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$50.00 per year ----------------------------- $6.00 US FROM THE WILDERNESS A Nonpartisan, Non-sectarian, MAP from the Here That Is, into the Tomorrow of Our Own Making Vol. IV, No. 7 -------------------------------- October 15, 2001 [C] Copyright 2001, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. Please visit web site for Reprint Policy] It's A Lie Insider Trading Evidence Leads Into Heart of CIA The Lies About Taliban Heroin - Russia And Oil The CIA Objective Bush/Bin Laden profiteering - The Carlyle Group - Three Generations of Bushes Arm Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden, Records Show This War Was Planned for Years Bush Cabinet Seeks "Infinite War" Iraq On The Target Menu - Will Israel Join Attacks? Prison Stocks Soar, More Americans Going To Jail Civil Liberties Disappearing Official Recount Complete - Gore Won Florida From The Wilderness Michael C. Ruppert Publisher/Editor Contributing Editor ------------------ Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. Research ------------------------------------------"The Goddess Web Master------------------------------------Andrea Shepherd From The Wilderness is published eleven times annually. Subscriptions are $50 for 12 issues. From The Wilderness Publications P.O. Box 6061- 350 Sherman Oaks, CA 91413 www.copvcia.com e-mail: mruppert@copvcia.com (818) 788-8791 * (818) 981-2847 fax Unless otherwise indicated, all articles are written by Michael C. Ruppert. Intellectual Triage Picking Stories Wisely This is a crisis of unimaginable proportions. There is an avalanche of information and opinion that threatens to overload us all. That what we are seeing is a deliberate, pre-planned war, justified by attacks that the U.S. government was aware of and did nothing to stop, has changed the paradigm of history, and of FTW's reporting. Few are yet able to look ahead and see that the Bush Administration has unleashed political, economic and military forces that cannot be recalled or stopped, short of their complete implementation, without setting off a backlash within this country or unleashing a global holocaust. The power grab that has begun has placed the globalist interests behind the U.S. and British governments in an absolute do or die situation. Time is short. As deconstruction of the lies behind the government's position on the attacks and its agenda blazes across the Internet, noise interferes with effective journalism. Make no mistake. The battle lines are drawn now between fascism, global destruction and liberty. Therefore, my obligation is to pick and chose those stories that have a hope of derailing a plan that was - as you will see in this issue - in the works long before the September 11 attacks. I also have an obligation to you, my readers, to give you useful information. What is useful information? Information that breaks down the government's credibility by proving that its stated positions are lies. This information does not need to explain what happened. It only needs to prove, through documented sources, that what you are being told is either untrue or misleading. This is information that needs the widest possible distribution and I encourage all FTW subscribers to disseminate it as widely as possible. Information that provides you with a better map of how to evaluate your personal situation. Information that quickly establishes a fact rather than opinion (e.g. - It is not possible that the Taliban could flood this country with heroin; The Bush family has current business dealings with the bin Laden family; The CIA and Administration knew of the attacks and did nothing to stop them). What is not useful information? Information that supports a non-provable opinion, (e.g. - Were explosives placed in the WTC towers? - Were the hijacked planes remotely controlled?). I will not waste a minute of your or my time on issues that cannot be easily proven to legal standards. Do not waste your mental energies on such issues. Did hearings on Waco, the OKC bombing or Iran-Contra drugs produce any changes? Insanity is repeating the same actions over again, expecting different results. Information that requires stages of additional investigation which none of us may have time to ever get to. What information must wait? Information that is not immediately essential to stopping this race to destruction. Very relevant and important issues such as who will pay for the billions of dollars in pork subsidies for the military, Wall Street and the inevitable looting of Social Security are based on the assumption that we will have a government and society remotely resembling what we think we have today. I am not at all certain of that now. Denial is running rampant in part of the population while the long prayed for awakening is occurring rapidly in another. With Colin Powell's son Michael in charge of the FCC and with Kevin Close, a CIA operative who has headed the CIA radio networks Voice of America and Radio Free Europe now the CEO of National Public Radio; with the Pacifica network lost in a takeover which has gutted it's heart and soul, there are precious few voices left to speak the truth. But we are experiencing power and influence we had never expected for the simple reason that we are telling the truth. Nothing is more important than choosing our stories wisely and giving you the information that will help you remember that you are responsible for determining your fate, the fate of this nation, and perhaps of the human race. Final Florida Recount Establishes That Al Gore Won The Election On October 9th, the Miami Herald published the results of the final, and universally recognized as the most accurate, recount of Florida votes in the 2000 election. The BDO Seidman manual recount established that Al Gore won the state of Florida by 662 votes. Do not waste a second asking if things would have been different under a Gore Administration. Ask yourself instead if the now illegitimate Bush Administration can afford not to complete its seizure of power. A Time For Fear Glimpsing The Reality of the New World That Has Been Planned For Some Time Evidence - For Those Who Want It This is a very good time to be afraid. Fear is an entirely appropriate and healthy response in an animal that wants to survive. It is the how and what of fear that is critical in deciding whether or not the animal will survive. Panic, denial and hysteria are not survival traits. They are not adaptive behaviors. Fear is. It is my intent to scare you, so that we might survive together. When all is said and done, provided that there is someone left to speak, they will say that the Bush Administration, in sheer incompetent arrogance, embarked on an aggressive, fascist plan to control the world's economy in September 2001. But what they failed, or were even unable - for lack of intellectual ability - to grasp was the latent animosity of most of the world's population towards the U.S. or the impact of their stamping out of civil liberties inside that once great nation, or the inherent weaknesses - so like the Roman Empire - of their military strategies. In the January issue of FTW, entitled Empire, I wrote, "Now that we have become an empire, President Bush is making our foreign policy stance clear. The Vice President, Dick Cheney, is a former Secretary of Defense, The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, is a former Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Deputy Secretary of State-designate, Richard Armitage, is a career intelligence operative, graduate of Annapolis, Vietnam veteran and legendary covert warrior. The New Chairman of the FCC is Colin Powell's son. The Bush Administration's foreign policy is all stick and no carrot as a 'War Cabinet' takes control." Noting the indiscreet arrogance of Wall Street in engaging in criminal behavior, I wrote in May's issue, after Citigroup's brazen acquisition of Mexico's drug money-laundering bank, Banamex, "It doesn't matter anymore whether the American public chooses to notice. The fait accompli is that drug money and criminal money are now out of the closet as the most important determinants of economic success for the US financial system. The careless arrogance of these moves only reveals the utter confidence in Washington, on Wall Street and in the banking system that no voices from the wilderness can stop it. " There is reason to be afraid now. The arrogance and stupidity of "Empire" gave us the First World War. As I have quoted so often, former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts says, "Those who win in a rigged game get stupid." Few events in the history of mankind are so apparently manufactured or pre-arranged as what we have seen from September 11 through today. Even a cursory look by an unbiased mind will find hundreds of holes in the U.S. government's position big enough to fly an airplane through - intact. And when you acknowledge just one of the holes, the lies, the distortions, you create a matching hole in your consciousness, a rend in the fabric of your desire for a cozy belief that everything is going to be all right. It will not. Indeed, it cannot. What we are experiencing can be nothing other than a long-planned scenario, so foolishly conceived and executed, that a global holocaust has now become likely. Provoking The Taliban The British newspaper, The Guardian wrote on September 26, "These are the