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Richard Haut
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 1056
Location: Nice, France
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 Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2006 9:53 am Post subject: Holistic Washington: so did Abramoff know Atta ? |
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Look, this is getting confusing.
Abramoiff appears to have got some $80million from Indian tribes, and been involved in the purchase of the boat casinos.
As I understand it, Abramoff used to work with a Florida law firm whose credentials include being influential in obtaining the 2000 Presidential Election for Bush (George Dubya - Jeb is the other one).
He is also buddybuddy with a certain Mr. deLay (French name, huh ?).
These are the boat casinos where we are required to believe that Muslim extremists so fanatical that they killed themselves attacking America on 9.11.01 got roaring drunk, gambled, chased women, bragged about what they were doing and - as I remember the scenario - one actually left his copy of the Holy Koran on the bar; reported I believe in the Associated Press and other media. (A story about as credible as the idea that the Pentagon was struck by a giant beansprout, out of which sprang the sprout people who now rule the world. I am not saying that such an hypothesis is impossible - merely that it is unlikely).
I am sure that Mr. Abramoff has a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, but when it is tied in with his very strong connections with Muslim Banks and financiers (notably Saudis), then there are those who may become slightly suspicious.
_________________
Richard Haut has worked with the architectural profession for over 25 years and produces the weekly Richard Haut's Competitions, which has given architects details of many thousands of projects for which they can apply across Britain and Europe. |
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SDR
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1544
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 12:45 pm Post subject: |
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Bush Campaign to Give Abramoff Money to Charity
By REUTERS
Filed at 10:39 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's re-election campaign will give to charity $6,000 in contributions linked to a lobbyist at the center of a mounting corruption scandal, the Republican National Committee said on Wednesday.
Lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to fraud charges on Tuesday and agreed to help U.S. prosecutors in a corruption probe that could involve several top Republican lawmakers, including former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas.
RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt said a total of $6,000 will be given to the American Heart Association.
She said the money came in $2,000 contributions from Abramoff, his wife and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe that Abramoff represented.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said giving the money to charity was consistent with past practice by the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign with contributions from controversial individuals.
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean on Tuesday called on Bush to return to donors what he said was more than $100,000 in campaign contributions raised by Abramoff, whom he described as a major fund-raiser for the president's 2004 re-election bid.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers seeking to distance themselves from Abramoff and his clients have returned more than $200,000 in campaign contributions in recent weeks.
McClellan said Abramoff attended three Hannukah receptions at the White House over the past several years.
``The president does not know him and does not recall meeting him. It is possible that he could have met him at a holiday reception or some other widely attended event,'' he said.
McClellan, as he said on Tuesday, noted that Abramoff ''needs to be held to account, punished for his wrongdoing that he has acknowledged.''
``It is outrageous, and beyond that I don't think I want to speculate. The Justice Department continues to investigate the matter,'' he said.
_________________
"I'm the commander . . . see, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB |
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SDR
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1544
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 12:52 pm Post subject: |
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Key Events in the Jack Abramoff Probe
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:24 p.m. ET
Here is a timeline of key events in the Jack Abramoff investigation:
2005:
-- Dec. 13-22: Six members of Congress -- Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla.; Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.; Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.; Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont.; and Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D. -- return or give away campaign donations they received from Abramoff and his associates.
-- Dec. 15: Abramoff associate Adam Kidan reaches plea bargain with federal prosecutors on fraud charges arising from a 2000 deal to buy casino boats.
-- Nov. 21: Abramoff associate Michael Scanlon, a former aide to Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, pleads guilty to conspiring to bribe public officials.
-- Oct. 5: David Safavian, former chief of staff of the General Services Administration, is indicted on charges he made false statements and obstructed a federal investigation into his dealings with lobbyist Abramoff.
-- Aug. 29: Abramoff pleads innocent to Miami fraud charges.
-- Aug. 11: Abramoff and associate Adam Kidan indicted by a Miami federal grand jury on fraud charges in the casino boat deal.
