lobbyist Scandal* is a man named Charlie Black. As a senior adviser to the campaign who is doing McCain's damage control right now, Black has to explain to the press that John McCain didn't have a romantic relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, didn't treat Iseman's clients with undue favoritism, and isn't too close to lobbyists in general despite his years of anti-lobbyist rhetoric.

Black, of course, is a lobbyist. In fact, as the head of the extremely influential lobby shop BKSH and Associates, he's one of Washington's most powerful influence-peddlers. In the Washington Post story today about the lobbyists that populate the upper ranks of McCain's campaign (here's another guy); Black is listed as working for AT&T, Alcoa, JP Morgan, and U.S. Airways. He works and has worked for far more companies than that, however.

By day, Charlie Black represents the corporations that profit from the Iraq War, while by night he clean up after John McCain’s indiscretions that might mar his presidential election effort. Yes, Virginia, Washington is a very small town, and the revolving door is golden. In addition to deserving his own share of the credit for cultivating the careers of the men who started the Iraq War, Black is also one of its biggest profiteers, receiving tens of millions to lobby for a host of companies that have swollen their bottom lines with massive military and intelligence contracts during the era of kleptocratic one-party rule, the period of Bush-Cheney-McCain-Delay-Hastert GOP dominion over America.

Christie Hardin Smith at FiredogLake has observed this about Black: Link /
When you think about Charlie Black, think of him in terms of Jack Abramoff's political reach, connections and influence -- only much, much more so -- with that same odious level of using it to the furthest extent to suck money out of clients who pay-to-play from K Street.

CONCLUSION

John McCain was very much one of Chalabi’s key mentors in Congress, and along with Joe Lieberman, a vocal purveyor of false information about nonexistent Iraqi WMD. And, it was Congress, as well as the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA, that was responsible for the Iraq WMD deception.

Responsibility for the Iraq intelligence deception should not for a moment be limited to Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles. About this, Jane Meyer wrote in her New Yorker portrait of Chalabi, “The Manipulator”, Link
Peter Galbraith, a former Ambassador to Croatia and a human-rights activist, who has long supported Chalabi’s efforts to depose Saddam, suggested that if the Administration was unhappy with the outcome in Iraq it had only itself to blame. “Chalabi is one of the smartest people I know,” he told me. As Galbraith put it, Chalabi “figured out in the eighties that the road to Baghdad ran through Washington. He cultivated whom he needed to know. If he didn’t get what he wanted from State, he went to Capitol Hill. It’s a sign of being effective. It’s not his fault that his strategy succeeded.

The presumptive Republican nominee for President has been a knowing part of an espionage and deception operation that led to the deaths of 4,000 Americans in Iraq. John McCain is a security risk.



McCain’s 30-Years of Service to Saudi Bank Raiders

Monday, 9 June 2008, 12:42 am
Column: Mark G. Levey
The Crimes And Cover-Ups Of John McCain
Part 2



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


By Mark G. Levey
Part 3, Part 1
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, Link ), 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: Link
Loeffler last month told a reporter "at no time have I discussed my clients with John McCain." But lobbying disclosure records reviewed by NEWSWEEK show that on May 17, 2006, Loeffler listed meeting McCain along with the Saudi ambassador to "discuss US-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia relations."

Another potential problem: Loeffler's firm started paying $15,000 a month last summer to one of its lobbyists, Susan Nelson, after she left to become McCain's full-time finance director, said a source familiar with the arrangement (who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters). Campaign officials were told the payments were "severance" for Nelson and that they ended by November. But in "February or March," Loeffler rehired Nelson as a consultant to "help him with his clients" while she continued on the McCain payroll, according to a campaign official who asked not to be identified talking about personnel matters. Federal election law prohibits any outside entity from subsidizing the income of campaign workers. . Also last week, energy adviser Eric Burgeson was ousted.Burgeson reportedly represented the Gulf emirate state of Qatar, along with several major multinational energy companies. See, Link

McCain is, indeed, in good favor among the Saudi and Gulf elites. Bloomberg reports: Link

Saudis are privately rooting for the presumptive Republican nominee, discounting some of his rhetoric because he's the only candidate to promise to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and to deter Iran.

