NAZI-CIA; October Surprise; Bush-Moon Axis; Corporate McPravda...

CIA's Worst-Kept Secret

By Martin A. Lee
May 16, 2001

"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ... unprejudiced mind..."

That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties," a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs.

Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Pried loose by Congress, which passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act three years ago, a long-hidden trove of once-classified CIA documents confirms one of the worst-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA's use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a clandestine campaign against the Soviet Union.

The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.

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

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

October Surprise: Finally, Time for the Truth

By Robert Parry

Jamshid Hashemi looked wearier than he did seven years earlier, his complexion was waxier, befitting a man with a serious heart condition. The U.S.-Iranian arms merchant/businessman also was in more legal hot water from his work with an American company which collapsed in an allegedly fraudulent stock scheme.

But Jamshid Hashemi's account of the political intrigue that surrounded the 1980 Iranian hostage crisis -- plotting that allegedly undercut President Carter's negotiations to free 52 Americans and ensured Ronald Reagan's election -- has changed little over the years. In that way, Jamshid Hashemi remains potentially one of the most important witnesses to the unsavory acts that may have launched the Reagan-Bush era.

Jamshid Hashemi still claims that in the summer of 1980, he and his brother, Cyrus, participated in secret meetings involving William J. Casey and Iranian intermediaries representing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In a recent interview with The Consortium, Jamshid Hashemi repeated his account that meetings in Madrid, Spain, in late July and then in August, 1980, resulted in an agreement to release the 52 American hostages only after Reagan took office. In exchange, the radical Iranian government got commitments for secret shipments of U.S. military supplies.

"I thought it was my duty that the people in the United States should know," Hashemi told me during an afternoon-long interview at a hotel near Heathrow Airport outside of London. "They should know, they should be the judge of it."

Though Hashemi sat through the lengthy interview with the same gentlemanly style that I encountered when I first met him in 1990, he did flash with anger when he discussed the House inquiry that examined the October Surprise controversy in 1992 and issued a report in January 1993 clearing the Republicans.

"Rubbish, that's what I think," steamed Hashemi. "Just a whitewash of the whole situation. It's a cover-up."

Hashemi argued that it made no sense for him to have invented his October Surprise account which he repeated under oath to Congress in 1992. He had nothing to gain by making the public charges -- and a great deal to lose, he said. "Who has ever paid me a single dime?" he asked. "I had to pay all my lawyer's fees. What did I gain here?"

Hashemi blamed the cover-up primarily on the attack strategy of Republican lawyers on the task force, particularly Richard Leon, who was the senior GOP investigator, a role similar to Leon's post on the 1987 House Iran-Contra investigation, in which the Republicans issued a minority report clearing Reagan and his subordinates of all wrongdoing in that scandal, too. Hashemi said Leon, rather than task force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella, appeared to be running the October Surprise investigation.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile9.html

The Moon-Bush Cash Conduit

By Robert Parry
June 14, 2006

Over the past quarter century, South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon has been one of the Bush family’s major benefactors – both politically and financially – while enjoying what appears to be protection against federal investigations into evidence that his cult-like organization has functioned as a criminal enterprise.

Indeed, the newest disclosure about Moon funneling money to a Bush family entity bears many of the earmarks of Moon’s business strategy of laundering money through a complex maze of front companies and cut-outs so it can’t be easily followed. In this case, according to an article in the Houston Chronicle, Moon’s Washington Times Foundation gave $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation, which in turn acted as a conduit for donations to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

The Chronicle obtained indirect confirmation that Moon’s money was passing through the Houston foundation to the Bush library from Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath. Asked whether Moon’s $1 million had ended up there, McGrath responded, “We’re in an uncomfortable position. … If a donor doesn’t want to be identified we need to honor their privacy.”

But when asked whether the $1 million was intended to curry favor with the Bush family to get President George W. Bush to grant a pardon for Moon’s 1982 felony tax fraud conviction, McGrath answered, “If that’s why he gave the grant, he’s throwing his money away. … That’s not the way the Bushes operate.”

McGrath then added, “President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington. But there can’t be any connection to any kind of a pardon.”

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/061406.html

CIA-Nazi Link Grows Clearer as More Documents Come to Light

Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann stands trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Apparently, the CIA knew of his whereabouts as early as 1958.

Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

WASHINGTON -- A former Nazi rose to the highest ranks of a Western intelligence agency - and was a Soviet mole. A lead to Adolf Eichmann was ignored. A spy whose pathological lies made him useless, but who still escaped prosecution for war crimes.

These are among the revelations found among some 8 million pages of documents released here Tuesday that deal with German and Japanese war crimes, including 27,000 pages that detail the relationship after World War II between U.S. government agencies and suspected Nazis war criminals.

The message threading the documents was clear: The price one pays for consorting with evil men far outweighs the return.

"Using very bad people can have very bad consequences," Elizabeth Holtzman, a former U.S. congresswoman and a member of the Interagency Working Group that released the documents, said at a news conference last Tuesday at the National Archives. The group was established in 1999 to declassify rooms full of documents related to Nazi war crimes.

The mandate was later extended to Japanese war crimes.

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http://www.jewishexponent.com/ViewArticle.asp?ArtID=3617

U.S. Journalism's Shameful Anniversary

By Robert Parry
December 9, 2005

One year ago, reporter Gary Webb – his life in ruins – killed himself with a handgun. The tragedy made him the final victim of a long-running cover-up protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s tolerance of drug trafficking by its client army, the Nicaraguan contras.

But Webb’s death also could be blamed on the fecklessness of modern American journalism. The nation’s leading newspapers had driven the 49-year-old father of three to his desperate act rather than admit that they had bungled one of the biggest stories of the Reagan-Bush era – the contra-cocaine scandal.

Webb might be alive today if the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had shown the decency to explain the importance of what the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general acknowledged in a two-volume report in 1998.

In that investigation – sparked by Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 – CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz found that the spy agency hid evidence of contra-cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, even disrupting federal investigations that threatened to expose the secret.

Though insisting that the CIA didn’t authorize the contra-cocaine trafficking, Hitz’s report revealed that the criminality was even more pervasive than Webb believed (his series had focused on only one contra-cocaine pipeline into California). Hitz’s investigation found more than 50 contras and contra entities implicated in the drug trade.

Hitz also was told by CIA officers that the motive for the cover-up was that they put their mission of overthrowing Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government ahead of law enforcement that might have disrupted or discredited the contra operation.

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Holidays, Lobbyists & Murder

By Richard Fricker
December 23, 2005

As the wags of Washington make their Christmas rounds and chardonnay corks litter the streets like cherry blossoms, there is a chill in the holiday spirit for friends and associates of Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff – since some of them are facing a New Year that may include testimony in a murder and corruption case in Florida.

While Abramoff's influence-buying schemes are likely to entangle prominent politicians in bribery cases in Washington, the Fort Lauderdale murder-corruption case surrounding the SunCruz casino stands out as possibly the biggest embarrassment for the Republican power structure, since it may feature appearances by Abramoff and his onetime aide Michael Scanlon.

Fort Lauderdale homicide detectives are interested in questioning Abramoff about the 2001 murder of SunCruz casino owner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis. Prosecutor Brian Cavanaugh told me he most certainly “will be spending time with Mr. Scanlon.”

Boulis was gunned down in his car on Feb. 6, 2001, amid a feud with an Abramoff business group that had purchased Boulis’s SunCruz casino cruise line in 2000. On Sept. 27, 2005, Fort Lauderdale police charged three men, including reputed Gambino crime family bookkeeper Anthony Moscatiello, with Boulis’s murder.

As part of the murder probe, police are investigating payments that SunCruz made to Moscatiello, his daughter and Anthony Ferrari, another defendant in the Boulis murder case. Moscatiello and Ferrari allegedly collaborated with a third man, James Fiorillo, in the slaying.

Abramoff Indictment

The SunCruz deal also led to the August 2005 indictment of Abramoff and his partner, Adam Kidan, on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud over a $60 million loan for buying the casino company in 2000. Prosecutors allege that Abramoff and Kidan made a phony $23 million wire transfer as a fake down payment.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/122305a.html

Bush, Posada & Terrorism Hypocrisy

By Robert Parry
May 10, 2005

The New York Times has finally put the case of fugitive terrorist Luis Posada Carriles on Page One, observing that the violent anti-Castro Cuban’s presence in Florida “could test” George W. Bush’s universal condemnation of terrorism. But that principle already has been tested and failed.

Without doubt, Posada – who reportedly has been hiding in South Florida for six weeks – is getting the benefit of a conscious U.S. policy of benign neglect, a Bush version of the “I know nothing” approach made popular by Sgt. Schultz, the German prison guard in the TV comedy “Hogan’s Heroes.”

If Posada were a suspected Islamic terrorist – not a CIA-trained right-wing Cuban exile – there’s no question that the Bush administration would be showing zero tolerance for his presence inside the United States. Certainly, the U.S. government wouldn’t be waiting around patiently for the terrorist to check in with immigration authorities.

All legal niceties would be swept aside. The Bush administration – and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s state police – would be leaving no stone unturned in searching for the fugitive. There would be a manhunt with every known associate hauled in for questioning while the national news would be giving the story around-the-clock coverage.

‘Waterboarding’

Indeed, there’s a good chance that if a lawyer for, say, an al-Qaeda terrorist had publicly announced that his client was hiding in the United States – as Posada’s lawyer Eduardo Soto did last month – the lawyer himself would be detained and put under intense pressure to give up his client’s whereabouts. He’d be lucky not to get “waterboarded.”

But no such effort is underway to locate the 77-year-old Posada. The Bush administration even remains equivocal on the possibility of granting asylum to protect him from an extradition request lodged by Venezuela, where Posada is wanted to face charges he masterminded the in-air bombing of a Cubana Airliner that killed 73 people in 1976.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/051005.html

The Hariri Mirage: Lessons Unlearned

By Robert Parry
June 16, 2006

In October 2005, the drumbeat had begun for a confrontation with a rogue Middle East regime based on supposedly strong evidence about its nefarious secret activities. The U.S. news media trumpeted the regime’s guilt and agreed on the need for action, though there was debate whether forcible regime change was the way to go.

A half year later, however, much of that once clear evidence has melted away and what seemed so certain to the TV pundits and the major newspapers looks now to be another case of a rush to judgment against an unpopular target.

The drumbeat in October 2005 was directed at the Syrian government for its alleged role in masterminding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in a bomb blast in Beirut, Lebanon, on Feb. 14, 2005. A preliminary United Nations investigative report fingered senior Syrian officials as the likely architects of the killing.

“There is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security officials and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services,” declared the U.N.’s first interim report on Oct. 20. President George W. Bush immediately termed the findings “very disturbing” and called for the Security Council to take action against Syria.