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2004:
-- Sept. 29: Abramoff refuses to answer questions from the Senate Indian Affairs Committee about his work on behalf of American Indian tribes and casino issues. The Senate committee's staff concluded after a seven-month investigation that Abramoff and his business partner, Michael Scanlon, had charged six tribes in six states a total of $66 million for lobbying and may have manipulated at least two tribal elections to ensure they would get contracts with tribes.
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2003:
-- Abramoff donates more than $100,000 to President Bush's reelection campaign.
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2000:
-- Abramoff and Kidan purchase the SunCruz Casinos fleet of gambling boats. According to the 2005 Miami indictment, prosecutors say the pair faked a $23 million wire transfer to make it appear that they were making a significant contribution of their own money into the deal. Based on that transfer, lenders Foothill Capital Corp. and Citadel Equity Fund Ltd. agreed to provide $60 million in financing for the purchase.
_________________
"I'm the commander . . . see, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB |
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SDR
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1544
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 12:56 pm Post subject: |
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January 4, 2006 -- NY Times
Money Trail
Many Millions in Kickbacks From Tribes
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - The kickbacks from one Indian tribe exceeded $11 million. From another, they surpassed $6 million. In less than three years, Jack Abramoff secretly netted more than $20 million from tribes in five states, a sum close to half of the $43.3 million they paid him and a partner to lobby on their behalf.
"These are staggering numbers, even by Washington standards," said Stanley Brand, a defense lawyer who specializes in criminal and ethical matters. "The big firms do very, very well, but they don't come close to these kinds of numbers."
The level to which Mr. Abramoff enriched himself at the expense of clients came into sharp focus on Tuesday as his plea agreement on federal charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion was made public by the Justice Department.
The agreement referred to five business relationships Mr. Abramoff had with Indian tribes, and in each case he admitted to receiving a large percentage of the tribe's total spending as a kickback. As part of his plea, Mr. Abramoff agreed to repay his former clients $25 million.
Mr. Abramoff carried out his fraudulent schemes by persuading clients that they needed the lobbying services of firms run by a former business partner, Michael Scanlon, or by his own companies. Mr. Scanlon pleaded guilty in November to conspiring to bribe a member of Congress, and as part of his plea, he agreed to repay $19.6 million to the tribes that once retained him.
Mr. Abramoff's largest kickback came from a Louisiana tribe that used his services from early 2001 through the spring of 2004. In the plea agreement Mr. Abramoff said the tribe paid companies run by Mr. Scanlon $30,510,000. But through an agreement between Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon, they concealed a kickback of about $11,450,000 to Mr. Abramoff.
In another scheme, beginning in early 2001, a Mississippi tribe paid Mr. Scanlon about $14,765,000, ignorant of the "secret profit-sharing agreement" between Mr. Scanlon and Mr. Abramoff that sliced off nearly half of the total, about $6,364,000, as a kickback to Mr. Abramoff.
A Michigan tribe paid Mr. Scanlon about $3.5 million from the middle of 2002 to the fall of 2003, unaware of the "secret arrangement" that directed about $540,000, half the profit earned by Mr. Scanlon's companies, to Mr. Abramoff.
In a scheme that suggested how little they cared for the needs of their clients, Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon persuaded a Texas tribe in 2002 to hire them to help the tribe reopen its casino through federal legislation. According to the plea agreement, while the tribe paid $4.2 million for services arranged by Mr. Scanlon, the two men concealed from the Texas tribe that, at the same time, they had collected millions of dollars from the Louisiana tribe to oppose all gaming in the Texas Legislature.
They also did not tell the Texas tribe that $1,850,000 of their fees went directly to Mr. Abramoff "pursuant to his undisclosed arrangement with Mr. Scanlon."
In a final case cited by the plea agreement, a New Mexico tribe paid Mr. Scanlon $2.75 million, hiding from tribal officials that the lobbying firm's profit margin was about 80 percent and that $1,175,000 of the total was paid to Mr. Abramoff through his secret agreement with Mr. Scanlon.
Paul Miller, president of the American League of Lobbyists, a trade group with 700 members, said Mr. Abramoff was "in a league by himself" as a Washington lobbyist, a term he said he used reluctantly.