``The royal family and other elites would like to see McCain,'' Mai Yamani, a visiting scholar with the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, said yesterday in a telephone interview from London.

``He would keep the troops in Iraq, and that is their main worry, that the U.S. may withdraw or minimize its presence,'' said Yamani, whose father, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, was the kingdom's oil minister from 1962 to 1986.

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, Link ; Link

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. Link 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. Link / 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, Link

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. Link

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, Link

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, Link

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, Link

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. Link 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. Link

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; Link ; Link ; Link

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. Link 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. Link; Link

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. Link

“Lindner, a wealthy businessman from Cincinnati, Ohio owned the American Financial Corporation (AFC). In 1976, Keating bought a subsidiary of AFC called American Continental Homes from Lindner, which Keating later renamed American Continental Corporation (ACC). ACC embarked on several ambitious real estate development projects, mostly in Arizona and Colorado. To finance its activities, ACC set up its own in-house mortgage company and was a pioneer in creating the type of financial package and instrument known as the ‘mortgage-backed security.’” See, Link

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 cover-up 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.” Link 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. Link

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. Link 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 rip-offs and ultimate collapse:

On Jan. 14, 1993, in the final days of the first Bush administration, Wendy Gramm – as chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – pushed through a key regulatory exemption removing energy derivatives contracts and interest-rate swaps from federal oversight.

That was a major financial boon to Enron, where Wendy Gramm landed five weeks later as a member of the board of directors. She also became a member of the audit committee that signed off on another one of Enron’s fraudulent schemes, partnerships that hid the company’s growing debt.

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, include the possibility that BCCI related entities may have laundered funds for Keating to move them outside the United States.” Link Out of the five Senators accused, only McCain and Glenn ever ran again for office, with McCain the sole survivor.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0806/S00096.htm






McCover-Up: Abramoff & the GOP Money Machine

Monday, 9 June 2008, 12:52 am
Column: Mark G. Levey
The Crimes And Cover-Ups Of John McCain Part 3



Senator McCover-Up: Abramoff & the GOP Foreign Money Machine


By Mark G. Levey
Part 1, Part 2
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.

This is Part 3 of a series, The Crimes and Coverups of John McCain, “Reformer” . See, Part 2, “McCain’s 30-Years of Service to Saudi Bank Raiders and Junk Bond Kings” , Link ; Pt 1, "McCain Had Key Role in Iraq WMD Deception", Link

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 Justice Department's probe is far broader than previously thought . . . its focus on prominent Republicans raises the risk of serious embarrassment to the party before next year's congressional elections.”

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)

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: Link

By the time McCain took control of the investigation started by Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who retired from the Senate in 2005, investigators knew that Ralph Reed had taken large amounts of Indian casino money in more than one state. What Reed and Abramoff did to one small tribe in Texas justified bringing Reed before the committee and putting him under oath, as was done with Abramoff. Perhaps Reed was never called because he was too powerful to confront, or because he was still considered a prospect for elected office. But he got a walk, and the Tigua tribe in El Paso never got a full accounting of what Reed and Abramoff had done to them.

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. Link 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. Link

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.
Link /

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.” Link

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.” Link

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), Link 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. Link

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. Link

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 . Link

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. Link Further rounds of document destructions came to light, and the federal government has continued to resist settling the case. Link This appalling breech of trust led to a comment in The National Catholic Observer: Link

The century of stalling meant the money owed increased exponentially and no administration wants to pay the billions back on its watch. Thus, both the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration tried to derail the Indian trust fund lawsuit. A Jan. 26, 2004, editorial in The New York Times called the refusal to pay half a million Native Americans what is rightfully theirs “a continuing shame.” Compared to a scandal of comparable size such as Enron, the federal government’s egregious conduct has been hidden from the public.

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: Link
During the 2004 campaign, Abramoff was a top fund-raiser for the Bush re-election effort, raising more than $100,000 for the campaign. While exact figures on how much he raised for the campaign aren’t known, Abramoff told The New York Times in July 2003 - months before active fund-raising began - that he had already raised $120,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign.