The U.S. press quickly joined the stampede in assuming Syrian guilt. On Oct. 25, a New York Times editorial said the U.N. investigation had been “tough and meticulous” in establishing “some deeply troubling facts” about Hariri’s murderers. The Times demanded punishment of top Syrian officials and their Lebanese allies implicated by the investigation, although the Times cautioned against the Bush administration’s eagerness for “regime change.”

But – as we noted at the time – the U.N. investigative report by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis was anything but “meticulous.” Indeed, it read more like a compilation of circumstantial evidence and conspiracy theories than a dispassionate pursuit of the truth.

Mehlis’s initial report, for instance, had failed to follow up a key lead, the Japanese identification of the Mitsubishi Canter Van that apparently carried the explosives used in the bombing that killed Hariri and 22 others. The van was reported stolen in Sagamihara City, Japan, on Oct. 12, 2004, four months before the bombing, but Mehlis’s hasty report indicated no effort to investigate how the vehicle got from the island of Japan to Beirut or who might have last possessed it.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/061506.html

Bush's Enron Lies

By Robert Parry
May 26, 2006

Four years ago, when the taboo against calling George W. Bush a liar was even stronger than it is today, the national news media bought into the Bush administration’s spin that the President did nothing to bail out his Enron benefactors, including Kenneth Lay.

Bush supposedly refused to intervene, despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Enron had poured into his political coffers. That refusal purportedly showed the high ethical standards that set Bush apart from lesser politicians.

Bush’s defenders will probably reprise that storyline now that former Enron Chairman Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling stand convicted of conspiracy and fraud in the plundering of the onetime energy-trading giant. But the reality is that the Bush-can’t-be-bought spin was never true.

For instance, the documentary evidence is now clear that in summer 2001 – at the same time Bush’s National Security Council was ignoring warnings about an impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack – NSC adviser Condoleezza Rice was personally overseeing a government-wide task force to pressure India to give Enron as much as $2.3 billion.

Then, even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when India’s cooperation in the “war on terror” was crucial, the Bush administration kept up its full-court press to get India to pay Enron for a white-elephant power plant that the company had built in Dabhol, India.

The pressure on India went up the chain of command to Vice President Dick Cheney, who personally pushed Enron’s case, and to Bush himself, who planned to lodge a complaint with India’s prime minister. Post-9/11, one senior U.S. bureaucrat warned India that failure to give in to Enron's demands would put into doubt the future functioning of American agencies in India.

The NSC-led Dabhol campaign didn’t end until Nov. 8, 2001, when the Securities and Exchange Commission raided Enron’s offices – and protection of Lay’s interests stopped being politically tenable. That afternoon, Bush was sent an e-mail advising him not to raise his planned Dabhol protest with India’s prime minister who was visiting Washington.

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Haditha, Bush & Nuremberg's Law

By Peter Dyer
June 6, 2006

Editor's Note: As the U.S. military completes its investigation of the alleged murder of 24 Iraqi civilians at the hands of U.S. Marines last November in Haditha, the next phase likely will be some form of court martial against Marines implicated in the case.

If that happens, President George W. Bush has made clear that he expects justice to be meted out to any Marine found guilty of a war crime against Iraqi civilians. But, as we anticipated in an earlier article, virtually no U.S. media attention has focused on the Nuremberg principles and Bush's culpability in the crime.

In this guest essay, Peter Dyer reviews the principles of international law that were set by U.S. and other allied jurists after World War II, rules against aggressive war that were meant to apply to the architects of illegal conflicts as well as to the grunts on the ground:

George W. Bush -- in his first public comment on the alleged massacre of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha, Iraq, last November -- said: “If, in fact, these allegations are true, the Marine Corps will work hard to make sure that ... those who violated the law -- if indeed they did -- will be punished.”

Now that President Bush has resolved publicly that those who committed war crimes will be punished, the subject of U.S. war crimes may begin to move closer to its deserved prominent place in the American public discourse. If this happens, more Americans are likely to realize that the man who spoke of punishing war criminals has himself violated the law and should be accordingly punished.

In fact, according to the Nuremberg Charter, a document which the U.S. had a major role in drafting, those who initiate a war of aggression quite literally bear individual criminal responsibility, not only for waging unprovoked war, but for the war crimes which inevitably flow from aggression.

In 1946, the chief American prosecutor of the first Nuremberg trial, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, took this principle seriously enough to help secure the conviction of 17 of the most prominent surviving German leaders for initiating a war of aggression. Eleven were sentenced to death. Three received life sentences and three received lesser sentences.

Reading the transcript of the first Nuremberg trial, we see that all who committed war crimes, from the foot soldiers to the highest leaders, were to be held responsible for their crimes. We also see, however, that the leaders who initiated the aggression were assigned primary criminal responsibility by the prosecutors and by the Tribunal, since none of the subsequent crimes would have been committed had the aggression not occurred. This principle was absolutely central to the Nuremberg Charter and Trials.

Moreover, we see that the intent of the authors of the Charter was not to limit the principles involved in this body of law to prosecution of Germans in 1946 but rather to set a precedent for all times and for all countries, including the United States.

Article 6 of the Charter states: “The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility: (a) CRIMES AGAINST PEACE: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing; ...Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.”

And from Article 7: “The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment.”

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/060506a.html

Principle I

Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefore and liable to punishment.

Principle II

The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.

Principle III

The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

Principle IV

The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Principle V

Any person charged with a crime under international law has the right to a fair trial on the facts and law.

Principle VI

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

(a) Crimes against peace:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

(b) War Crimes:

Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation of slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the Seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

(c) Crimes against humanity:

Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

Principle VII

Complicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.

Kerry Attacker Protected Rev. Moon

By Robert Parry
October 15, 2004

Carlton Sherwood, who has produced an anti-John Kerry video that will be aired across the United States before the Nov. 2 elections, wrote a book in the 1980s denouncing federal investigators who tried to crack down on Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s illicit financial operations.

In retrospect, Sherwood’s book, Inquisition: The Prosecution and Persecution of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, appears to have been part of a right-wing counter-offensive aimed at discouraging scrutiny of Moon and his mysterious money flows. The strategy largely succeeded, enabling Moon to continue funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. political process, most notably to publish the ultra-conservative Washington Times but also to make payments to prominent politicians, including former President George H.W. Bush.

New evidence also makes clear that Moon resumed his practice of laundering money into the United States after serving a 13-month prison sentence for a 1982 conviction for tax law violations. Former Moon associates, including his ex-daughter-in-law, have disclosed that Moon’s organization smuggled cash across U.S. borders, but those admissions have not led to renewed federal investigations.

Indeed, the pummeling of federal investigators who examined Moon’s financial schemes in the 1970s and early 1980s – and Moon’s enormous clout among conservatives in Washington – have made the South Korean theocrat something of a political untouchable. The congressional investigators, who first uncovered Moon’s financial irregularities, and the federal prosecutor, who narrowed that evidence into a successful prosecution for tax evasion, were made into cautionary tales for others thinking about challenging Moon.

Accused Investigators

Government investigators, including former Rep. Donald Fraser and ex-federal prosecutor Martin Flumenbaum, were accused by Moon defenders of offenses ranging from a lack of patriotism to racial and religious bigotry. Sherwood, a former Washington Times reporter, was among the Moon defenders who lashed out at Fraser and Flumenbaum, portraying them as unscrupulous witch hunters who abused their investigative authority.

In Inquisition, Sherwood claimed he had examined the financial records of Moon’s organization and found nothing improper, concluding that Moon and his associates “were and continued to be the victims of the worst kind of religious prejudice and racial bigotry this country has witnessed in over a century.” Sherwood portrayed Moon as a religious martyr.

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The CIA, a Bush Family Fiefdom

By Robert Parry
May 9, 2006

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the U.S. government has tried both structural and personnel changes to fix the nation’s intelligence services – including now the ouster of CIA Director Porter Goss – but the remedies have failed because they’ve missed the core problem.

What’s wrong with the U.S. intelligence community is that over the past three decades its ethos of telling truth to power has been corrupted by politics to such a degree that George W. Bush now sees the Central Intelligence Agency as virtually his family’s fiefdom, with the Langley, Virginia, headquarters even named for his father, George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director.

So, when analysts at the CIA were viewed as undercutting George W. Bush’s case for war with Iraq, the White House launched a counter-attack against these intelligence professionals for perceived disloyalty.

During the buildup to the Iraq War, Vice President Dick Cheney personally went to CIA headquarters to bang heads with intelligence analysts who doubted White House claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. While some analysts resisted, many mid-level bureaucrats acquiesced to Cheney.


SNIP...

Loyal Henchmen

Like a Medieval ruler punishing a rebellious province, Bush sent in loyal henchmen to root out perceived traitors. Bush’s attitude toward CIA analysts who disagreed with his pre-war assertions about Iraq’s WMD was much like his anger toward the French for cautioning him about his Iraq invasion plans.

Being right was no protection from Bush’s wrath; indeed, it appeared to make him madder. Though Bush has continued to this day to stress how much he values accurate intelligence as vital for the nation’s security, his real record has been one of insisting on getting information that fits his preconceptions.

So, rather than reward the CIA analysts who had resisted White House pressure to cook the WMD intelligence on Iraq, Bush set out to remove them. (He also took aim at the State Department, another bastion of WMD dissent, where he moved to replace the diffident Colin Powell with the enthusiastic loyalist Condoleezza Rice.)

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Lost History: Reagan-Bush Crime Syndicate

By Robert Parry

WASHINGTON -- It should be clear by now that for 12 years, from 1981-1993, the United States was governed by political leaders who merged the power of the state with criminality to a degree possibly unmatched in modern American history. That disturbing reality was underscored again this past month by an exhaustively researched series by Gary Webb in The San Jose Mercury-News.

Webb's three-part series, with supporting documentation, traced the "crack" epidemic that devastated Los Angeles and other U.S. cities to massive shipments of cocaine smuggled by elements of the CIA-organized Nicaraguan contra army in the early-to-mid 1980s. Danilo Blandon Reyes, a former contra leader and drug dealer, testified during a recent cocaine trafficking trial in San Diego that the smuggling was given a green light by the late Enrique Bermudez, who commanded the FDN, the largest contra force and the one most closely associated with the CIA.

"There is a saying that the ends justify the means," Blandon said. "And that's what Mr. Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK. So we started raising money for the contra revolution." Though Blandon was offered as a U.S. government witness, the Justice Department first obtained a gag order that blocked defense attorneys from inquiring about the CIA's role in dealing dope to the Crips and Bloods and other inner-city gangs.

But a wealth of other evidence, collected by federal drug agents and congressional investigators during the 1980s, corroborated that the Reagan-Bush administrations knew about the drug trafficking and mounted a determined cover-up to protect the contras from exposure. Senior administration officials apparently shared Enrique Bermudez's situational ethics. After all, President Reagan had hailed the contras as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers." They could not be unmasked as drug dealers.

Published stories about contra drug trafficking were also not new. On Dec. 20, 1985 -- more than a decade ago -- The Associated Press published a story by Brian Barger and me reporting that all major contra factions had joined the drug trade. "Nicaraguan rebels operating in northern Costa Rica have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua's leftist government, according to U.S. investigators and American volunteers who work with the rebels," our AP story read.