troubling questions raised by the Guardian's disclosure at the weekend that the Taliban received a specific warning - passed during secret diplomacy in Berlin in July - that the Bush team had prepared a new plan to topple the entire Afghan regime militarily unless they handed bin Laden over... "And then [President] Clinton himself disclosed what limited - and equally unsuccessful - action he had been prepared to attempt by secret executive order. He said on Saturday: "I authorized the arrest and, if necessary, the killing of Osama bin Laden and we actually made contact with a group in Afghanistan to do it.... "A US department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops inside Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana..." "Reliable western military sources say a US contingency plan existed on paper by the end of summer to attack Afghanistan from the north..." "And a couple of weeks later, another group gathered in a Berlin hotel. There, former state department official Lee Coldren passed [to the Taliban] on a message he had got from Bush officials: 'I think there was some discussion of the fact that the United States was so disgusted with the Taliban that they might be considering some military action.'" Those who seek comfort in denial by suggesting, "Gee, the government knew something was up and was trying to get ready," are lemmings headed straight for the cliff. They miss the fact that our actions were the pressure that forced bin Laden to act and that the Administration could have prevented the WTC attacks but did not. It has happened before in history as the Roosevelt Administration repeatedly denied the Japanese access to oil in the 1930s. Those who hope in vain that this will all go away forget that that historical precedent led to the most destructive war in human history. And oil is perhaps the biggest hidden card in this deck. Pre-Planning For September 11th Like all of the major wars of the last century, this one too has had a hidden but very real and undeniable phase of preparation. International Law Professor Francis A. Boyle, of the University of Illinois wrote on October 12, "Obviously, the war against Afghanistan was planned for quite some time. We know for a fact that it had been war-gamed by the Pentagon going back to 1997. Right around September 11, two US Aircraft carrier task forces conveniently arrived in the Persian Gulf right at the same time on "rotation." Obviously, preplanned. Just before September 11, the UK had put together what was billed as the "largest armada since the Falklands War" and had it steaming towards Oman, where now 23,000 UK troops are on maneuvers. This had been planned for at least 3 years. Also, the US "Bright Star" operation is currently going on in Egypt. 23,000 US troops plus an additional 17,000 from NATO and its associates. This had been planned at least two years ago. Finally, NATO just landed 12,000 troops into Turkey. This had been planned for at least two years. It is obvious that we are seeing an operational War Plan being executed here that had been in the works for at least the past four years. September 11 is either a pretext or a trigger or both." In light of the known available intelligence information that we have previously presented in these pages, and the hard data on insider trading that we present in this issue, there can be no doubt that the Bush Administration awaited the attacks as a pretext for the massive military operations that we see occurring now. In the words of retired Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff - who taught military science at West Point - "I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks." Oil In the early 1990s Unocal, in a joint venture with Saudi companies and other US oil firms, developed a major plan for an oil pipeline running from the vast oil and gas reserves of Central Asia, straight through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean where the American oil companies would reap huge profits from sales to China and Japan. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Asia and the Pacific in 1998, Unocal Vice President, John Maresca said, "In spite of this, a route through Afghanistan appears to be the best option with the fewest technical obstacles. It is the shortest route to the sea and has relatively favorable terrain for a pipeline. The route through Afghanistan is the one that would bring Central Asian oil closest to Asian markets and thus would be the cheapest in terms of transporting the oil." Although Unocal ostensibly abandoned the project the next year, things have changed since September 11th. An October 10 story from the Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post, opened with: "The US ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain paid a courtesy call on the Federal Minister for Petroleum and Natural resources, Usman Aminuddin here Tuesday and discussed with him matters pertaining to Pak-US cooperation in the oil and gas sector." In a later paragraph the story said, "Usman Aminuddin also briefed the Ambassador on the proposed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan gas pipeline project and said that this project opens up new avenues of multi dimensional regional cooperation particularly in view of the recent geo-political developments in the region." It appears that the military weren't the only ones prepared for September 11th. Exposing The Lie Is Easy As a demonstration of the Administration's arrogance, let's look at just three of the biggest flaws in the official version. First, let's look at the timing of the hijackings. Stan Goff, the covert warrior who taught at West point writes, " Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 Am Eastern Daylight Time. "Who is notified? "This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified... "By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers. "By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World trade Center, Bush is sitting with children... and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief. "No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either. "At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center building. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush... "He resumes listening to second graders read... this banality continues even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington, D.C. Has he instructed Card to scramble the Air Force? No. "An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement... "There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No. "At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American flight 77 is still ten minutes from the Pentagon. "At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC." Another easy and non-debatable hole is with the passenger lists and the hijackers. Gary North, Ph.D. - a history professor - has done a detailed, line-by-line analysis of the passenger lists of the four airliners hijacked on September 11. He relied on lists published by CNN and notes two major discrepancies on all four flights. First, by comparing the number of reported fatalities on each flight - as reported by CNN and AP, he discovers that the list of passenger names - on every one of the flights - between six and twelve names are missing. The total number of all missing names for all four flights is 35. Official reports state that there were only 19 hijackers. Second, none of listed passenger names are Arabic, Muslim or even close. The government needs to provide an explanation for this glaring discrepancy. The significance of this is that it flies in the face of two very obvious airline safety procedures. First, every passenger must show a photo ID, matching a reservation, in order to board. An Arabic-looking passenger, not on the manifest and lacking a photo ID would never have been allowed to board. Second, prior to take off, flight attendants do a head count. It is mandatory, both to match meals to passengers and to make sure there are no stowaways. Are we to assume that the planes just took off with a bunch of extra unticketed middle-eastern passengers on board? To assume that the hijackers had control of the aircraft before take off is ludicrous. At least one of the pilots would have refused to take off and notified FAA of a hijack. To obtain a full copy of North's scientific analysis, send an email to puzzle@kbot.com. Then there's the flight training issue. Journalist Dan Hopsicker, www.madcowprod.com, has been meticulously pulling apart the stories about the suicide pilots' flight training before the attacks. Aside from uncovering huge holes he has noted a huge problem for the government. "It said Mohamed Atta had attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. In addition Abdulaziz Alomari had attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, they reported, and Saeed Alghamadihas had been to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California." Someone please explain how these known or suspected terrorists were given clearances to attend military and intelligence related facilities inside the US? Operation Infinite War Reporting on what Pentagon insiders are referring to as a plan for "Operation Infinite War," the British paper, The Observer, on September 30 told of a chilling spilt in Bush's Cabinet. It disclosed the deeper thinking that we have seen behind the full-throttle rhetoric of the