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.” Link 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. Link

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. Link ; reproduced at: Link ? The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Kamel’s name nor Dallah al Baraka. (See, Link )

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. hv 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. Link ; c.f., Link Malaysia was also a hub of the nuclear proliferation network of A.Q. Khan. Link 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. Link The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Mohamed’s name nor makes reference to Rove’s involvement. (See, Link )

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.” Link The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report makes no mention of Abramoff’s lobbying on behalf of Malaysian interests in Sudan. (See, Link )

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]. “Link The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report mentions neither Fuelner’s name, the Heritage Foundation, nor Belle Haven Consultants. (See, Link )

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.” Link 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. Link 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. Link The 373-page Senate Indian Affairs Committee Final Report makes no reference to Abramoff’s Russian lobbying, Russian intelligence, or to NaftaSib. (See, Link )

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. . Link 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, Link )

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), Link

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.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0806/S00097.htm
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Crimes and Cover-Ups of John McCain

Postby American Dream » Mon Aug 27, 2018 11:44 am

11/07/2008 05:12 am ET Updated May 25, 2011

McCain Advised Ultra-Right Group Tied to Death Squads


By Chip Berlet

Background Information on the United States Council for World Freedom and the World Anti-Communist League

In the mid-1980s, Senator John McCain, was on the Advisory Board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League. McCain was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and he voted for financial aid for the Contra rebels..

According to the Associated Press:

“The U.S. Council for World Freedom aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. That landed the group in the middle of the Iran-Contra affair and in legal trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, which revoked the charitable organization’s tax exemption.”


At the time, the “leftist government of Nicaragua” was the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua.

In the 1970s, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) brought together conservatives, fascists, and representatives of right-wing death squads. WACL announced it had rid itself of unsavory elements, but in reality only a handful of overtly antisemitic and neonazi participants were ousted.

Anticommunist activist Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, who led his British affiliate out of WACL, declared in 1974 that despite a publicized housecleaning, “The World Anti-Communist League is largely a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”

In the 1980s the United States affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) was the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF).

Retired General John “Jack” Singlaub was one of the principal cheerleaders and fundraisers for the Contras, and had close ties to the Oliver North covert operation on behalf of President Reagan. The congressional Iran-Contra investigative committee never pursued Singlaub’s leadership role in the World Anti-Communist League.

Along with Singlaub, leaders of the WACL’s U.S. affiliate included Stephan Possony, Lev Dobriansky, Fred Schlafly, and Jay Parker. The advisory board inluded Hon. John S. McCain, III, U.S. Congressman; Howard Phillips, President, The Conservative Caucus; and Dr. George Roche III, President, Hillsdale College.

In 1978 Washington Post reporter Paul W. Valentine wrote an expose headlined: “The Fascist Specter Behind the World Anti-Red League.” In 1980 WACL chairman Roger Pearson was forced to resign based on these and other allegations.

In 1984 the issue surfaced again when nationally-syndicated columnist Jack Anderson revealed that one Latin American affiliate of WACL (the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation or CAL) was notorious for its link to death squads.

Singlaub told the AP that by 1984 he had cleaned up WACL. However some researchers disputed that claim.

Scott Anderson & Jon Lee Anderson (no relation to Jack), for example, wrote in 1986:

“Perhaps what is most wrong with the World Anti-Communist
League is what it hides behind and what it has rejected. In the
name of anti-communism, it has embraced those responsible for
death squads, apartheid, torture, and the extermination of
European Jewry. Along the way, it has repudiated democratic
government as a viable alternative, either to govern or to combat communism.


Continues: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-ber ... 32612.html
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Re: The Crimes and Cover-Ups of John McCain

Postby chump » Sun Sep 02, 2018 10:28 pm


http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2018/08/a ... .html#more

TUESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2018

A Senator Masquerading as a Gas Station

John McCain is dead, and many people are celebrating whereas they should be sad. He wasn’t a friend of mankind—he was its enemy, but a really bad one. But with such grossly incompetent enemies—who needs friends?

McCain did a great deal to destroy America. He devoted his entire lifetime to American destruction. To start with, he was quite effective as a protester against America’s genocidal war on the people of Vietnam. Other Americans just marched around ineffectually, waving banners and shouting antiwar slogans, but not McCain! His own father had a lot to do with starting that war, but McCain made up for that by destroying 26 American war planes. That’s quite something! If every American flyer crashed as many planes, countless innocent lives would have been saved.