It was the first article alleging contra drug trafficking and it was sharply criticized by both the Reagan-Bush administration and the conservative media. The contras were already reeling from widespread charges that they engaged in rape, torture and murder of Nicaraguan civilians. The day our AP story ran, deputy State Department spokesman Charles Redman declared, "we are not aware of any evidence to support those charges" -- a claim Barger and I knew to be untrue. But Redman's denial was just the start of a cover-up by the "just-say-no" crowd.

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Neil Bush Meets the Messiah

Why is the President's younger brother, Neil, touring with the leader of the Moonies?

By John Gorenfeld, AlterNet. Posted December 5, 2005.

http://alternet.org/images/managed/Story+Image_thumb_aboo.jpg
Standing center left, Neil Bush. Standing second from the right, the Korean Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

"Those who stray from the heavenly way," the owner of the flagship Republican newspaper the Washington Times admonished an audience in Taipei on Friday, "will be punished."

This "heavenly way," the Rev. Sun Myung Moon explained, demands a 51-mile underwater highway spanning Alaska and Russia. Sitting in the front row: Neil Bush, the brother of the president of the United States.

Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the South Korean giant of the religious right who owns the Washington Times, is on a 100-city speaking tour to promote his $200 billion "Peace King Tunnel" dream. As he describes it, the tunnel would be both a monument to his magnificence, and a totem to his prophecy of a unified Planet Earth. In this vision, the United Nations would be reinvented as an instrument of God's plan, and democracy and sexual freedom would crumble in the face of this faith-based glory.

The name Peace King Tunnel would allude to the title of authority to which Moon, 86, lays claim, and to which U.S. congressmen paid respect on Capitol Hill in last year's controversial "Crown of Peace" coronation ritual.

Moon's lobbying campaign is "ambitious and diffuse," as the D.C. newspaper The Hill reported last year, and the sheer range of guests revealed just how many Pacific Rim political leaders the Times owner has won over, including Filipino and Taiwanese politicians. And the head of the Arizona GOP attended a recent stop in San Francisco. But perhaps the most surprising VIP to tag along is Neil Bush, George H.W. Bush's youngest and most wayward son, who made both the Philippines and Taiwan legs of the journey, according to reports in newspapers from those countries and statements from Moon's Family Federation.

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http://alternet.org/story/29054/

America's Historic Debt to Haiti

By Robert Parry
February 10, 2006

As Haiti intrudes again on the U.S. consciousness with a new round of troubled elections, Americans see a violent, backward, poverty-stricken country run by descendants of African slaves. There are feelings of condescension mixed with a touch of racism.

But what few Americans know is that they owe this Caribbean nation a profound historical debt. Indeed, perhaps no nation has done more for the United States than Haiti and been treated as badly in return.

If not for Haiti – which in the 1700s rivaled the American colonies as the most valuable European possession in the Western Hemisphere – the course of U.S. history would have been very different. It is possible that the United States might never have expanded much beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

What altered this early American history was the Haitian slave uprising against France near the end of the 18th Century. This second great anti-colonial revolution in the New World both alarmed and ultimately benefited the leaders of the newly born United States.

At the time, Haiti – then known as St. Domingue and covering the western third of the island of Hispaniola – ranked as perhaps the richest colony in the world. Its carefully cultivated plantations produced nearly one-half the world’s coffee and sugar, and its profits helped build many of the grandest cities of France.

But the human price was unspeakably high. The French had devised a fiendishly cruel slave system that imported enslaved Africans for work in the fields with accounting procedures for their amortization. They were literally worked to death.

The American colonists may have rebelled against Great Britain over issues such as representation in Parliament and arbitrary actions by King George III. But the Haitians took up arms against a brutal system of slavery. One French method for executing troublesome slaves was to insert explosives into their rectums and detonate the bomb.

So, when revolution swept France in 1789, the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity” resonated with special force in St. Domingue. African slaves demanded that the concepts of freedom be applied universally, but the plantation system continued, leading to violent slave uprisings.

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For those who know Haitian history, this has been a time of eerie, unhappy déjà vu. Part of the pain is to see the elected president coerced out of office by heavy-handed pressure from the United States and France, accompanied by a show of force and the threat of a blood bath. But to also hear that he's been spirited off to a secret location is to be bluntly reminded of the fate of the fabled leader of Haiti's revolution, former slave and stable boy Toussaint L'Ouverture, who was entrapped by the French, bound, and hustled away from Haiti on a ship, to die in solitary confinement in a fortress prison in the Jura mountains in France.

When Aristide descended from his plane in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic, he made a brief statement: "In overthrowing me, they cut down the tree of peace, but it will grow again, because its roots are well planted." This was a deliberate allusion to Toussaint, who said, from aboard the ship, never to see Haiti again: "They have felled only the trunk of the tree. Branches will sprout again, for its roots are numerous and deep." The echo can be missed by no Haitian.

It's hard to justify contemporary comparisons to the founders of nations, especially when made not by a third party but by the leader himself. But in Bangui, Aristide was not so much comparing himself to Toussaint as he was making a connection between the French betrayal of Toussaint and the Americans' betrayal of his own presidency. Though the indications had been many, especially since George W. Bush came to power, Aristide had hesitated over the years--for reasons of political expedience--to come right out and say what was patently true.

But now he's saying it. What happened in Haiti was a coup d'état, and it's almost funny to hear Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Scott McClellan call that claim "absurd" and "nonsense." The coup didn't come in one fell strike, which fact camouflaged it for a time; we're used to a coup being a coup--which means a cut or blow in French--something sudden. But the coup against Aristide, and by extension against the Haitian people, was prolonged, a chronic coup. It began when Aristide was first elected at the end of 1990 and continued right up until he was hustled aboard a plane and flown to what he was told would be a place of his choice but that turned out to be the former homeland of fabled killer and diamond collector Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a country where, according to the CIA country report available on the web, a ten-year elected civilian government was recently replaced by a military coup d'état. Sound familiar?

snip

One should be clear about the opposition in Haiti right now: although it includes some very good people, it is largely a group of malcontent career politicians, wealthy businessmen and ambitious power-seekers. It is exactly the kind of "civil society" opposition the United States encouraged and financed when it was attempting to remove Manuel Noriega in Panama. The Haitian opposition, too, was financed and organized during the Aristide years by US-funded groups like USAID's Democracy Enhancement Project and the International Republican Institute, an organization established in 1983 "to advance democracy worldwide." These have played a central and critical role in keeping an unpopular Haitian opposition alive and obstructionist. At every turn, the US-backed opposition tried to bring political life under Aristide to a halt.

snip

Eight weeks after Mexican soldiers at a rural airport in the Yucatan discovered 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard an American-registered DC9 painted to resemble aircraft from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials seem no closer to publicly identifying either the owner of the plane, or the tons of cocaine.

Some suggest they may not be trying very hard. If true, this is yet another indication that suspicions of CIA involvement in the drug flight are on target. In fact, in the strange brew of companies through whose hands the twin DC9's have passed, we will soon see even more unmistakable signs of companies known to be CIA fronts and people considered to be Bush Family retainers.

snip

snip

In a hearing on November 3, 2000 Federal Magistrate Judge James Glazebrook denied Hilliard's motion to get his Lear back.

"Wally took a big hit on that one," stated one aviation observer at the Naples Airport. "The DEA was not going to let him have that plane back."

"The DEA was planning on adding it to their Border Patrol fleet," confirmed a spokesman for the Lear jet's current owner. East Coast Jets of Allentown, PA. bought the plane, they told us, after the insurance company which had insured it for the lender against seizure successfully wrenched it back from the DEA after Hilliard had been removed from the picture.

Wally Hilliard's central role in the purchase and operation of the flight school that was a magnet for Mohamed Atta and the Hamburg cadre requires raising some serious questions about his charter jet company's possible involvement in heroin trafficking...

Especially since the chief product for export of Osama Bin Laden's terrorist organization was also, strangely enough, heroin.

snip

John Ashcroft, fishing in Missouri
after a busy three-day week
as Attorney General in Washington.
It may've been taken in summer 2001,
after he was warned to stop
flying commercial.

Ashcroft & Anti-Semitism

By Robert Parry
January 16, 2001

When John Ashcroft addressed an audience at Bob Jones University on May 8, 1999, the man who is now George W. Bush’s nominee to be attorney general cited – and exaggerated – a passage from the Book of John that has contributed to the persecution of Jews for the past two millennia.

Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri, ventured into this controversial doctrinal terrain with an argument that "a slogan of the American Revolution" was a declaration that the colonists recognized only Jesus as their king.

To an appreciative audience at the conservative Christian school in Greenville, S.C., Ashcroft asserted that angry American colonists frequently rebuffed British authorities trying to enforce the laws of the British king with the response, “We have no king but Jesus.”

But Ashcroft went further. He reached back to antiquity to what he saw as the antithesis of this founding American belief. Ashcroft counterpoised the phrase, “We have no king but Jesus,” against an alleged declaration by the Jews of Jerusalem seeking the execution of Jesus for sedition.

According to a transcript of his speech released last week, Ashcroft offered the following rendition of the Biblical passage:

“My mind thinking about that once raced back a couple of thousand years when Pilate stepped before the people of Jerusalem and said, ‘Whom would ye that I release unto you? Barabbas? Or Jesus, which is called the Christ?’ And when they said, ‘Barabbas,’ he said, ‘But what about Jesus? King of the Jews?’ And the outcry was, ‘We have no king but Caesar’.”

In the Bob Jones speech, Ashcroft then contrasted this supposed outcry of the Jews of Jerusalem with the supposed principle behind the American Revolution. Ashcroft said:

“There’s a difference between a culture that has no king but Caesar, no standard but the civil authority, and a culture that has no king but Jesus, no standard but the eternal authority. When you have no king but Caesar, you release Barabbas – criminality, destruction, thievery, the lowest and the least. When you have no king but Jesus, you release the eternal, you release the highest and the best.”

Ashcroft's Scholarship

To suggest that America's Founding Fathers envisioned a society built on the premise that “We have no king but Jesus” is challenged by many scholars.

According to historians of the revolutionary era, many of the Founding Fathers staunchly opposed any sectarian creed as the basis for the new country, as is reflected in the First Amendment and in the public statements and writings of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Tom Paine and others.

“Their prevailing faith was deism, a belief that God presided over the universe and had a providential interest in mankind,” wrote historian Thomas Fleming. “But He was not a personal God in the vivid way Jesus is presented in the Gospels.”

The notion that the rebellious Jews of ancient Jerusalem eagerly announced their submission to “no king but Caesar” also clashes with the historical record and reflects some dubious scholarship on Ashcroft’s part.