"Jack Abramoff, by my definition, is not a lobbyist," Mr. Miller said. "He knowingly defrauded clients. In my view, he is nothing more than a scam artist."
_________________
"I'm the commander . . . see, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB |
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Richard Haut
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 1056
Location: Nice, France
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| Posted: Wed Jan 04, 2006 2:32 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Shortly after 9/11, Abramoff registered as a lobbyist for the General Council of Islamic Banks. According to the National Journal (Aug 31, 2002), the consortium was funded to counter the Treasury Department and the FBI's efforts to put an unwanted public spotlight on global terrorist financing coming out of banks in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
Abramoff's lobbyists spread the lie that Islamic banks had not sheltered money used for terrorist networks. Their primary client, chairman of the Council, Saleh Abdullah Kamel, soon after 9/11 became the focus of intense government scrutiny over alledged ties to terrorist activity.
Kamel, whose fortune is estimated at $3 billion, is the chairman of Dallah al Baraka Group (DBG), which is accused of financing al Qaeda and other extremist groups, and he was also the co-founder and major shareholder of Al Shamal Bank in Sudan, an institution in which Osama bin Laden established a personal ownership interest.
Kamel was listed as being one of the seven "main individual sponsors of terrorism" in a report by French counter-terrorism exert Jean-Charles Brisard submitted to the UN Security Council in December 2002. Recall that Omar al-Bayoumi, who provided money to two of the 9/11 hijackers, was once an assistant to the Director of Finance for Dallah Avco, a DBG company that works with the Saudi aviation authority. And the WSJ has reported that the United States believes the Dallah al-Baraka Bank, another DBG company, was also used by al-Qaeda.
Kamel's name appeared in the "Golden Chain," a roster seized by Bosnian authorities in Sarajevo in March 2002 listing Saudi donors to bin Laden. |
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/17/122311/72
_________________
Richard Haut has worked with the architectural profession for over 25 years and produces the weekly Richard Haut's Competitions, which has given architects details of many thousands of projects for which they can apply across Britain and Europe. |
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Ed Ziomek
Joined: 07 Jun 2005
Posts: 440
Location: Stamford, Connecticut
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| Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 11:43 am Post subject: Dangerous Times, or... Who Will Die Next? |
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Speaking about Abramoff, and the mysteries surrounding him, and his possible association with terrorists (unproven), I think today’s newspapers show some mysterious links with Mafioso hit men and the murder of Casino owner Gus Boulis in 2001.
Yesterday, in an amazing C-span story, host Steve Scully presented a sort of timeline interview with New Republic and Weekly Standard editors, reviewing the progress of the growing Abramoff story.
In the middle, they presented a November video clip of Senator McCain questioning one of the players in the scandal, an Italia Federici who seemed to keep dodging the questions posed to her, of how a non-profit environmental lobbyist allegedly working for Indian tribal interests, could end up making anti-Kerry ads during the last Presidential election.
What intriqued me most is that in one sentence, this very bright Federici mentioned… New York Post advertising, Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, Abramoff contacts, environmental concerns, and casino tribal interests.
Asked by McCain if she used any of the investor funds for personal use, she responded… “No, not to my recollection”, or something like that.
And it seems we have a full-court-press for damage control…
1. Newt Gingrich telling Bill O’Reiley about how Republicans should strongly “clean up their act” or something (how ironic is this!)
2. Cheney making a comment yesterday about the terrorists… that wiretapping would have helped prevent 9-11… (paraphrased)… “we didn’t realize they were in the country plotting”… (so then, you knew they were here??)
3. Bill O’Reiley challenging David Letterman about Cindy Sheehan and the war in Iraq.
These are very dangerous political times for America. Abramoff. NSA wiretapping. Murders. Controlling News Outlets. Guilty Pleas. Indictments. Iraq/Afghan chaos. American Military dieing.
Gallery of historical politics and mysteries…
Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffett (Ford Administration)
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/092300a.html
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/brambles/499/Bush/Condor/condor.html
William Casey (Reagan Administration)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Casey
Vincent Foster, Ron Brown et al (Clinton Administration)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Crete/3450/deaths.html
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/CRASH/BROWN/brown.html
Gus Boulis (Bush-2 Administration)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9506465
Questions, questions, questions. Is America destroying itself?