President since September 11. "The Observer has learnt that two detailed proposals for warfare without limit were presented to the President this week by his Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of which were temporarily put aside but remain on hold. "They were drawn up by his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - a highly intellectual right-winger who rose through the State department and Pentagon ranks under Ronald Reagan..." "The plans put before the President during the past few days involve expanding the war beyond Afghanistan to include similar incursions by special ops forces - followed by air strikes by the bombers they would guide - into Iraq, Syria and the Beqaa Valley area of Lebanon, where the Syrian-backed Hizbollah (Party of God) fighters that harass Israel are based..." "...If action in Lebanon led to an Israeli reinvasion of the southern part of the country, it would be supported by the US...." "Special US units could be deployed in conjunction with domestic troops against cells in allied Western countries, notably Britain, France and Spain." Indications that this concept is dominating are clear as we go to press. New stories are indicating that the anthrax used in recent attacks likely originated in Iraq. At the same time FTW is receiving information about troop deployments indicating preparations for air and airborne assaults in that country. News From The Other Side Three very chilling stories tell us of the psychology impacting the Muslim world. These are but a clue of the hostility and tensions being unleashed and fanned to fever pitch. Arnaud de Borchgrave, in a September 26 UPI story writes, "The Sept 11, terrorist attacks on the United States were perpetrated by renegade U.S. Air Force elements working in conjunction with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, according to the retired Pakistani general who is closest to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden..." "... Now [Gen. Hameed] Gul had added a new disinformation wrinkle to the plot. And what Gul says or writes is taken at face value by religious leaders and is repeated in thousands of mosques at Friday prayers." "Asked why Israel would benefit, Gul replied, "Israel knows it has a short shelf-life before it is overwhelmed by demographics (and it) has now handed the (Bush administration) the opportunity it has been waiting for to consolidate America's imperial grip on the Gulf and acquire control of the Caspian basin by extending its military presence in Central Asia." A story totally ignored by American media from the British paper The Telegraph, dated October 4, reports that "The largest outbreak in history of a highly contagious disease that causes patients to bleed to death from every orifice was confirmed yesterday on Pakistan's frontier with Afghanistan." The Ebola-like virus had killed 75 people as of the date of this report and appeared to be spreading. Although no further stories have appeared to follow-up on this highly significant event, FTW has received information that the Muslim world is believing that the U.S. has unleashed biological warfare. This is not at all surprising since the U.S. is the world's primary developer of Ebola-like weapons of mass destruction. Finally, from the Arabic news web site, www.arabicnews.com comes an October 12 story that simply says that an Israeli Defense Ministry spokesperson has announced that American will provide Israel with advance notice of attacks on Iraq and that, "the Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Bin Aliazer announced Israel's readiness to take part in the fighting the U.S. will launch against Iraq." If you are not afraid, you should be. I am. SUPPRESED DETAILS OF CRIMINAL INSIDER TRADING LEAD DIRECTLY INTO THE CIA's HIGHEST RANKS CIA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR "BUZZY" KRONGARD MANAGED FIRM THAT HANDLED "PUT" OPTIONS ON UAL FTW, October 9, 2001 - Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the case of at least one of these trades -- which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed -- the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown. A.B. Brown was acquired by Banker's Trust in 1997. Krongard then became, as part of the merger, Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust-AB Brown, one of 20 major U.S. banks named by Senator Carl Levin this year as being connected to money laundering. Krongard's last position at Banker's Trust (BT) was to oversee "private client relations." In this capacity he had direct hands-on relations with some of the wealthiest people in the world in a kind of specialized banking operation that has been identified by the U.S. Senate and other investigators as being closely connected to the laundering of drug money. Krongard (re?) joined the CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director George Tenet. He was promoted to CIA Executive Director by President Bush in March of this year. BT was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999. The combined firm is the single largest bank in Europe. And, as we shall see, Deutsche Bank played several key roles in events connected to the September 11 attacks. THE SCOPE OF KNOWN INSIDER TRADING Before looking further into these relationships it is necessary to look at the insider trading information that is being ignored by Reuters, The New York Times and other mass media. It is well documented that the CIA has long monitored such trades - in real time - as potential warnings of terrorist attacks and other economic moves contrary to U.S. interests. Previous stories in FTW have specifically highlighted the use of Promis software to monitor such trades. It is necessary to understand only two key financial terms to understand the significance of these trades, "selling short" and "put options". "Selling Short" is the borrowing of stock, selling it at current market prices, but not being required to actually produce the stock for some time. If the stock falls precipitously after the short contract is entered, the seller can then fulfill the contract by buying the stock after the price has fallen and complete the contract at the pre-crash price. These contracts often have a window of as long as four months. "Put Options," are contracts giving the buyer the option to sell stocks at a later date. Purchased at nominal prices of, for example, $1.00 per share, they are sold in blocks of 100 shares. If exercised, they give the holder the option of selling selected stocks at a future date at a price set when the contract is issued. Thus, for an investment of $10,000 it might be possible to tie up 10,000 shares of United or American Airlines at $100 per share, and the seller of the option is then obligated to buy them if the option is executed. If the stock has fallen to $50 when the contract matures, the holder of the option can purchase the shares for $50 and immediately sell them for $100 - regardless of where the market then stands. A call option is the reverse of a put option, which is, in effect, a derivatives bet that the stock price will go up. A September 21 story by the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, entitled "Black Tuesday: The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam?" documented the following trades connected to the September 11 attacks: - "Between September 6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put options on United Airlines, but only 396 call options... Assuming that 4,000 of the options were bought by people with advance knowledge of the imminent attacks, these "insiders" would have profited by almost $5 million. - "On September 10, 4,516 put options on American Airlines were bought on the Chicago exchange, compared to only 748 calls. Again, there was no news at that point to justify this imbalance;... Again, assuming that 4,000 of these options trades represent "insiders," they would represent a gain of about $4 million. [The levels of put options purchased above were more than six times higher than normal.] - "No similar trading in other airlines occurred on the Chicago exchange in the days immediately preceding Black Tuesday. - "Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157 of its October $45 put options bought in the three trading days before Black Tuesday; this compares to an average of 27 contracts per day before September 6. Morgan Stanley's share price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming that 2,000 of these options contracts were bought based upon knowledge of the approaching attacks, their purchasers could have profited by at least $1.2 million. - "Merrill Lynch & Co., with headquarters near the WTC Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put options bought in the four trading days before the attacks; the previous average volume in those shares had been 252 contracts per day [a 1200% increase!]