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Lost History (Part 1): Death, Lies and Bodywashing

WASHINGTON -- On Sunday, May 5, a solemn ceremony took place in an open grassy space at Arlington National Cemetery. A small memorial stone was unveiled to honor 21 American soldiers who died in secret combat against leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. As family members wiped tears from their eyes, Salvadoran children placed tiny American flags next to the soldiers' names, unknown casualties from the 1980s.

"For too long, we have failed to recognize the contributions, the sacrifices, of those who served with distinction under the most dangerous conditions," said former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador, William G. Walker. The next day, The Washington Post focused on the human interest side of the story in a front-page piece entitled "Public Honors for Secret Combat."

But what received short-shrift amid the honors and the tears was the remarkable confirmation that for much of a decade, the Reagan-Bush administrations had conducted a secret war in which American soldiers engaged in not-infrequent combat. The 21 dead surpassed the number who died in the 1989 invasion of Panama.

Yet, the war in El Salvador was waged with hardly anyone in Congress or the national news media catching on to the U.S. combat role. Indeed, throughout the 1980s, the White House and Pentagon routinely denied that U.S. soldiers were in combat in El Salvador -- and few reporters challenged the official story.

Shortly after taking office in 1981, President Reagan dispatched 55 Green Beret trainers to El Salvador to teach the Salvadoran army better techniques for defeating a resilient band of Marxist-led guerrillas. For years, the Salvadoran military had been more adept at running death squads against civilian targets than at cornering an armed enemy in the country's mountainous terrain.

To allay public fears about another Vietnam War, however, Reagan limited the number of Green Berets to 55 and ordered them to avoid combat zones. They were to train only, not advise the Salvadorans in combat situations as Green Berets had done in Vietnam. They also were forbidden to carry M-16s. They were to have only side arms, for self-defense.

Missing the Story

All of these U.S. government pronouncements, the Arlington ceremony made clear, had been lies. But the Post story made only a passing attempt to explain why so little was known about these years of classified combat and why the government cover-ups had been so successful.

"Reports of firefights involving U.S. troops were closely held, and field commanders were told in no uncertain terms not to nominate soldiers for combat awards," the Post reported. It then quoted Joseph Stringham, a retired one-star Army general who commanded U.S. military forces in El Salvador in 1983-84.

"It had been determined this was not a combat zone, and they were going to hold the line on that," Stringham said. "I've puzzled over why. It may be something as fundamental as the bureaucracy not wanting to reverse itself."

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost1.html

Bay of Pigs Meets Black Hawk Down

By Robert Parry
March 30, 2003

Whatever happens in the weeks ahead, George W. Bush has “lost” the war in Iraq. The only question now is how big a price America will pay, both in terms of battlefield casualties and political hatred swelling around the world.

That is the view slowly dawning on U.S. military analysts, who privately are asking whether the cost of ousting Saddam Hussein has grown so large that “victory” will constitute a strategic defeat of historic proportions. At best, even assuming Saddam’s ouster, the Bush administration may be looking at an indefinite period of governing something akin to a California-size Gaza Strip.

The chilling realization is spreading in Washington that Bush’s Iraqi debacle may be the mother of all presidential miscalculations – an extraordinary blend of Bay of Pigs-style wishful thinking with a “Black Hawk Down” reliance on special operations to wipe out enemy leaders as a short-cut to victory. But the magnitude of the Iraq disaster could be far worse than either the Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba in 1961 or the bloody miscalculations in Somalia in 1993.

SNIP...

The Bush Strategy

Few analysts today, however, believe that George W. Bush and his senior advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, have the common sense to swallow the short-term bitter medicine of a cease-fire or a U.S. withdrawal. Rather than face the political music for admitting to the gross error of ordering an invasion in defiance of the United Nations and then misjudging the enemy, these U.S. leaders are expected to push forward no matter how bloody or ghastly their future course might be.

Without doubt, the Bush administration misjudged the biggest question of the war: “Would the Iraqis fight?” Happy visions of rose petals and cheers have given way to a grim reality of ambushes and suicide bombs.

CONTINUED...

Why U.S. Intelligence Failed

By Robert Parry
October 22, 2003

In Tom Clancy’s political thriller “Sum of All Fears,” the United States and Russia are being pushed to the brink of nuclear war by neo-Nazi terrorists who have detonated a nuclear explosion in Baltimore and want the Americans to blame the Russians.

CIA analysts have pieced together the real story but can’t get it to the president. “The president is basing his decisions on some really bad information,” analyst Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) pleads to a U.S. general. “My orders are to get the right information to the people who make the decisions.”

Though a bit corny, Ryan’s dialogue captures the credo of professional intelligence analysts. Solid information, they believe, must be the foundation for sound decisions, especially when lives and the national security are at stake. The battle over that principle is the real back story to the recent dispute over Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It is a story of how the CIA’s vaunted analytical division has been corrupted – or “politicized” – by conservative ideologues over the past quarter century.

Some key officials in George W. Bush’s administration – from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to Vice President Dick Cheney – have long been part of this trend toward seeing intelligence as an ideological weapon, rather than a way to inform a full debate. Other figures in Bush’s circle of advisers, including his father, the former president and CIA director, have played perhaps even more central roles in this transformation.

For his part, the younger George Bush has shown little but disdain for any information that puts his policies or “gut” judgments in a negative light. In that sense, Bush’s thin skin toward contradiction can’t be separated from the White House campaign, beginning in July, to discredit retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly debunking the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger. That retaliation included the exposure of Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA officer, an act that is now under FBI investigation as a possible felony.

Dating Back to Watergate

Though one cost of corrupting U.S. intelligence can now be counted in the growing U.S. death toll in Iraq, the origins of the current problem can be traced back to the mid-1970s, when conservatives were engaged in fierce rear-guard defenses after the twin debacles of the Vietnam War and Watergate. In 1974, after Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from office over the Watergate political-spying scandal, the Republicans suffered heavy losses in congressional races. The next year, the U.S. –backed government in South Vietnam fell.

At this crucial juncture, a group of influential conservatives coalesced around a strategy of accusing the CIA’s analytical division of growing soft on communism. These conservatives – led by the likes of Richard Pipes, Paul Nitze, William Van Cleave, Max Kampelman, Eugene Rostow, Elmo Zumwalt and Richard Allen – claimed that the CIA’s Soviet analysts were ignoring Moscow’s aggressive strategy for world domination. This political assault put in play one of the CIA’s founding principles – objective analysis.

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Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'

By Nat Parry
February 21, 2006

Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration’s domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with the enemy.

“The administration has not only the right, but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column movements,” Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.

“I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant to do that,” Graham added, volunteering to work with the administration to draft guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat.

“Senator,” a smiling Gonzales responded, “the President already said we’d be happy to listen to your ideas.”

In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an administration of his own party while seeking some credit from Washington centrists for suggesting Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush runs the War on Terror.

But recent developments suggest that the Bush administration may already be contemplating what to do with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or who disseminate information that may be considered helpful to the enemy.

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Bush's Conspiracy to Riot

By Robert Parry

August 5, 2002

More than three decades apart, two political riots influenced the outcome of U.S. presidential elections. In 1968, protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago hurt Democrat Hubert Humphrey and helped Republican Richard Nixon eke out a victory. On Nov. 22, 2000, the so-called “Brooks Brothers Riot” of Republican activists helped stop a vote recount in Miami -- and showed how far George W. Bush’s supporters were ready to go to put their man in the White House.

But the government reaction to the two events was dramatically different. The clashes between police and Vietnam War protesters in 1968 led the Nixon administration to charge seven anti-war radicals with “conspiring to cross state lines with the intent to incite a riot.” The defendants, who became known as the Chicago Seven, were later acquitted of conspiracy charges, in part, because the protests were loosely organized and because solid documentary evidence was lacking.

After the Miami “Brooks Brothers Riot” – named after the protesters’ preppie clothing – no government action was taken beyond the police rescuing several Democrats who were surrounded and roughed up by the rioters. While no legal charges were filed against the Republicans, newly released documents show that at least a half dozen of the publicly identified rioters were paid by Bush’s recount committee.

The payments to the Republican activists are documented in hundreds of pages of Bush committee records – released grudgingly to the Internal Revenue Service last month, 19 months after the 36-day recount battle ended. Overall, the records provide a road map of how the Bush recount team brought its operatives across state lines to stop then-Vice President Al Gore’s recount efforts.

The records show that the Bush committee spent a total of $13.8 million to frustrate the recount of Florida’s votes and secure the state's crucial electoral votes for Bush. By contrast, the Gore recount operation spent $3.2 million, about one quarter of the Bush total. Bush spent more just on lawyers – $4.4 million – than Gore did on his entire effort.

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Dark Side of Rev. Moon: Buying the Right

By Robert Parry

On Jan. 28, 1995, a beaming Rev. Jerry Falwell told his Old Time Gospel Hour congregation news that seemed heaven sent. The televangelist hailed two Virginia businessmen as financial saviors of debt-ridden Liberty University, the fundamentalist Christian school that Falwell had made the crown jewel of his Religious Right empire.

"They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything," enthused Falwell. "Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas." Falwell's congregation rose as one to applaud. The star of the moment was Daniel Reber, who was standing behind Falwell. Thomas was not present.

Reber and Thomas earned Falwell's public gratitude by excusing the Lynchburg, Va., school of about one-half of its $73 million debt. In the late 1980s, that flood of red ink had forced Falwell to abandon his Moral Majority political organization and nearly drowned Liberty University in bankruptcy.

Reber and Thomas came to Falwell's rescue in the nick of time. Their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation of Forest, Va., snapped up a big chunk of Liberty's debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value. Thousands of small religious investors who had bought church construction bonds through a Texas company were the big losers. But Falwell shed no tears. He told local reporters that the moment was "the greatest single day of financial advantage" in the school's history.

Left unmentioned in the happy sermon was the identity of the bigger guardian angel who had been protecting Falwell's financial interests -- from a distance and without publicity. That secret benefactor was the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed South Korean messiah who is controversial with many fundamentalist Christians because of his bizarre Biblical interpretations and his brainwashing tactics that have torn thousands of young people from their families. Moon also has grown harshly anti-American in recent years.

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Iran's Ex-President Blows the Whistle

By Martin Kilian

His word didn't mean a thing to the U.S. investigators examining the so-called October Surprise case four years ago. But in Germany, Iran's ex-president Abolhassan Bani-Sadr has become a hot witness in a politically super-charged criminal case that implicates Tehran's intelligence chief Ali Fallahyan.

A court in Berlin indicted Fallahyan for his role in the murder of four Kurdish opposition figures at a Berlin discotheque in September 1992. The German government alleges that the four Kurds were gunned down by Fallahyan's agents, the ones actually facing the charges since Tehran has refused to extradite Fallahyan.

In late August of this year, Bani-Sadr appeared as a witness and stated that Iranian President Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani and Iran's "spiritual leader" Ali Khameini were also involved in the plot. Bani-Sadr testified that both signed off on the murders, an accusation that outraged Tehran.