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Ed Ziomek |
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SDR
Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 1544
Location: San Francisco
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| Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 12:54 pm Post subject: |
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Well, the left-right pendulum swings back and forth -- though some have argued that the "centerline" of that oscillation has moved steadily rightward for the last half century or so. While the pendulum may be about to take a (brief ? temporary ?) leftward movement, each right-hand period leaves in its wake some permanent erosion of equality and access. Those guys really know how to inflict damage. . .!
See Alex Carey for some insight into how the corporate interests have wielded power, in Washington and elsewhere, over the last century -- and what the politicians have learned from their example:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/25/006.html
SDR
_________________
"I'm the commander . . . see, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." GWB |
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Richard Haut
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 1056
Location: Nice, France
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| Posted: Thu Jan 05, 2006 3:37 pm Post subject: |
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(It is not Abramoff's link with terrorism which is unproven, but the precise nature and extent of that involvement).
An excellent introduction to what is happening is John Pilger's book "Hidden Agendas" - published in 1998.
This is what Pilger wrote in the New Statesman this week http://www.newstatesman.com/nscoverstory.htm
The death of freedom
The rights of ordinary people to speak out against an unjust war and atrocities unleashed in their name are being crushed. Fascism is at the door. Who else, asks John Pilger, will fight it?
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. "That's typical of the public," he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. "I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq," he said to Brian, who cautioned him: "You'll spend the night in the cells, mate." We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an "offensive" T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the "purpose" of searching him was "terrorism" and the "grounds for intervention" were "carrying plackard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info" (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held "on suspicion". Some of the "evidence" against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, accor-ding to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a "terrorist", a description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime's "right" to imprison an American citizen "indefinitely" without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the "Project for the New American Century". Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade: "the cavalry on the new American frontier", guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. "Pre-emptive" aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as "the crazies". He said: "We should now be very worried about fascism."
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of "a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed". He asked why "the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of inde- pendent thought" of Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while US state crimes were merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged".
A silence has reigned. Across the world, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings can be attributed to rampant American power, "But you wouldn't know it," said Pinter. "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
To its credit, the Guardian published every word of Pinter's warning. To its shame, though unsurprising, the state television broadcaster ignored it. All that Newsnight flatulence about the arts, all that recycled preening for the cameras at Booker Prize-giving events, yet the BBC could not make room for Britain's greatest living dramatist, so honoured, to tell the truth.
For the BBC, it simply never happened, just as the killing of half a million children by America's medieval siege of Iraq during the 1990s never happened, just as the Dhafir and Padilla trials and the Senate vote banning freedom never happened. The political prisoners of Belmarsh barely exist; and a big, brave posse of Metropolitan police never swept away Maya Evans as she publicly grieved for British soldiers killed in the cause of nothing except rotten power.
Bereft of irony, but with a snigger, the newsreader Fiona Bruce introduced, as news, a Christmas propaganda film about Bush's dogs. That happened. Now imagine Bruce reading the following: "Here is delayed news, just in. From 1945 to 2005, the United States attempted to overthrow 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more." (Thanks to William Blum's Rogue State, published by Common Courage Press.)
The icon of horror of Saddam Hussein's rule is a 1988 film of petrified bodies of people in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killed in a chemical weapons attack. The attack has been referred to a great deal by Bush and Blair and the film shown a great deal by the BBC. At the time, as I know from personal experience, the Foreign Office tried to cover up the crime at Halabja. The Americans tried to blame it on Iran. Today, in an age of images, there are no images of the chemical weapons attack on Fallujah in November 2004. This allowed the Americans to deny it until they were caught out recently by investigators using the internet. For the BBC, American atrocities simply do not happen.