. When trading resumed, Merrill's shares fell from $46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000 option contracts were bought by "insiders," their profit would have been about $5.5 million. - "European regulators are examining trades in Germany's Munich Re, Switzerland's Swiss Re, and AXA of France, all major reinsurers with exposure to the Black Tuesday disaster." [FTW Note: AXA also owns more than 25% of American Airlines stock making the attacks a "double whammy" for them.] On September 29, 2001 - in a vital story that has gone unnoticed by the major media - the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "Investors have yet to collect more than $2.5 million in profits they made trading options in the stock of United Airlines before the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, according to a source familiar with the trades and market data. "The uncollected money raises suspicions that the investors - whose identities and nationalities have not been made public - had advance knowledge of the strikes." They don't dare show up now. The suspension of trading for four days after the attacks made it impossible to cash-out quickly and claim the prize before investigators started looking. "... October series options for UAL Corp. were purchased in highly unusual volumes three trading days before the terrorist attacks for a total outlay of $2,070; investors bought the option contracts, each representing 100 shares, for 90 cents each. [This represents 230,000 shares]. Those options are now selling at more than $12 each. There are still 2,313 so-called "put" options outstanding [valued at $2.77 million and representing 231,300 shares] according to the Options Clearinghouse Corp." "...The source familiar with the United trades identified Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, the American investment banking arm of German giant Deutsche Bank, as the investment bank used to purchase at least some of these options..." This was the operation managed by Krongard until as recently as 1998. As reported in other news stories, Deutsche Bank was also the hub of insider trading activity connected to Munich Re. just before the attacks. CIA, THE BANKS AND THE BROKERS Understanding the interrelationships between CIA and the banking and brokerage world is critical to grasping the already frightening implications of the above revelations. Let's look at the history of CIA, Wall Street and the big banks by looking at some of the key players in CIA's history. Clark Clifford - The National Security Act of 1947 was written by Clark Clifford, a Democratic Party powerhouse, former Secretary of Defense, and one-time advisor to President Harry Truman. In the 1980s, as Chairman of First American Bancshares, Clifford was instrumental in getting the corrupt CIA drug bank BCCI a license to operate on American shores. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and banker. John Foster and Allen Dulles - These two brothers "designed" the CIA for Clifford. Both were active in intelligence operations during WW II. Allen Dulles was the U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland where he met frequently with Nazi leaders and looked after U.S. investments in Germany. John Foster went on to become Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower and Allen went on to serve as CIA Director under Eisenhower and was later fired by JFK. Their professions: partners in the most powerful - to this day - Wall Street law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell. Bill Casey - Ronald Reagan's CIA Director and OSS veteran who served as chief wrangler during the Iran-Contra years was, under President Richard Nixon, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His profession: Wall Street lawyer and stockbroker. David Doherty - The current Vice President of the New York Stock Exchange for enforcement is the retired General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency. George Herbert Walker Bush - President from 1989 to January 1993, also served as CIA Director for 13 months from 1976-7. He is now a paid consultant to the Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the nation, which also shares joint investments with the bin Laden family. A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard - The current Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency is the former Chairman of the investment bank A.B. Brown and former Vice Chairman of Banker's Trust. John Deutch - This retired CIA Director from the Clinton Administration currently sits on the board at Citigroup, the nation's second largest bank, which has been repeatedly and overtly involved in the documented laundering of drug money. This includes Citigroup's 2001 purchase of a Mexican bank known to launder drug money, Banamex. Nora Slatkin - This retired CIA Executive Director also sits on Citibank's board. Maurice "Hank" Greenburg - The CEO of AIG insurance, manager of the third largest capital investment pool in the world, was floated as a possible CIA Director in 1995. FTW exposed Greenberg's and AIG's long connection to CIA drug trafficking and covert operations in a two-part series that was interrupted just prior to the attacks of September 11. AIG's stock has bounced back remarkably well since the attacks. To read that story, please go to http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ ciadrugs/part_2.html. One wonders how much damning evidence is necessary to respond to what is now irrefutable proof that CIA knew about the attacks and did not stop them. Whatever our government is doing, whatever the CIA is doing, it is clearly NOT in the interests of the American people, especially those who died on September 11. The Lies About Taliban Heroin Russia and Oil the Real Objectives, With Heroin As A Weapon of War A Replay of CIA's Vietnam-era Drug Dealing FTW Revises Its Map On Economic Impacts FTW, October 10, 2001 - The governments of the United States and Britain - along with a lap-dog mainstream media all too willing to regurgitate falsehoods - are feeding us a line of demonstrably inaccurate lies about the Taliban and opium. We are being warned of a "new flood" of al-Q'aeda opium as the war expands. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair boasts, "We will bomb their poppy fields," he neglects to mention that there aren't any poppy fields in Taliban controlled areas to bomb. This outrageous deception of the public, in an effort to stir up support for the war effort, is further evidence that most of the rest of the government's line following the attacks of September 11, is simply not credible. A simple side-by-side comparison of reports from the UN and the U.S. government, along with major media stories from before and after the Sept. 11 attacks exposes the lie. Even the U.S. State Department (www.state.gov/www/regions/ sa/facts_taliban_drugs.html.) acknowledges that in July 2000, Mullah Omar of the Taliban ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in all Taliban controlled regions of Afghanistan. That State Department Fact Sheet, published after Jan 1, 2000, however, expresses U.S. disbelief in the ban's effectiveness. This position is, however, flatly contradicted by some very credible sources, including Secretary of State Colin Powell. He gave the Taliban $43 million this May to replace the income lost to Afghani farmers as a result of the ban. Their wheat crops had failed due to the drought and they had no money from opium harvests to buy food. The middlemen who had stockpiled the opium had income. But the farmers, who had harvested in the summer of 2000, had already been paid. In February 2000 citing reports from Agence France-Presse, the AP, and UPI, FTW published a story describing the Taliban's successful destruction of their poppy crop. We viewed this at the time - possibly incorrectly - as a move by the Taliban to take $90 billion in drug cash out of the western banking system. That sales remained stable, however, is reflected in the fact that heroin prices fell only slightly in 2000. Had Afghanistan stopped selling altogether, then Western Europe, which gets its opium from Afghanistan, would have seen a steep increase in prices. It did not. So why then did Powell give Afghanistan the $43 million? I wish I knew. Now, based upon new evidence, we know that in 1999 Afghanistan produced a bumper crop of 4,600 metric tons of opium and that this has been verified by a number of sources including the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) as well as in a multitude of press stories. The 2000 harvest was close to 3,300 metric tons. The result, as Colombia expanded poppy cultivation in the late 1990s, and as the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia showed only a minor drop in output, was a glut. Therefore the Taliban's ban on production would have had the impact of creating a price support by reducing supplies. How successful was the ban and destruction of crops? Well, aside from the above reports, which all indicated that inspections confirming the ban had taken place, consider the following: - On January 3, 2001 an ABC News story, posted on their web site stated, "Pakistan's Foreign Secretary Inam ul-Haq's claim to have eliminated all opium plantations in Taliban controlled territories - reported by Agence France-Presse -- seems to have been confirmed by a UN survey. "This development could have several important ramifications for both the geopolitical situation in the region and the world drug trade... "The center of world drug production will shift from Afghanistan, which accounted for 75 percent of world opium production last year, to Colombia and the Golden Triangle on the border between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. - A February 16, 2001 AP story by Kathy Gannon was headlined, "Taliban virtually wipes out opium production in Afghanistan." It opened with these lines: "U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan - once the world's largest producer - since banning poppy cultivation in July. "A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year. "'We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,' said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier - a sea of blood red poppies. - On May 24, 2001 Barry Berak of the New York Times wrote a story entitled, "Taliban Ban on Drug Crops Is Working, U.S. Concludes." Here are the lead paragraphs: "ELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan, May 20 - This has been heroin's great heartland, where the narcotic came to life as an opium resin taken from fragile buds of red and white poppies. Last year, 75 per cent of the world's opium crop was grown in Afghanistan, with the biggest yield sprouting from here in the fertile plains of the country's south, sustained by the meander of the Helmand River. "But something astonishing has become evident with this spring's harvest. Behind the narrow dikes of packed earth, the fields are empty of their most profitable plant. Poor farmers, scythes in hand, stoop among brown stems. "Mile after mile, there is only a dry stubble of wheat to cut from the lumpy soil... "But American narcotics officials who visited the country confirmed earlier United Nations reports that the Taliban had, in one growing season, managed a rare triumph in the long and losing war on drugs..." Before looking at what the press is saying since the WTC attacks, take three facts and lock them firmly in your brain. First, the opium-growing season in the region, according to the UN and other drug monitoring agencies, is a planting in October and November with a harvest in May and June. There have been no crops planted or harvested in Afghanistan or Pakistan since the summer of 2000. The Taliban and farmers have been sustaining themselves by selling stockpiles, with the prices fairly stable since the ban. Second, Afghanistan, for the last four years, has been suffering under one of the worst droughts in its history. The last year has been the worst. Third, Central Asian expert, Vladimir Davlatov, writing for "1 world media," from the Tajikistan capital of Dushnabe, interviewed a General [Rustam Nazarov] in command of Tajik border guards charged with intercepting heroin supplies smuggled out of Afghanistan. The August 31 story (Issue No. 67) quoted the General as saying, "The quality of Afghan heroin has recently deteriorate[d]." The Propaganda "The West At War: Drugs Wipeout - We'll Bomb Poppy Fields - Blair Targets Terror Profits - Poppy fields which supply the Taliban's multi-billion pound drugs trade are to be a key target of military strikes in Afghanistan" read the headline of a September 30, 2000 story in the British paper, The Sunday Mirror. The story said: "A senior Downing street aide said: 'We have reliable information that the Taliban are planning to use money from drugs to finance military action, and that bin Laden has ordered farmers to step up production..." How can they step up production? It takes six months to grow a crop and they have to plant one first. The planting doesn't start until November. Meantime we're bombing the region to smithereens. Is this a new form of plowing the soil? "There is an estimated 3,000 tonnes of opium stockpiled inside Afghanistan ..." OK, what have they been selling for the last year, wheat? Mushrooms? "Flood of Cheap Afghan Heroin," blazed the headline of a story in the Times of London dated September 25, 2001. The lead sentences of that story read: "AFGHAN farmers are ready to swamp world markets with heroin amid signs that the Taleban has dropped its ban on opium growing. "The ban was imposed by Mullah Muhammad Omar last year, leaving many farmers ruined. But the sudden halving of the price of raw opium to $250 a kg suggests the decree has been reversed." So whose heroin is flooding the markets? The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with every network, have all reported that the Taliban's response to U.S. attacks will be to increase heroin production. Strange for a country that is now militarily sealed off and has no remaining operable airfields and whose land borders are now sealed by the U.S. military. That gives a whole new meaning to the term "Thunder Road." On September 30 The Chicago Tribune published a story entitled "Panicked Opium Traders Unload Huge Stocks. Implying that it was the Taliban doing so, the story opened with the lead: "ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Just as the Dow Jones industrial average fell precipitously in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the U.S., so did the main economic marker in the ramshackle street bazaars of Pakistan's North West Frontier province. "Traders from Peshawar reported that the price of opium had plunged from $700 a kilo to $90 since September 11..." There is no mention in the story of the fact that Pakistan itself grows the opium poppy or that the Pakistani government of Musharraf Pervez - our erstwhile ally - has been dependent upon drug money to sustain itself for at least ten years. How come the story doesn't look to the Pakistani issue? The Ananova press agency reported on September 29th, "...A Downing Street spokesman says there is evidence of a sudden movement of opium out of neighboring Pakistan where it was being stockpiled." Now let me get this straight. The stockpiles are in Pakistan so we're going to bomb Afghanistan for it. That makes real good sense! In the most outrageous propaganda of all, the Indian news service PTI in New Delhi, published a story on October 4, headlined, "Laden Planned to Wreak Havoc in U.S. Through Super Heroin." It's lead paragraph reads: "The most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden had planned to develop a 'super heroin' drug and export the same to United States and West Europe to wreak havoc there much before the deadly September 11 attacks. 'The terror network headed by Osama bin Laden has tried to develop a high-strength form of heroin that it planned to export to United States and Western Europe," a major American daily said today quoting intelligence reports." This is the most patent b.s. I have ever read. I specialized in heroin at LAPD. I was also trained by the DEA in 1976. There is no such thing as super heroin. Heroin is a chemical, diacetyl morphine. Its purest form is 100%. It is usually "cut" at least four times - each time by 50% - to 6.25% purity or less before it is sold on the streets. There is no way to make it stronger unless you just cut it less, which automatically cuts the profits to street vendors. And it is the middlemen and retailers who do the cutting, not the manufacturer. It is easier to smuggle one kilo of pure heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan or Pakistan or Turkey than it is to smuggle eight kilos at 6.25%. It would take eight times as many airplanes and trucks. Each time a middleman cuts the heroin he has twice as much to sell. This lie of a story implies that Osama bin Laden controls street-level drug dealing in the United States from the black ghettos of New York and L.A to the white suburbs of San Francisco and Chicago. That's the only way it is possible to get a higher-strength heroin on the streets of America. And what about the fact that the U.S. receives - according to the DEA and the Department of Justice - more than 60 per cent of its heroin from Colombia. Does bin Laden control Colombia too? "Oh Yeah, We Forgot To Tell You" Only belatedly have major outlets like the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 2), The Associated Press (Oct. 5), and the Washington Post (Oct. 5) begun to acknowledge, in stories placed well back in the paper, and with much less emphasis, that the Northern Alliance - our allies against the Taliban - are now in real control of the heroin trade. Smuggling routes have shifted from south through Pakistan northward through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. They acknowledge the obvious - that the Taliban is no longer the primary supplier of heroin. How could they be? The Real Story In March 2001 FTW reported from Moscow that Uzbekistan was "awash" in a sea of poppies. Since September 11 we have seen Uzbekistan not surprisingly become the hub for all U.S. military operations going into Afghanistan. It was, in fact, the very first place that U.S. military and "special operations" forces deployed - within days of the attacks. Unmentioned in press stories is the fact that firms like Southern Air, Evergreen and other CIA proprietary or contract operations have been establishing a presence in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent for more than a year. And Tashkent is a surprisingly modern city. It even has an Intercontinental Hotel. This is undoubtedly due in part to increased oil exploration, but it hauntingly parallels our experience from another era - Vietnam. Now, as we are hearing the first reports that the Uzbeki government, fighting its own battle against a Muslim insurgency, will permit offensive operations from its military bases, FTW has had two reports that CIA operative Richard Secord has recently traveled to Tashkent. Secord's documented history of involvement in heroin smuggling, from Vietnam, Laos and Thailand in the 1960's and his criminal involvement in illegal operations, including drug smuggling during the Iran-Contra years, tells us exactly what is