Iran's Islamic government tried until the last minute to block Bani-Sadr's testimony. Tehran even demanded that the Germans extradite the ex-president back to Iran for the hijacking of an Iranian military plane that Bani-Sadr used to flee into exile in 1981. The Germans refused to comply with that demand, but German officials also fear that the public confrontation over the Kurdish assassinations could damage the lucrative Iran-Germany relationship.

To soften the blow to Iran, German officials publicly cast doubt on Bani-Sadr's knowledge about the assassination plot. The officials noted that Bani-Sadr's high-level contacts in Tehran had long ago dried up. The former president just had an axe to grind and sought revenge, some German officials said.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story19.html

Lost History: Arafat Confirms GOP 'October Surprise' Bid

By Robert Parry

Palestinian president Yasir Arafat has joined the growing list of world leaders to confirm that Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign did try to disrupt President Carter's negotiations to free 52 Americans then held hostage in Iran.

Arafat shared the secret with Carter 15 years after the end of Carter's presidency, according to an article by historian Douglas Brinkley in the fall issue of the scholarly journal Diplomatic History. Arafat informed Carter about the Republican sabotage efforts during a private meeting between the two men last Jan. 22 at Arafat's bunker-headquarters in Gaza City.

"There is something I want to tell you," Arafat said, addressing Carter. "You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the election."

Arafat insisted that he rebuffed the offer and Brinkley's account of the Arafat-Carter meeting supplied no other details about the alleged GOP initiative. It was unclear, for instance, which Republican representative made the overture to the PLO and exactly when or where.

Although Arafat had never before commented publicly about the so-called October Surprise controversy, his statement to Carter does not stand alone. Since the late 1980s, one of Arafat's senior aides, Bassam Abu Sharif, has given journalists a similar account of a Republican approach to the PLO. It is also true that the PLO had close ties to the Islamic government in Iran in 1980.

In 1990, during an interview in Tunis, Bassam told me that a senior figure in the Reagan campaign contacted Arafat and the PLO in Beirut in 1980 about engineering a delay in the hostage release. "It was important for Reagan not to have any of the hostages released during the remaining days of President Carter," Bassam said.

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America's Matrix, Revisited

By Robert Parry
April 12, 2006

EXCERPT...

The Matrix's Origin

But a fuller explanation for this American Matrix goes back much farther – and like the Matrix in the movie – we know some but not all the facts.

The American Matrix grew out of Republican anger in the 1970s. That anger followed the leaking of the Pentagon Papers which described the secret the history of the Vietnam War and the revelations about President Richard Nixon’s political abuses known as Watergate. Those two disclosures helped force U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and drove Nixon from office.

For leading Republicans, the trauma was extreme as the party was pummeled in congressional elections in 1974 and lost the White House in 1976. An influential core of wealthy conservatives decided that they needed to assert tighter control over what information reached and influenced the people.

Led by former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon and enlisting the likes of right-wing philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, these Republicans began pouring tens of millions of dollars into building a conservative media infrastructure to challenge the mainstream press, which the conservatives labeled “liberal.”

This political/media strategy gained momentum in the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan’s image-savvy team worked closely with the emerging conservative media, such as Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times which Reagan called his “favorite” newspaper. Meanwhile, a host of conservative attack groups, such as Accuracy in Media, went after journalists who exposed embarrassing facts about Reagan’s secret operations, such as the Iran-Contra scandal and drug-trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras, Reagan's beloved “freedom fighters.”

Conservative activists worked hand-in-glove with Reagan’s “public diplomacy” apparatus, which borrowed psychological operations specialists from the U.S. military to conduct what was termed “perception management.” Their goal was to manage the perceptions of the American people about key foreign-policy issues, such as Central America and the threat posed by the Soviet Union.

“The most critical special operations mission we have … is to persuade the American people that the communists are out to get us,” explained deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force, J. Michael Kelly, at a National Defense University conference.

In the 1980s, the Republicans were helped by news executives in mainstream publications who favored Reagan’s hard-line foreign policy, including New York Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal. Some of these executives turned their news organizations away from the tough reporting that was needed to expose the foreign policy abuses that were occurring under Reagan.

That averting of eyes was one of the key reasons major newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, largely missed the Iran-Contra scandal and attacked the reporting of other journalists who uncovered foreign-policy crimes such as cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan contra forces. A false reality was being created that covered up the ugly side of U.S. foreign policy.

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CIA at 50: Still Hiding Its 'Original' Nazi Sin

By Martin A. Lee

For U.S. policy-makers, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency on Sept. 8 provides yet another opportunity for congratulatory pronouncements about "winning the Cold War." But the American public would be better served if U.S. officials marked the occasion by owning up to the CIA's "original sin," which dates back to the spy agency's earliest days: its covert use of a Nazi spy network brimming with war criminals.

U.S. spy chiefs protected this cast of killers so they ostensibly could help counter the Soviet threat. But for the next five decades, this decision -- the ultimate practice of situational ethics -- loosened up Washington's tolerance for human rights abuses and a variety of other crimes in the name of anti-communism. The consequences continue to this day, with a resurgent neo-fascist movement in Europe that can trace its ideological lineage back to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, through some of the men who served the CIA.

The key player on the German side of this unholy alliance was Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, a thin, bespectacled espionage prodigy who was Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy. Gehlen oversaw all of Germany's military-intelligence capabilities throughout Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.

As the war drew to a close, the crafty Gehlen surmised that the grand anti-fascist coalition -- led by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union -- would not survive the peace. Gehlen also recognized that U.S. intelligence operations, largely an anti-Nazi improvisation, would be ill-prepared to wage a sustained shadow struggle against the U.S.S.R.

So, at war's end, Gehlen opted to surrender to the Americans. He offered to turn over the vast espionage archive on the U.S.S.R. that he had accumulated for Hitler. Plus, he said he could activate an underground army of battle-hardened anti-communists in Eastern Europe for Cold War duty.

SNIP...

Yet, even the vilest of the vile -- senior bureaucrats who administered the Holocaust -- were welcome in the Org. (Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man and personal favorite, found gainful employment courtesy of Gehlen and the CIA.) "It seems," the Frankfurter Rundschau editorialized, "that in the Gehlen headquarters one SS man paved the way for the next and Himmler's elite were having happy reunion ceremonies."

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story41.html

Bush's My Lai

By Robert Parry
May 30, 2006

The new U.S. atrocity in Iraq, the alleged murder of two dozen Iraqis by revenge-seeking Marines in the city of Haditha, appears likely to follow the course of other Iraq war-crimes cases, such as the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib – some low- or mid-level soldiers will be court-martialed and marched off to prison.

George W. Bush will offer some bromides about how the punishment shows that the United States honors the rule of law and how the punishment is further proof of America’s civilized behavior when compared with the enemy’s barbarity. It’s also likely the U.S. news media won’t place too much blame on Bush.

But the common thread from the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003 through Abu Ghraib to Haditha is that Bush cavalierly sent young Americans into a complex and frightening conflict with false and alarmist rhetoric ringing in their ears.

Through clever juxtaposition, Bush’s speeches linked Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and later blurred the distinctions between Iraq’s home-grown insurgency and the relatively small number of al-Qaeda terrorists operating in Iraq.

Again and again, in 2002-2003, Bush rhetorically fused the names Saddam Hussein and Osama bin-Laden, as Bush rushed the United States into war. Then, in fall 2005 – around the time of the alleged Haditha atrocity on Nov. 19, 2005 – Bush was framing the Iraq conflict as a war to stop terrorists from creating “a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia,” which would threaten the American mainland.

Though these claims lacked credible intelligence – Hussein and bin-Laden were bitter enemies and al-Qaeda remains a fringe player in the Muslim world – Bush’s messages apparently sank in with impressionable young soldiers and Marines trying to understand why they needed to kill Iraqis. (See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Latest Iraq War Lies.”)

As a result of Bush’s incessant propaganda, a poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq – taken in January and February 2006 – found that 85 percent believed the U.S. mission in Iraq was mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.” Seventy-seven percent said a chief war goal was “to stop Saddam from protecting al-Qaeda in Iraq.”

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/052906.html

Gore's Victory

By Robert Parry
November 12, 2001

So Al Gore was the choice of Florida’s voters -- whether one counts hanging chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the eight news organizations that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots. By any chad measure, Gore won.

Gore won even if one doesn’t count the 15,000-25,000 votes that USA Today estimated Gore lost because of illegally designed “butterfly ballots,” or the hundreds of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls.

Gore won even if there’s no adjustment for George W. Bush’s windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness reported earlier by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Put differently, George W. Bush was not the choice of Florida’s voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nationwide. (For more details on studies of the election, see Consortiumnews.com stories of May 12, June 2 and July 16.)

The Spin

Yet, possibly for reasons of “patriotism” in this time of crisis, the news organizations that financed the Florida ballot study structured their stories on the ballot review to indicate that Bush was the legitimate winner, with headlines such as “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush” (Washington Post, Nov. 12, 2001).

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/111201a.html

Bush: 'Alpha Male on the Cruise Ship'

By Robert Parry
May 18, 2006

When future historians scratch their heads and wonder how George W. Bush came to lead the world’s most powerful nation at the start of the Twenty-First Century, it might help them to know that many Americans found his type familiar – and thus reassuring. Bush was the alpha male on the cruise ship.

He was like the wise-cracking guy leading a pack of vacationers out of the elevator toward the all-you-can-eat buffet bar, while poking fun at Charlie for getting too much sun on his bald head or at Mildred for putting on a few extra pounds. The others in the group titter with nervous amusement, fearing their ribbing will come next.

Like that dominant male on the cruise ship, Bush exhibits a freedom to mock the appearance of almost anyone, holding up both American citizens and foreign leaders to public ridicule for how they look.

At a joint White House press conference May 16 with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, as the two men stood side by side, Bush slipped in a couple of zingers about Howard’s bald head and supposed homeliness.

Bush joshed, “Somebody said, ‘You and John Howard appear to be so close, don’t you have any differences?’ And I said, ‘yes, he doesn’t have any hair.’”

Getting a round of laughs from reporters, Bush moved on to his next joke: “That’s what I like about John Howard,” Bush said. “He may not be the prettiest person on the block, but when he tells you something you can take it to the bank.”

Howard played the role of gracious guest, smiling and saying nothing in response to the disparaging comments about his physical appearance.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/051706.html

Chinese Espionage Was a Reagan-Bush Scandal

By Robert Parry
February 16, 2001

As recently as Tuesday, in a televised infomercial for right-wing Judicial Watch, the charge resurfaced that the Clinton administration’s role in Chinese nuclear espionage had not been investigated fully.

This time, the claim came from onetime-leftist journalist Christopher Hitchens as he chewed over old “Clinton scandals” with Judicial Watch leader Larry Klayman. According to the Judicial Watch infomercial, the culprits who curtailed this investigation were Clinton sympathizers in the press.

Beyond helping Judicial Watch raise money, this recurring China allegation has become something of a touchstone for many conservatives -- as well as other Americans -- who believe that the Clinton administration somehow traded nuclear secrets to China for campaign donations in 1996 -- and got away with it.