In 1999, while filming in Washington and Iraq, I learned the true scale of bombing in what the Americans and British then called Iraq's "no-fly zones". During the 18 months to 14 January 1999, US aircraft flew 24,000 combat missions over Iraq; almost every mission was bombing or strafing. "We're down to the last outhouse," a US official protested. "There are still some things left [to bomb], but not many." That was seven years ago. In recent months, the air assault on Iraq has multiplied; the effect on the ground cannot be imagined. For the BBC, it has not happened.
The black farce extends to those pseudo-humanitarians in the media and elsewhere, who themselves have never seen the effects of cluster bombs and air-burst shells, yet continue to invoke the crimes of Saddam to justify the nightmare in Iraq and to protect a quisling prime minister who has sold out his country and made the world more dangerous. Curiously, some of them insist on describing themselves as "liberals" and "left of centre", even "anti-fascists". They want some respectability, I suppose. This is understandable, given that the league table of carnage by Saddam Hussein was overtaken long ago by that of their hero in Downing Street, who will now support an attack on Iran.
This cannot change until we, in the west, look in the mirror and confront the true aims and narcissism of the power applied in our name, its extremes and terrorism. The usual double standard no longer works; there are now millions like Brian Haw, Maya Evans, John Catt and the man in the pinstriped suit, with his wreath. Looking in the mirror means understanding that a violent and undemocratic order is being imposed by those whose actions are little different from the actions of fascists. The difference used to be distance. Now they are bringing it home.
_________________
Richard Haut has worked with the architectural profession for over 25 years and produces the weekly Richard Haut's Competitions, which has given architects details of many thousands of projects for which they can apply across Britain and Europe. |
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Ed Ziomek
Joined: 07 Jun 2005
Posts: 440
Location: Stamford, Connecticut
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| Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:34 pm Post subject: David Rosenbaum, NY Times Reporter, Retired one month |
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I am mentioning this tragic murder of a New York Times reporter, one month retired, with sadness, of course, but also of confusion.
David Rosenbaum, age 63, had worked with the New York Times in reporting the Watergate story, the Iran Contragate story, and the Washington political scene, retiring last month after 35 years on the job. I certainly did not know the individual, but the odd timeliness of his "mugging" and death... I don't know what to think.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/national/09rosenbaum.html?ex=1294462800&en=aa476148356b41c6&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Certainly, the New York Times has been on the forefront of the Abramoff situation, and this tragedy certainly stokes ...??? more questions.
I had the same knot in my stomach when Marla Ruzicka, Lakeport California, was reported killed in Iraq on April 18th, 2005, by some suicide car bomb.
Hopefully, my fears and paranoias are wrong.
_________________
Ed Ziomek |
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Richard Haut
Joined: 18 Apr 2004
Posts: 1056
Location: Nice, France
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| Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:38 am Post subject: |
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A lot of people seem to share your caution about the "mugging".
As for paranoia, Blair has just threatened Iran.
Surely America - Britain - Israel cannot be so stupid as to attack Iran ? Yes they can. And they will. The chaos in Iraq only makes sense if Iran is attacked.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with Iran's nuclear programme - it is because Iran will start an oil trading bourse during the first half of this year.
Why kill a journalist ? Because this journalist knew precisely what sort of trash were involved in Iran-Contra and similar events and could unroll the meaningless jargon to see what was underneath.
Britain has a similar roll of honour of those who "happen" to die at a convenient time - Dr. David Kelly, Robin Cook, many many journalists, senior intelligence officers, military officers and other ranks - and others, some known, some unknown.
Some are killed, others ridiculed or arrested on dubious charges - to give their views no impact, some are just the victims of whispering campaigns. Maybe some just die from the stress or even of natural causes - some. Is there a precedent for all this ? Sure is. Lord Curzon's shameful Anglo-Iranian Agreement which brought the fascist Reza Khan to power, and of course Blair's role-model and the role model for each and every one of those who follow or vote for him: Sir Oswald Mosley.
Perhaps it was just a mugging. But even if it was, Americans are still dying day in and day out in Iraq, and for what ?
_________________
Richard Haut has worked with the architectural profession for over 25 years and produces the weekly Richard Haut's Competitions, which has given architects details of many thousands of projects for which they can apply across Britain and Europe. |
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