happening. These same intelligence sources have also reported that many other CIA veterans of Iran-Contra and Vietnam - despite their age - are converging on Tashkent like bees to a field of flowers - poppy flowers. In the 1960's and 70's, as the Vietnam War raged, the CIA fostered and maintained a series of covert wars in Laos and Cambodia. They did this by funding their operations with heroin, refined from opium grown by indigenous tribesmen including the Hmong in Laos. The Hmong, in turn became surrogate U.S. armies and the money from the trade supported the CIA and its allies as the region became totally unstable. In the years since, the only difference is that drug money has become a $500-600 billion a year cash flow that is now an essential part of the world banking and financial system because it provides the liquid cash necessary to make the "minimum monthly payments" on huge stock and derivative and investment bubbles in the U.S. and Britain. These bubbles were already bursting in the weeks prior to the September 11 attacks. Now, as the CIA moves to control the drug trade in the region you can be sure of several things. First, when the world sees an explosion of heroin from the region it won't be the Taliban's doing. Second, the cash flows from the smuggling will now be directed through U.S. banks and stocks. That is what the CIA does. Third, those cash flows - as direct air operations from Tashkent to the U.S. become commonplace - will be taken away from Russia, the Balkans, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Fourth, the result of that will be de-stabilization of the entire region. Fifth, destabilization in the region will Balkanize Russia. Sixth, the increasing U.S. military and economic presence will consolidate U.S. control over the vast oil and gas reserves in the region. A revived Unocal-Saudi pipeline project, which will begin construction soon after the U.S. establishes control, will take the oil and gas from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, and down to the Pakistani coast where it will then be sold to China and Japan. The profits from those sales will come back into Wall Street. This will be a further drain on Russian influence in the region and greatly increase global instability. Throughout the 1990s the United States - under an exclusive arrangement coordinated by the Harvard Endowment, Goldman Sachs and the U.S Treasury - looted some $300 billion from Russia. During the period from 1989-2001 the population of that country shrank from 165 to 145 million people. As infrastructure collapsed, as services disappeared, as unemployment skyrocketed, as the Ruble collapsed, the life expectancy for a Russian male dropped from 68 to 48 years. Make no mistake. Russia is the target here just as much as is the propping up of a feeble U.S. economy with drug money. And remember that Russia still has most of its nuclear arsenal intact. The Best Enemies Money Can Buy From Hitler To Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden - Insider Connections and the Bush Family's Partnership with Killers of Americans Brown Brothers, Harriman - BNL- and the Carlyle Group FTW, Oct. 9, 2001 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, major media powerhouses and the increasingly influential alternative media alike have begun to focus attention on Bush family connections and a long history of arming and financing America's attackers in the months and years prior to the outbreak of war. Recent stories in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 27 & 28, 2001), ABC News (Oct. 1, 2001), as well as a host of reports from so-called alternative news sources have begun to focus attention on the Bush family's profit-making role in creating and arming our enemies. The following is a more comprehensive look at the documented history of these relationships that will also open some new avenues of inquiry for the press, Congress and the American people. In a world now filled with biowarfare agents, backpack nuclear devices, and chemical weapons like Sarin gas -- where there are people in many countries with reasons to oppose the United States -- the Bush Administration is following predictable strategies in a way that redefines the concept of brinksmanship. Human survival may depend upon the will and the ability of both the Congress and the press to focus on these relationships and to take appropriate action. Moreover - and I am not the first to say this - if a national security priority is to seize the financial assets of those who support terrorists, then perhaps we should start right here at home. Adolph Hitler Meticulous research, including U.S. government records from the era, along with contemporaneous news stories from the New York Times and other papers is presented in the 1992 book entitled, "George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography" by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, Published by The Executive Intelligence Review and located at http://www.tarpley.net/bushb.htm. The following is sourced entirely from Chapter II of this essential work. [Note: Although FTW does not always agree with conclusions reached by the Executive Intelligence Review, or its founder Lyndon La Rouche, we have never found a single flaw in any of their factual research. History is history, no matter who presents it. And this history is essential to understanding our era.] George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was the Managing Director of the investment bank Brown Brothers, Harriman from the 1920s through the 1940s. It was Brown Brothers, in conjunction with Averell Harriman, the Rockefeller family, Standard Oil, the DuPonts, the Morgans and the Fords who served as the principal funding arm in helping to finance Adolph Hitler's rise to power starting in 1923. This included direct funding for the SS and SA channeled through a variety of German firms. Prescott Bush, through associations with the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line, Nazi banker Fritz Thyssen (pronounced Tee-sen), Standard Oil of Germany, The German Steel Trust (founded by Dillon Read founder, Clarence Dillon), and I.G. Farben, used the Union Bank Corporation to funnel vast quantities of money to the Nazis and to manage their American interests. The profits from those investments came back to Bush allies on Wall Street. Thyssen is universally regarded as having been Hitler's private banker and ultimate owner of the Union Bank Corporation. Early support for Hitler came from Prescott Bush through the Hamburg-Amerika Steamship line -- also funded by Brown Bothers -- that funneled large sums of money and weapons to Hitler's storm troopers in the 1920s. According to Tarpley and Chaitkin, "In May 1933, just after the Hitler regime was consolidated, an agreement was reached in Berlin for the coordination of all Nazi commerce with the U.S.A. The Harriman International Company... was to head a syndicate of 150 firms and individuals, to conduct all exports from Hitler Germany to the United States." Furthermore, a 1942 U.S. government investigative report that surfaced during 1945 Senate hearings found that the Union Bank, with Prescott Bush on the board, was an "interlocking concern" with the German Steel Trust that had produced: 50.8% of Nazi Germany's pig iron 41.4% of Nazi Germany's universal plate 36% of Nazi Germany's heavy plate 38.5% of Nazi Germany's galvanized sheet 45.5% of Nazi Germany's pipes and tubes 22.1% of Nazi Germany's wire 35% of Nazi Germany's explosives The business relationships established by Bush in 1923 continued even after the war started until they became so offensive and overt as to warrant seizure by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act in 1942. In 1942, "Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the government took over Union Banking Corporation, in which Bush was a director. The U.S. Alien Property Custodian seized Union Banking Corp.'s stock shares... "... all of which shares are held for the benefit of... members of the Thyssen family, [and] is property of nationals... of a designated enemy country." "On October 28, the government issued orders seizing two Nazi front organizations run by the Bush-Harriman bank: the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation." "Nazi interests in the Silesian-American Corporation, long managed by Prescott Bush and his father in law George Herbert Walker, were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act on Nov. 17, 1942..." These seizures of Bush businesses were reported in a number of American papers including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Prescott Bush went on to become an influential Republican Senator from Connecticut who went on to be a regular golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower. His attorneys were the lawyers John Foster and Allen Dulles, the later became the CIA Director under Eisenhower. Saddam Hussein After becoming President in January 1989, Prescott Bush's son, George Herbert Walker Bush - father of our current President - authorized a series of programs that not only armed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein but also provided him with technology that assisted in his development of chemical weapons like Sarin gas, and biological weapons, which he still possesses. Apologists for Bush (the elder) say that, after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s