Indeed, many American voters may have gone to the polls last November with concerns that Al Gore's 1996 visit to a Buddhist temple in California had some connection to the alleged loss of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos. Bush supporters certainly did all they could to leave that impression.

But as we have pointed out before, these allegations were based on bogus history and false logic. Indeed, the evidence always has pointed in a very different direction: that the alleged Chinese theft of secrets for building the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead occurred during the mid-1980s, under the watch of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

The key facts were these: A purported Chinese defector walked into U.S. government offices in Taiwan in 1995 and handed over Chinese documents indicating that Chinese intelligence apparently had stolen the secrets of the W-88 warhead “sometime between 1984 and 1992.” The Chinese then tested their miniaturized warhead in 1992 while the elder Bush was still president. Indeed, the suspicious trips that made Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee an espionage suspect occurred between 1986-88, while Reagan was president.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/021601a.html

Reagan & Guatemala’s Death Files

By Robert Parry

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.

After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/052699a1.html

Mysterious Republican Money

By Robert Parry
September 7, 2004

If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon.

While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.

Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President George H.W. Bush.

Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party.

How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least investigated – at least since the Reagan-Bush era.

Limited investigations of Moon’s organization have revealed large sums of money flowing into the United States mostly from untraceable accounts in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. Former Moon associates also have revealed major money flows from shadowy sources in South America, where Moon built relationships with right-wing elements associated with the cocaine trade, including the so-called Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the early 1980s.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/090704.html

Paraguayans accuse Moon of carving out an empire of smack

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Exerpt:

"Since 1999, Rev Moon has built his personal empire which begins on the marshy banks of the River Paraguay and stretches beyond the hazy, level horizon through 600,000 hectares of arid land - equivalent to more than two Luxembourgs - punctuated by solitary clusters of withered trees and sad bushes which struggle desperately for air.

The scorching sun beats relentlessly on one of Latin America's most desolate zones. It is here in the northern province of Chaco, directly above the Guarani aquifer, the largest resource of fresh drinking water in the world, where Moon's associates claim he wishes to build an ecological paradise.

Nevertheless, national Senator Domingo Laino sees a different pattern in Moon's acquisitions. "There are two principal branches to Moon's interest in Paraguay," he said, "control of the largest fresh drinking water source in the world and control of the narcotics business", which is so prevalent in this area. "President Lula told me that Brazil took serious measures to curb Moon a few years back as it became evident that he was buying up the border between our two countries," said the senator.

Allegations from local law enforcement officials support this claim. The so-called Dr Montiel, Paraguay's drugs tsar from 1976-89, said: "The fact that they came and bought in Chaco and on both sides of the Brazilian border is very telling. It is an enormously strategic point in both the narcotics and arms trades and indeed the available intelligence clearly shows that the Moon sect is involved in both these enterprises." "

Exerpt:

"Not content with expanses of potentially invaluable land, Rev Moon has also taken over entire towns, including factories and homes. In Puerto Casado, tensions between Moon disciples and locals led to violent confrontation over the last year following the closure of the only source of work, a lumber factory, and the dismissal of 19 workers who tried to form a union in order to demand an eight-hour day and the national minimum wage of GBP80 sterling per month.

According to Senator Emilio Camacho: "The Moon sect is a mafia. They seek to subvert government control and are effectively building a state within a state. I believe they are hoping the local population will leave so they have unquestioned authority in the zone and are free to do whatever they want." "

SOURCE: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2004/11/5/13314/9719

The Bijlmerramp (in English: Bijlmer disaster) was an airplane crash. On October 4, 1992, El Al Flight 1862, a Boeing 747 cargo plane of the Israeli El Al airline crashed into the Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats in the Bijlmer neighbourhood (part of 'Amsterdam Zuidoost') of Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands. A total of 43 people were killed, including the plane's crew of three and an unidentified nonrevenue passenger in a jumpseat. Many more were injured.

(...)

Cargo concerns

The plane's cargo included, amongst other things: bullets, spare parts for AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, spare parts for Patriot missiles and 190 litres of dimethyl methylphosphonate.

Dimethyl methylphosphonate is not classified as toxic, but is harmful if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin. The primary commercial use of dimethyl methylphosphonate is as a flame retardant. Other commercial uses are a pre-ignition additive for gasoline, anti-foaming agent, plasticizer, stabilizer, textile conditioner, antistatic agent, and an additive for solvents and low- temperature hydraulic fluids. It is a Chemical Weapons Convention schedule 2 chemical used in the synthesis of Sarin nerve gas. The shipment was from a U.S. chemical plant to the Israel Institute for Biological Research under a U.S. Department of Commerce licence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijlmer_disaster

Lies Spun into History

EXCERPT...

Cracked Cornerstones

But under any careful inspection, both of Hyde's cornerstones crumbled. The alibis were laughably bogus. The clear and documented record showed that the House investigators put Casey in California on the wrong weekend. (See The Consortium, Feb. 14, 1996)

Plus, the "proof" of Hashemi's presence in Connecticut consisted of phone records showing two one-minute calls, one from a lawyer to Hashemi's home and one back to the lawyer. There was no evidence that Hashemi received or made the calls, and the pattern more likely fit a call asking a family member when Hashemi was due home and the second call giving the answer.

The Republicans were wrong, too, about the absence of incriminating evidence on the Hashemi wiretaps. But since those wiretaps were secret in 1993, that argument was impossible to assess then. But when I accessed the raw House documents (which I dubbed the "October Surprise X-Files") in a remote Capitol Hill storage room many months later, I found a classified summary of the FBI bugging.

According to that summary, the bugs actually revealed Cyrus Hashemi deeply enmeshed with Republicans on arms deals to Iran in fall 1980 as well as in business schemes with Bill Casey's close friend, John Shaheen. And contrary to the task force's claim of "not a single indication" of contact between Casey and Cyrus Hashemi, the Iranian banker was recorded as boasting that he and Casey had been "close friends" for years. That claim was supported by a CIA memo which stated that Casey recruited Cyrus Hashemi into a sensitive business arrangement in 1979. (See The Consortium, Dec. 31, 1995)

But beyond that, the secret FBI summary showed Hashemi receiving a $3 million offshore deposit, arranged by a Houston lawyer who said he was a longtime associate of then-vice presidential candidate George Bush. The Houston lawyer, Harrel Tillman, also told me in an interview that in 1980, he was doubling as a consultant to Iran's Islamic government.

After Reagan defeated Carter in November 1980, Tillman was back on the line promising help from the "Bush people" for one of Hashemi's floundering business deals. Then, the FBI wiretaps picked up Hashemi getting a cash payment, via a courier arriving on the Concorde, from the corrupt bank, BCCI. (For more details, see The Consortium, Dec. 31, 1995, & Jan. 15, 1996)

The House task force concealed these documents and then grossly miswrote an important chapter of recent American history. But even the primary author, the chief counsel, E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., saw potential problems caused by the report's omissions. According to another document I found in the storage room, Barcella ordered his staff "to put some language in, as a trap door" to allow a last-minute escape should complaints arise about selective use of evidence.

Barcella also needed to duck another problem -- conflicts of interest confronting him from the October Surprise case. Not only was the chief counsel friends with some of the suspects, he had earned more than $2 million from BCCI for his law firm which was headed by former Sen. Paul Laxalt, who had served as Reagan's campaign finance chairman in 1980. The conflict-of-interest difficulty was handled simply by purging any reference to BCCI and Barcella's associates from the final report. (See The Consortium, Feb. 29, 1996)

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile8.html

On Jan. 20, 1981, the day of President Reagan's inauguration, the United States released almost $8 billion in Iranian assets and the hostages were freed after 444 days in Iranian detention; the agreement gave Iran immunity from lawsuits arising from the incident.

http://www.answers.com/topic/iran-hostage-crisis

In November 1986, it was disclosed that the Reagan administration had been bargaining with terrorists by selling arms to Iran. Reagan went on television and vehemently denied that any such sale had occurred. He retracted this statement a week later, insisting that the sale of weapons had not been an arms-for-hostages deal. In March 1987, Reagan was forced to issue a second retraction, admitting that the deal had been arms-for-hostages after all.

http://www.geocities.com/thereaganyears/

Scandals / October Surprise
Honegger, Barbara. October Surprise. New York: Tudor, 1989. 323 pages.
California-based Barbara Honegger worked as a researcher at the Hoover Institution, then joined the Reagan team as a researcher and policy analyst in 1980. By 1983 she had become disillusioned and resigned, but her "love" for Reagan kept her from pursuing this story until after he left office. Actually she began leaking the story in mid-1987 after Iran-contra had become a household word; one suspects that it wouldn't have gotten far before then. "October Surprise" refers to the evidence that the Reagan campaign cut a secret (and treasonous) deal with Iran to delay the release of the American hostages, in order to keep President Carter from arranging a surprise release in October and winning the November election.
This book broke considerable ground on this story, which became much richer in detail over the following years. As this is being written in May 1992, new sources have come forward (Ari Ben-Menashe), other sources have been discredited (Richard Brenneke), and Congress is investigating. Honegger and her loose circle of supporters (which includes the LaRouche organization) have made a definite contribution, but by now they may be victims -- either of their own success or of deliberate disinformation or both. October Surprise sources comprise a who's who of sleaze and spookery; paranoia and suspicion abound and it becomes difficult to know whom or what to believe. It's a tall order for anyone, especially the U.S. Congress.


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

Parry, Robert. Trick or Treason: The October Surprise Mystery.
New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1993. 350 pages.
Robert Parry was a reporter for the Associated Press in Washington from 1980-1987. He was the first to put Oliver North's name into print, and then pursued the contra drug angle to the dismay of his editors. After three years with Newsweek, which he also found frustrating, he began reporting for the PBS Frontline show. This allowed him to trot around the globe with a cameraman in pursuit of the October Surprise story. Many witnesses, some flaky and some credible, have claimed that in 1980 the Reagan campaign cut a deal with Iran regarding the release of the hostages. For someone like Parry, who believes that the U.S. holds democratic elections and reporters serve the public interest, this amounts to treason. For the rest of us, who gave up voting long ago, it's pretty much a dog-bites-man yawner. The best line in the book is when Alexander Haig tells Parry, "Come on. Jesus! God! You know, you'd better get out and read Machiavelli or somebody else because I think you're living in a dream world!"
This book suggests that forces are at work to muddy the record when citizens get too curious. Flaky witnesses bearing half-truths are dispatched, and the Parrys are kept chasing their tails. Now this is the real story. But just try to prove it. As one spook put it, "It's not true if it can't be proven." And good luck proving anything when the stakes are this high.