Of course, he could have done even better—and he did try. He almost managed to destroy the US aircraft carrier Forrestal by setting it ablaze. To top off his illustrious military career, he surrendered to the enemy and spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. This made him a hero—in Americans’ eyes only, while the rest of the world saw in him a murderer of Vietnamese children.

His “martyrdom” as a POW helped pave his way to a political career, first in Congress, then in the Senate. During his obscenely long career in national politics, McCain did what he could to make American “democracy” look like a complete joke and to hasten America’s collapse. This, by the way, wasn’t a tall order: American “democracy” had long been a cesspool—a playground for lobbyists and political technologists based on a fully gerrymandered system of fake elections. But he did his thing, and is therefore twice the hero.

Defecating into the cesspool of American politics doesn’t alter its chemistry much, but McCain pushed the limits here as well. If only he and the native genius that is Sara Palin had won the Presidency! This surely would have hastened American collapse by quite a substantial amount, bringing his life’s work to fruition. This was perhaps his greatest failing: he turned out to be a traitor to his own friends and a faithful servant to his political enemies. He shut down his electoral campaign two weeks before the election. Then he did whatever he could to kiss up to Obama and helped wreck the repeal of Obamacare. McCain deserves to have a gigantic sausage-shaped obelisk erected in his honor, made of the same lumpy, brown material that he was so full of throughout his political career.

Internationally, McCain was a stellar performer when it came to meddling in the affairs of other nations, often in ways that helped undermine America’s standing in the world. Whenever he visited a foreign country, the likelihood of civil war breaking out there went up by a notch, sometimes by two. He always had a warm place in his heart for terrorists—be they Ukrainian neo-Nazis or the homicidal maniacs of the Islamic Caliphate (a.k.a. ISIS). He managed to perform in spite of not being very smart: in 2013 he published an article on the website Pravda.ru, thinking that it was Russia’s main newspaper (which was at that point two decades defunct).

He was one of the prime architects of the Ukrainian government’s “anti-terrorist operation” against its own citizens in the east of the country. His actions helped assure American defeat and Syrian victory in Syria and set the Ukrainian government he had helped install in 2014 on a course for self-destruction. Russia owes him a debt of gratitude for its reunification with Crimea after its two lost decades in the Ukrainian wilderness. He was also a champion of America’s own self-destruction through national bankruptcy, always being in favor of its profligate, fantastically corrupt and otherwise ineffectual defense spending.

His crowning achievement was his successful push for anti-Russian sanctions. They made it very difficult for Russian government officials to appear serious and resist the urge to say “May we have some more sanctions, please?” Thanks to these sanctions, Russia has moved rapidly toward achieving food security and has become one of the world’s major agricultural exporters; it has achieved or will soon achieve complete self-sufficiency in defense and in many other industrial sectors; and it is quite far along in making itself independent of the US dollar and of Western finance.

The effect of the sanctions in simultaneously driving down both the ruble and the Russian stock market has allowed the Russian government to sell dollars high and to buy up Russian industrial stocks low, effectively re-nationalizing Russian industry at bargain-basement prices, shifting the share of its government ownership from around 16% to at least 65% while squeezing out Western financial interests. The profits that would have otherwise been pocketed by Western investors are now flooding into the Russian treasury, to be spent on health, education, housing, roads and bridges and so on. McCain, you socialist you!

McCain also had a wonderful talent for being not just wrong but exactly wrong, as in the exact opposite of right. He called Russia “a gas station masquerading as a country.” That was great for Russia, because Russia was at the time a country masquerading as a gas station, to buy itself the time it needed to rebuild and rearm. Now that it has done so, the mask can come off, and Russia is most grateful to McCain for having given it plenty of cover just at the time when it most needed it.

It is a sad moment now that McCain’s untimely demise has sent him off to an eternity in Hell, because he didn’t get to finish his life’s work: destroying the United States. Nevertheless, we should call it a job well done, for the course on which he helped set the country is now unalterable. Even if he is replaced in his Senate seat by someone actually competent and able to act in his nation’s interest, this won’t alter its course by much, and certainly will not reverse it. Let us now observe a minute of silence in honor of John McCain, for upon his passing the American Collapse Party has lost a true leader.
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