left the region unstable, he was just trying to establish a new balance of power. Not so. Bush directives and policies, including relationships with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the Banca Nacional del Lavoro (BNL) were directly and deliberately responsible for creating the army the U.S. fought in 1991. A story by Russ W. Baker, in the March/April issue the Colombia Journalism Review (CJR), provided the most compelling overview of Iraqgate that I have seen. "ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop 'It is becoming increasingly clear,' said a grave Ted Koppel, 'that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy... "Why, then, have some of our top papers provided so little coverage?" Baker poignantly asks. " The result: readers who neither grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not follow the story of the Banca Nacional del Lavoro, which apparently served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history. "Complex, challenging, mind-boggling stories (from Iran-Contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define our times: yet we don't appear to be getting any better at telling them... "Much of what Saddam received from the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications. We've learned that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S. and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait. "And we've learned that the obscure Atlanta Branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nacional del Lavoro, relying partly on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $5 billion to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left holding the bag for what looks like $2 billion in defaulted loans to Iraq. "... In fact, we now know that in February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh [appointed by George H.W. Bush] blocked U.S. investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case... "... As New York Times columnist William Safire argued last December 7, 'Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the Systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [The U.S., Britain, and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator." While Democrat Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee during the period, stood as the lone voice from the wilderness in raising alarms about Bush's obvious corruption, the rest of the Congress sheepishly ignored all the signs demanding immediate action. Gonzales' voice reportedly fell silent after his empty car was machine-gunned in a Washington suburb in what passed for a drive-by shooting. The CJR continues: "Meanwhile, The Village Voice published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December 18, 1990 issue... "That American troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm Iraq,' Waas wrote, "is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent of the American public..." The L.A. Times, on Feb 23, 1992, dug deep enough to find secret National Security Decision Directives by the Bush Administration in 1989 ordering closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $1 billion in new aid. The Times' series, co-authored with Waas, emphasized that, "buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece - that Secretary of State James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz in October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loans guarantees to Iraq." Baker's CJR report also noted, "On October 3, the [Wall Street] Journal reported [BNL official Christopher] Drogoul's assertion that the director general of Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Production had told him, 'We are all in this together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very closely with the intelligence service of the Iraqi government.' Three weeks later, the Journal reported that [Henry] Gonzales 'produced a phone-book-sized packet of documents' showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms... The documents mentioned one... which designed parts for Iraq's howitzers and was financed through BNL..." In the wake of highly suspicious anthrax outbreaks in Florida, just miles from where several of the WTC suicides pilots trained, we add one final note. In his 1998 book "Bringing the War Home" author William Thomas writes, " Under that same [weapons transfer] program, 19 containers of Anthrax bacteria were supplied to Iraq in 1988 by the American Type Culture Collection company, located near Fort Detrick, MD, the site of the Army's high security germ warfare labs." The Carlyle Group, the Bushes and bin Laden The warnings about the Carlyle Group, the nation's 11th largest defense contractor, and the Bushes came long before the World Trade Center attacks. The Carlyle Group is a closely held corporation, exempt, for that reason, from reporting its affairs to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little is known of what it actually does except that it buys and sells defense contractors. As of October 4, 2001, it has removed its corporate web site from the World Wide Web making further investigation through that channel impossible. Its Directors include Frank Carlucci, former Reagan Secretary of Defense; James Baker, former Bush Secretary of State; and Richard Darman, a former White House aide to Ronald Reagan and Republican Party operative. On March 3, 2001, just weeks after George W Bush's inauguration, the conservative Washington lobbying group Judicial Watch issued a press release. It said: "(Washington, D.C.) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government abuse and corruption, called on former President George Herbert Walker Bush to resign immediately from the Carlyle Group, a private investment firm, while his son President George W. Bush is in office. Today's New York Times reported that the elder Bush is an "ambassador" for the $12 billion private investment firm and last year traveled to the Middle East on its behalf. The former president also helped the firm in South Korea. "The New York Times reported that as compensation, the elder Bush is allowed to buy a stake in the Carlyle Group's investments, which include ownership in at least 164 companies throughout the world (thereby by giving the current president an indirect benefit). James Baker, the former Secretary of State who served as President George W. Bush's point man in Florida's election dispute, is a partner in the firm. The firm also gave George W. Bush help in the early 1990's when it placed him on one of its subsidiary's board of directors. "This is simply inappropriate. Former President Bush should immediately resign from the Carlyle Group because it is an obvious conflict of interest. Any foreign government or foreign investor trying to curry favor with the current Bush Administration is sure to throw business to the Carlyle Group. And with the former President Bush promoting the firm's investments abroad, foreign nationals could understandably confuse the Carlyle Group's interests with the interests of the United States government," stated Larry Klayman, Judicial Watch Chairman and General Counsel. "Questions are now bound to be raised if the recent Bush Administration change in policy towards Iraq has the fingerprints of the Carlyle Group, which is trying to gain investments from other Arab countries who [sic] would presumably benefit from the new policy," stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton." Judicial Watch noted that "even the Clinton Administration called on the Rodham brothers to stop their business dealings in [The former Soviet Republic of] Georgia because those dealings started to destabilize that country." Since the WTC attacks the Wall Street Journal has reported (Sept. 28, 2001) that, "George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm." The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice in the last three years - 1998 and 2000 -- as a representative of Carlyle, seeking to expand business dealings with one of the wealthiest Saudi families, which some experts argue, has never fully severed its ties with black sheep Osama in spite of current reports in a mainstream press that is afraid of offending the current administration. The Nation, on March 27, 2000 - in a story co-authored by David Corn and Paul Lashmar - wrote, "In January former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major paid a social call on Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah..." This story confirms at least one meeting between the elder Bush and Saudi leaders, including the bin Ladens. That the bin Ladens attended this meeting was confirmed in a subsequent September 27, 2001 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) story. The January 2000 meeting with the bin Ladens was also later confirmed by Bush (the elder's) Chief of Staff Jean Becker, only after the WSJ presented her with a thank you note sent by Bush to the bin Ladens after that meeting. James Baker visited the bin Ladens in 1998 and 1999 with Carlyle CEO Frank Carlucci. The WSJ story went on to note, "A Carlyle executive said that the bin Laden family committed $2 million through a London investment arm in 1995 in Carlyle Partners II Fund, which raised $1.3 billion overall. The fund has purchased several aerospace companies among 29 deals. So far, the family has received $1.3 million back in completed investments and should ultimately realize a 40% annualized rate of return, the Carlyle executive said. "But a foreign financier with ties to the bin Laden family says the family's overall investment with Carlyle is considerably larger..." In other words, Osama bin Laden's attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, with the resulting massive increase in the U.S. defense budget have just made his family a great big pile of money. More Bush connections appear in relation to the bin Ladens. The WSJ story also notes that, "During the past several years, the [bin Laden] family's close ties to the Saudi royal family prompted executives and staff from closely held New York publisher Forbes, Inc. to make two trips to the family headquarters, according to Forbes Chairman Caspar Weinberger, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration. 