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

Sick, Gary. October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.
New York: Times Books - Random House, 1991. 278 pages.
Gary Sick spent 24 years in the navy as an analyst and served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. His book "All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter with Iran" (1985) is highly rated. He was a White House aide for Iran during the hostage crisis of 1979-81, and by 1991 was a professor at Columbia University.
"October Surprise" refers to the scenario that certain Reagan campaign officials, William Casey for one, may have arranged to delay the release of the hostages, thereby insuring that Carter would be unable to tilt the election with a "surprise" release in October 1980. This was proposed by Barbara Honegger in 1987 (see the annotation for her book), whereupon Joel Bleifuss of In These Times picked away at it in column after column. In October 1988 Abbie Hoffman wrote about it in Playboy, but still this isn't considered respectable. In April 1991 the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Sick, who was beginning to get very interested in the issue, and "Frontline" did a show on PBS on April 16. Now the networks and Congress took notice. By late 1992, however, many observers considered some of the sources for the story to be unreliable, and almost everyone lost interest.

Here are the names most frequently mentioned in the above books:

AARON DAVID L ADLER PEGGY ALEY PETER ALLEN RICHARD VINCENT AMITAY MORRIS J ANDELMAN DAVID A ANDERSON JACK (COLUMNIST) ANDERSON MARTIN CARL ARAFAT YASSER ARENS MOSHE ASCO COMPANY ASKIN FRANK AUSTIN MICHAEL AZZIZI FAROUKH BABAYAN RICHARD A BAKER JAMES A III BAKHTIAR SHAPOUR BANERJEE BEN BANI-SADR ABOL HASSAN BANK CREDIT COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL BARCELLA E LAWRENCE BAZARGAN MEHDI BEAL RICHARD SMITH BEGIN MENACHEM BEHESHTI MOHAMMED HUSSEIN BEN-GURION DAVID BEN-MENASHE ARI BENES ROBERT BLEDSOE RALPH BOFORS COMPANY BOVIGA COMPANY BRENNEKE RICHARD J BRISTOW ALAN BROMAN RALPH MARK BRZEZINSKI ZBIGNIEW BUCKLEY WILLIAM (CIA) BUSH GEORGE H.W. BUTLER MIKE (JOHN TOWER AIDE) CALLAHAN ARTHUR EDWARD CAPITAL ENGINEERING MANUFACTURING CARTER JIMMY E (PRES) CASEY LARRY CASEY SOPHIA CASEY WILLIAM JOSEPH CAVE GEORGE W CHADWICK JONATHAN CHARDY ALFONSO CHERON FRANCOIS CHIRAC JACQUES CHRISTOPHER WARREN M CLARRIDGE DUANE R (DEWEY) CODEVILLA ANGELO M COHEN HERBERT COPELAND MILES CORBETT WILLIAM (SECRET SERVICE) COTTAM RICHARD W CUTLER LLOYD N DAILEY PETER DALLEK ROBERT DANISH SEAMAN UNION DE MARENCHES ALEXANDRE DE MAROLLES ALAIN GAGNERON DEAVER MICHAEL K DEHQAN K (COL) DELAROCQUE JOHN H DELLE CHIAIE STEFANO DISINI HERMINIO DURRANI ARIF DUST MOSHEN RAFIQ DWYER CYNTHIA B DYMALLY MERVYN M (D-CA) EGYPTIAN-AMERICAN TRANSPORT SERVICE COMPANY EMERSON STEVEN A (JOURNALIST) EUROPEAN DEFENSE ASSOCIATES EZRI MEIR FAHD KING (FAHD IBN ABD AL-AZIZ AL SAUD) FANNING DAVID FARDUST HOSSEIN FAULQUES ROGER FIRST GULF BANK TRUST COMPANY FOGEL MOSHE FORTIER DONALD R FRYDEL JAMIE FRYE ALTON FUNK ARTHUR FURMARK ROY M GAMBINO ROBERT W GARRICK ROBERT (ADM) GATES ROBERT MICHAEL GELLI LICIO GENSCHER HANS-DIETRICH GHORBANIFAR MANUCHER GHOTBZADEH SADEGH GREGG DONALD P GRITZ JAMES G (BO) GUARINO PHILIP A HABASH GEORGE HAIG ALEXANDER M JR HAKIM ALBERT HALL WILMA GRAY HALPER STEFAN A HAMILTON LEE H (D-IN) HASHEMI CYRUS HASHEMI JAMSHID HASHEMI REZA HAYWARD BARBARA HEIDARI AHMED HENDERSON DAVID (STATE DEPT) HERRMANN WILLIAM (OCTOBER SURPRISE WITNESS) HOFFMAN ABBIE HONEGGER BARBARA HONG KONG DEPOSIT GUARANTY COMPANY HOSENBALL MARK HOWARD GARY S HUGEL MAX C HUSSEIN SADDAM IGNATIEW NICHOLAS IKLE FRED CHARLES INOUYE DANIEL K (D-HI) INTERGRAPH CORPORATION JACOBI REINER JENNI ANDREAS JEZZENY FAUD JIBRIL AHMED JOLIS ALBERT E (BURT) KANAFANI MARWAN KARRUBI HASSAN KARRUBI MEHDI KASHANI AHMED (MEHDI) KASSAR MONZER AL- KEOUGH KATHERINE KERRITT ROBERT KHAMENEI ALI KHASHOGGI ADNAN KHOMEINI AHMED KHUDARI AHMED KILIAN MARTIN KIMCHE DAVID KISSINGER HENRY A KLANG SVEN LANG CLAUDE LAUFMAN DAVID H LAVI HOUSHANG LAVI PARVIZ LAXALT PAUL D (R-NV) LE WINTER OSWALD LEDEEN MICHAEL A LEON RICHARD J LEWIS SAMUEL W LONG WAYNE E MACLEAN JOHN MACMICHAEL DAVID C MADANI AHMAD MALEK FREDERIC V MARCOS FERDINAND (PRES) MAZRUI GHANEM FARIS AL- MCCAFFERTY STUART ALLAN MCDUFFIE GLENN MCFARLANE ROBERT C (BUD) MCGLINN ANN MCHENRY DONALD F MCMANUS DOYLE MCQUEEN ROBERT (INS) MEADOWS RICHARD J MEESE EDWIN MERON MENACHEM (MENDY) MIDDENDORF J WILLIAM MONTANES JACQUES MOSS M.K. MOTT WILLIAM H MULLER RICHARD (LAWYER) MURRAY DICK (LABOR DEPT) MUSKIE EDMUND S NABAVI BEHZAD NABILA TRADING LTD NAQASHAN HAMID NEUMANN ROBERT G NEW REPUBLIC MAGAZINE NEWSWEEK MAGAZINE NIMRODI YAAKOV NIR AMIRAM NIXON RICHARD MILHOUS NORTH OLIVER L NORTHROP WILLIAM OLIVER R SPENCER OMSHEI AHMED OROURKE THOMAS M OSTROVSKY VICTOR OVEISSI GHOLAM ALI OWEN ROBERT W PAHLAVI ASHRAF (PRINCESS) PAHLAVI FOUNDATION PALME OLOF PARKER ANTHONY PARRY ROBERT (JOURNALIST) PATRY JEAN A PAZIENZA FRANCESCO PELLETREAU ROBERT H JR POTTINGER J STANLEY POWELL JODY PREBLE ALAN PROJECT DEMOCRACY PROPAGANDA DUE (P2) QUALLS KENNETH QUAYLE DAN RAFIQDUST MOHSEN RAFIZADEH MANSUR RAJAI MOHAMMED ALI RAJAIE-KHORASANI SAID RAYMOND WALTER REAGAN RONALD W RICHARDSON ELLIOT LEE RITZEL GERHARD ROBERT MADAME ROCKEFELLER DAVID SR ROGOVIN MITCHELL ROOSEVELT ARCHIBALD B ROSS ROBERT (FILMMAKER) ROUSAN ADNAN RUPP HEINRICH F SABRA HASSAN SAGUY YEHOSHUA SALAMATIAN AHMED SAMGHABADI RAJI SATTERFIELD DAVID M SAUNDERS HAROLD HENRY (HAL) SCHMITZ KARL-ERIK SCOTT CHARLES WESLEY SCOTT MICHAEL F SCREECH THOMAS SEARS JOHN PATRICK SECORD RICHARD V SHAHEEN BRADFORD SHAHEEN JOHN MICHAEL SR SHAMIR YITZHAK SHARIF BASSAM ABU SHARON ARIEL SICK GARY G SILBERMAN LAURENCE H SMALLEY IAN SMITH BERNADETTE CASEY SMITH BERNARD (WILLIAM CASEY ASSOCIATE) SMITH MICHEL (MICKEY) SNEPP FRANK W SOGHANALIAN SARKIS G SOUHAM GLENN STEWART POTTER STOCKMAN DAVID A STOFFBERG DIRK TABATABAI SADEGH TANIS LEONARD TANTER RAYMOND TOUFANIAN HASSAN TOWER JOHN GOODWIN (R-TX) TRENT DARRELL M TUCKER RONALD RAY TURNER STANSFIELD TURNER TED ULLMANN OWEN UNGER CRAIG VANCE CYRUS ROBERTS VEILLOT BERNARD VELIOTES NICHOLAS A VER FABIAN VILLALON HECTOR WALSH LAWRENCE EDWARD WAR PEACE FOUNDATION WEINGARTEN REID H WEISS BARUCH WEISS SEYMOUR (STATE DEPT) WESTERN DYNAMICS INTERNATIONAL WHEATON M GENE WIRTHLIN RICHARD B ZARGA HAMID ZELDIN MICHAEL ZIPPORI MORDECHAI

Source: http://www.namebase.org/books59.html

The Bush Rule of Journalism

by Robert Parry
www.consortiumnews.com, 1/17/05

"Don't take on the Bushes" is becoming an unwritten rule in American journalism. Reporters can make mistakes in covering other politicians and suffer little or no consequence, but a false step when doing a critical piece on the Bushes is a career killer.

The latest to learn this hard lesson are four producers at CBS, who demonstrated inadequate care in checking out memos purportedly written by George W. Bush's commanding officer in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. For this sloppiness, CBS fired the four, including Mary Mapes who helped break last year's Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

A painful irony for the CBS producers was that the central points of the memos - that Bush had blown off a required flight physical and was getting favored treatment in the National Guard - were already known, and indeed, were confirmed by the commander's secretary in a follow-up interview with CBS. But even honest mistakes are firing offenses when the Bushes are involved.

By contrast, journalists understand that they get a free shot at many other politicians who don't have the protective infrastructure that surrounds the Bush family. Take for example the case of reporters for the New York Times and the Washington Post who misquoted Al Gore about his role in the Love Canal toxic waste clean-up.

'Delusional'

The misquote in late 1999 prompted knee-slapping commentaries across the country calling Gore "delusional" because he supposedly had falsely claimed credit for the Love Canal clean-up by saying "I was the one that started it all." But Gore actually had said, "that was the one that started it all," referring to a similar toxic waste case in Toone, Tennessee.

Even after the error was pointed out by New Hampshire high school students who heard Gore's remark first hand, the two prestige newspapers dragged their heels on running corrections. While the newspapers dawdled, the story of Lyin' Al and Love Canal reverberated through the echo chamber of TV pundit shows, conservative talk radio and newspaper columns. Al Gore was a laughingstock whose sanity was in doubt.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/011705.html

Lost History: Marcos, Money & Treason

By Robert Parry

WASHINGTON -- Republican campaign strategist Ed Rollins has dropped an important clue to the mystery of whether the Reagan-Bush era started in 1980 with an act of treachery that bordered on treason. But it's a clue the mainstream media has misread completely.

In his new book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, Rollins recounted a dinner he had with a top Filipino politician in 1991. Over drinks, the man casually asserted that he had delivered an illegal $10 million cash payment in a suitcase from Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos to Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign.

"I was the guy who gave the ten million from Marcos to your campaign," the Filipino told Rollins, who was Reagan's 1984 campaign manager. "I was the guy who made the arrangements and delivered the cash personally. ...It was a personal gift from Marcos to Reagan."

Rollins described this stunning news with a light touch. The first thought that raced through his head, he wrote, was "Cash? Holy shit." In the book, Rollins also withheld the names of both the Filipino and the Republican lobbyist who allegedly accepted the cash for Reagan. Rollins suggested, too, that the illegal contribution never reached the campaign or the president. "I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank," Rollins wrote.

Rollins apparently did not realize that there was a history to the allegations of Ferdinand Marcos paying off Ronald Reagan. Neither did the news organizations that briefly mentioned the cash delivery in their stories about the Rollins book. The news stories gave no larger context, nor was there any editorial demand that the disturbing allegations be investigated. Rollins simply shrugged that the statute of limitations for illegal campaign contributions had probably expired.

But the Marcos-Reagan money story is near the core of the corruption that permeated the 1980s. Indeed, the story begins when Reagan was battling to unseat President Carter in 1980. Some witnesses who claim knowledge of alleged Reagan efforts to sabotage Carter's negotiations to free 52 U.S. hostages then held in Iran maintain that Marcos contributed some of the money used by Republicans to bribe key Iranian mullahs.

Longtime Friends

Certainly in 1980, Marcos was in Reagan's camp. They had been friends for years, since 1969 when President Nixon assigned Reagan to represent the United States at the gala opening of Imelda Marcos's multi-million-dollar cultural center in Manila. Reagan charmed the Philippine president and his wife as the former beauty queen danced with the former actor.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/lost6.html

Honoring the Dead, Questioning War

By Ivan Eland
Consortiumnews.com
May 31, 2006

Editor's Note: For more than four years now, the American people have been instructed to "support the troops" fighting first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. That command has often translated into a prohibition against questioning George W. Bush's war decisions, including his choice to shift resources prematurely from the pursuit of al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan to the invasion of Iraq.

The mounting death toll in both countries now is arguably the result of America's failure to conduct a full and responsible debate about Bush's strategies before they were implemented. Instead, Iraq War skeptics were baited by pro-Bush media/political operatives for supposedly undermining national "unity" and failing to "support the troops."

The current version of this argument is that if the war in Iraq is not "won," the memory of the fallen soldiers will be dishonored. Bush and his backers again hope to de-legitimize criticism of the war policies, this time by invoking the troops who have already died.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland looks at how fuzzy-minded "patriotism" about war is neither patriotic nor protective of the real interests of the nation's soldiers:

On Memorial Day, we should honor those who are buried after dying in the country’s wars, but be a little more skeptical of the U.S. government actions that put them there. It is often said that they died for “freedom” or their “country,” but more often they were needlessly put at risk by their government.

I learned on a trip to France that countries distort their history. The French had an official exhibit on World War II in the Arc of Triumph in Paris that did not mention other countries involved in the liberation of France after D-Day. The display had only a big arrow ending at the beaches of Normandy and much information about the French resistance.

An uninformed visitor might have mistakenly concluded that the French had liberated their own country from the Nazis. I was shocked at the French misrepresentation of their history.

A few years later, I learned on a trip to Canada that the United States is no exception to the distortion of history. I visited a fort in Toronto, Canada, and learned from the guide that the fort had been used in one of the several U.S. invasions of Canada.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/053006a.html

Neocon Amorality

By Robert Parry
March 3, 2005

For a government that wraps its actions in moral absolutes about good versus evil, while deriding liberal relativism, the Bush administration may rank as the most committed in modern American history to an ends-justify-the-means ethos.

Indeed, to understand the administration’s neoconservative foreign policy, one must recognize how this moral framework works: First, it sets out worthy-sounding goals – freedom, democracy, security – and then it applies whatever tactics are deemed necessary – torture, murder, unprovoked invasions – along with an aggressive propaganda strategy at home.

Next, when events take a positive turn, the neoconservatives claim credit, even if they had only a minor role or the events were largely coincidental. Criticism of the bloody means is washed away by celebration of the virtuous ends. Mainstream commentators join in, cheering the neocons’ farsightedness. Those who opposed the original actions are pushed to the political margins.

After two years of bloody war in Iraq and 1,500 U.S. soldiers dead, the neocons have reached such a moment. They are claiming vindication because of several developments in the Middle East, including the Iraqi election, tentative progress in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and Lebanese demands for a full Syrian withdrawal.

'Tipping Points'

This triumphal moment was noted by New York Times foreign policy columnist Thomas L. Friedman, who hailed the three developments as historical “tipping points” possibly foreshadowing “incredible” changes in the Middle East.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/030305.html

Rev. Moon, the Bushes & Donald Rumsfeld

By Robert Parry
January 3, 2001

George W. Bush’s choice of Donald Rumsfeld to be U.S. defense secretary could put an unintended spotlight on the role of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon – a Bush family benefactor – in funneling millions of dollars to communist North Korea in the 1990s as it was developing a missile and nuclear weapons program.

In 1998, Rumsfeld headed a special commission, appointed by the Republican-controlled Congress, that warned that North Korea had made substantial progress during the decade in building missiles that could pose a potential nuclear threat to Japan and parts of the United States.

"The extraordinary level of resources North Korea and Iran are now devoting to developing their own ballistic missile capabilities poses a substantial and immediate danger to the U.S., its vital interests and its allies," said the report by Rumsfeld's Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.

"North Korea maintains an active WMD program, including a nuclear weapon program. It is known that North Korea diverted material in the late 1980s for at least one or possibly two weapons," the report said.

Rumsfeld’s alarming assessment of North Korea’s war-making capabilities now is being cited by Republicans as a justification for investing billions of taxpayer dollars in an anti-missile defense system favored by Bush and Rumsfeld.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/010301a.html

Bush Family's Terrorism Test

By Robert Parry
August 31, 2005

A week after a Cuban civilian airliner was blown out of the sky in 1976, George H.W. Bush’s CIA was hearing from informants that two right-wing Cuban extremists were implicated in that terrorist attack – as well as in an earlier assassination in Washington – but the Bush Family has continued to protect these operatives for the three decades since.

That long record of loyalty is now being tested by Venezuela’s demand that one of the Cuban exiles – former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles – be extradited from the United States to stand trial as an international terrorist for the airplane bombing that killed 73 people. The request is before a federal immigration judge in El Paso, Texas.

It remains unclear whether the judge will order Posada deported to Venezuela or – if the judge does – whether George W. Bush’s administration would comply.

When Posada illegally sneaked into the United States earlier this year and hid out in Miami for several weeks, neither President Bush nor Florida Gov. Jeb Bush took any known action to catch the fugitive terrorist. Only after Posada called a news conference was the U.S. government shamed into arresting him.

Since then, the Bush administration has voiced an unwillingness to turn Posada over to Venezuela, which is governed by President Hugo Chavez, an ally of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. If Posada gets U.S. protection again, it will represent a continuation of a Bush Family policy dating back 29 years.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/083105.html

Missing U.S.-Iraq History

By Robert Parry
February 27, 2003

Before George W. Bush gives the final order to invade Iraq -- a nation that has not threatened the United States -- the American people might want a few facts about the real history of U.S.-Iraq relations. Missing chapters from 1980 to the present would be crucial in judging Bush’s case for war.

But Americans don’t have those facts because Bush and his predecessors in the White House have kept this history hidden from the American people. When parts of the story have emerged, administrations of both parties have taken steps to suppress or discredit the disclosures. So instead of knowing the truth, Americans have been fed a steady diet of distortions, simplifications and outright lies.

This missing history also is not just about minor details. It goes to the heart of the case against Saddam Hussein, including whether he is an especially “aggressive” and “unpredictable” dictator who must be removed from power even at the risk of America’s standing in the world and the chance that a war will lead to more terrorism against U.S. targets.

For instance, George W. Bush has frequently cited Saddam Hussein’s invasions of neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, as justification for the looming U.S. invasion of Iraq. “By defeating this threat, we will show other dictators that the path of aggression will lead to their own ruin,” Bush declared during a speech in Atlanta on Feb. 20.

Leaving aside whether Bush’s formulation is Orwellian double-speak – aggression to discourage aggression – there is the historical question of whether Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush actually encouraged Saddam’s aggressions for geopolitical reasons or out of diplomatic incompetence.

Carter's 'Green Light'?

This intersection of Saddam’s wars and U.S. foreign policy dates back at least to 1980 when Iran’s radical Islamic government held 52 Americans hostage in Tehran and the sheiks of the oil-rich Persian Gulf feared that Ruhollah Khomeini's radical breed of Islam might sweep them from power just as it had the Shah of Iran a year earlier.

The Iranian government began its expansionist drive by putting pressure on the secular government of Iraq, instigating border clashes and encouraging Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish populations to rise up. Iranian operatives sought to destabilize Saddam’s government by assassinating Iraqi leaders.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2003/022703a.html

CIA Admits Tolerating Contra-Cocaine Trafficking in 1980s

By Robert Parry
June 8, 2000

In secret congressional testimony, senior CIA officials admitted that the spy agency turned a blind eye to evidence of cocaine trafficking by U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels in the 1980s and generally did not treat drug smuggling through Central America as a high priority during the Reagan administration.

“In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,” CIA Inspector General Britt Snider said in classified testimony on May 25, 1999. He conceded that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in “a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.”

Still, Snider and other officials sought to minimize the seriousness of the CIA’s misconduct – a position echoed by a House Intelligence Committee report released in May and by press coverage it received. In particular, CIA officials insisted that CIA personnel did not order the contras to engage in drug trafficking and did not directly join in the smuggling.

But the CIA testimony to the House Intelligence Committee and the body of the House report confirmed long-standing allegations – dating back to the mid-1980s – that drug traffickers pervaded the contra operation and used it as a cover for smuggling substantial volumes of cocaine into the United States.

Deep in the report, the House committee noted that in some cases, “CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.”

Former CIA officer Duane Clarridge, who oversaw covert CIA support for the contras in the early years of their war against Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, said “counter-narcotics programs in Central America were not a priority of CIA personnel in the early 1980s,” according to the House report.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2000/060800a.html