'We would call on them to get their view of the country and what would be of interest to investors.'" President G.H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger for his criminal conduct in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1989. Our current President, George W. Bush has also had -- at minimum -- indirect dealings with Carlyle and the bin Ladens. In 1976 his firm Arbusto Energy was funded with $50,000 from Texas investment banker James R. Bath who was also the U.S. investment counselor for the bin Laden family. In his watershed 1992 book, "The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush," award winning Texas investigative journalist Pete Brewton dug deeply into Bath's background, revealing connections with the CIA and major fraudulent activities connected with the Savings & Loan scandal that took $500 billion out of the pockets of American taxpayers. A long-time friend of George W. Bush, Bath was connected to a number of covert financing operations in the Iran-Contra scandal, which also linked to bin Laden friend Adnan Khashoggi. One of the richest men in the world, Khashoggi was the arms merchant at the center of the whole Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi, whose connections to the bin Ladens is more than superficial, got his first business break by acting as middle-man for a large truck purchase by Osama bin Laden's older brother, Salem. Another key player in the Bush Administration, Deputy Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage, left his post as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration after a series of scandals connected to CIA operatives Ed Wilson, Ted Shackley, Richard Secord and Tom Clines placed him at the brink of criminal indictment and jail. Shackley and Secord are veterans of Vietnam operations and have long been linked to opium/heroin smuggling. The Armitage scandals all focused on the illegal provision of weapons and war materiel to potential or actual enemies of the U.S. and to the Contras in Central America. Armitage, a former Navy SEAL, who reportedly enjoyed combat missions and killing during covert operations in Laos during the Vietnam War, has never been far from the Bush family's side. Throughout his career, both in and out of government, he has been perpetually connected to CIA drug smuggling operations. Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a 1995 Washington Post story, called Armitage, "my white son." In 1990, then President Bush dispatched Armitage to Russia to aid in its "transition" to capitalism. Armitage's Russian work for Bush has been frequently connected to the explosion of drug trafficking under the Russian Mafias, which became virtual rulers of the nation afterwards. In the early 1990s Armitage had extensive involvement in Albania at the same time that the Albanian ally, Kosovo Liberation Army was coming to power and consolidating its grip, according to The Christian Science Monitor, on 70% of the heroin entering western Europe. [See FTW Vol. II, No 2 - April 24, 1999] Armitage and Carlucci are both Board Members of the Washington think tank, the Middle East Policy Council. The connections continue with Vice President Dick Cheney. Amongst the multitude of oil pipeline construction running through the new war zone is one project - according to a Sept. 19, 2001 Wall Street Journal story - a joint venture in which the bin Laden family joined with the construction firm H.C. Price. A researcher named "Phoenix," writing for the Internet news site Rumor Mills News Agency located at www.rumormillnews.com, reported that Price subsequently changed its name to Bredero Shaw, Inc. and is now owned by a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corporation, Dresser Industries. It was Dresser industries that gave George H.W. Bush his first post war job in 1948. A check of the relevant corporate web sites has confirmed this. Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as Secretary of Defense during Desert Storm, directing the campaign against Saddam Hussein, was Halliburton's CEO until last year's election. And, according to a 2000 story from Harper's Magazine, in 1990 our current President, through a position as a corporate director of Caterair, owned by the Carlyle Group - at a time when the bin Laden's were invested in Carlyle - had additional connections to the bin Laden family. In addition, on March 1, 1995, when George W. Bush was Texas governor and a senior Trustee of the university, the University of Texas Endowment voted to place $10 million in investments with the Carlyle Group. As to how much of that money went to the bin Ladens we can only guess. But we do know that there is a long tradition in the Bush family of giving money to those who kill Americans. Now, as the people of America are beginning to awaken to what is really being unleashed upon them, as a few brave souls are asking who's going to get all the money the Bush Administration is "borrowing" from government coffers and who's going to pay for it - the above history is more than ominous. Considering that during the 1980s, under the pretext of fighting a Sandinista regime in Nicaragua that never once launched an attack on the U.S., these same people oversaw an explosion in U.S. cocaine consumption that went from 80 metric tons in 1979 to 600 metric tons in 1989 - considering that the CIA trained and equipped death squads that tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of people from Guatemala to Panama - considering that these same people have brutalized Iraq, leaving portions of it radioactively contaminated by depleted uranium for the next 4 billion years and causing a fivefold increase in the number of childhood leukemia cases amidst a starving population, one can only wonder what they will produce for the world now given the context of the World Trade Center attacks. Stock Prices In Private Companies Operating Prisons for U.S. Gov't Soar War on Terrorism Will Mean a War on Blacks An October 4, story in the New York Post raises a serious question which it does not answer. America's new wall of homeland security is creating a big demand for cells to hold suspects and illegal aliens who might be rounded up. "Stocks of private companies that build and operate prisons for governments have zoomed as high as 300 percent in anticipation of internment camps and new prisons..." "One company, Wackenhut Corp., may be able to put its expertise to work here. "'Wackenhut has had some success running the immigrant camps in Australia by converting military bases,' said [prison-security analyst James] MacDonald." "'It could be done here, too, but turning our old military bases into internment camps would be a highly charged issue for us,' said MacDonald. 'It would be too drastic.'" "He said the half-dozen publicly traded prison companies are in a buzz about expanding prison projects being issued by the Federal Bureau of Prisons [BoP]..." "He said the Bureau is also seeking bids early next year for three more prisons in the Southwest deserts that can hold more than 1,500 detainees..." "Private prison investors are also jubilant about an expected U.S. Supreme Court ruling that would bar any inmate from suing a privately run prison for civil rights violations..." "In line to get a big piece of that business is the nation's largest private prison company, Corrections Corp. of America. Its stock has soared 308persent this year, and closed yesterday at $13.98, up 30 cents in active trading" OK, so we know of 4,500 new prison beds for the more than 300,000 privately housed inmates who will soon have no civil rights. That does not include, however, many tens of thousands of new beds in the new BoP request. Are there that many terrorists in America? One answer as to where the new prisoners are going to come from is suggested by Macomb County, Michigan's prosecutor Carl Marlinga who issued a press release on October 3. After October 3, he will accept no plea bargains and will automatically appeal any heroin sentence that is not the maximum. His rationale is that this will help fight the Taliban and he predicts that prosecutors in every state and the federal government will soon follow suit. That means that most of the new inmates will likely be poor African-Americans and other minorities. We are, of course, the nation that has imprisoned a million non-violent drug offenders in the last decade. Who else will fill the beds and keep the stock prices up? I don't know. I'll tell you when I get there.
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