COMMENT -
Baron Jacob Rothschild is the father of Nat Rothschild, who is a big influence on Glencore Internatioal PLC (which owns Mopani Mine, by the way).
Michael Steinhardt is an old familiar from the 1980s, and is mentioned in the book The Market Wizards, by Jack Schwager. In Marty Schwartz' book Pit Bull, he is simply referred to as 'Porky'.
The War on Syria: Israeli Licence to Cheney-Linked Energy Firm in Occupied Golan Heights
By Jim Lobe
Global Research, February 25, 2013
IPS
In a potential new source of contention between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has reportedly granted a U.S. energy firm with heavyweight political connections to explore for oil and gas in the occupied Golan Heights.
The company is a local subsidiary of New Jersey-based
Genie Energy Ltd. The Strategic Advisory Board of another subsidiary,
Genie Oil and Gas, includes former Vice President Dick Cheney, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, and former Republican Rep. Jim Courter.
It also includes several prominent investment managers, such as Jacob Rothschild, chairman of the J. Rothschild group, and Michael Steinhardt, a major contributor to Jewish and Zionist causes, notably Birthright Israel, a multi-million-dollar programme to bring young Diaspora Jews to Israel.
By their own admission, the Israeli government says it’s occupied territory. So why would they invest millions of dollars in occupied territory?
The granting of the licence by Israel’s Ministry of Energy and Water Resources, which was initially reported by Dow Jones Thursday, comes amidst continuing civil war in Syria, which has demanded the return of the Heights since Israel took them in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
It also comes a month before Obama is scheduled to make his first visit to Israel as president.
Some analysts here compared the move to previous announcements by the Netanyahu government of new settlement construction on the West Bank or East Jerusalem — either on the eve of or during meetings with top U.S. officials – that have clearly contributed to thinly veiled tensions that exist between the two leaders.
The administration remained tight-lipped about the move Friday, confining itself only to issuing a terse statement by the State Department acknowledging the press reports about the licence.
“We intend to discuss this issue with the Israeli Government,” it said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of Netanyahu’s plan to put additional pressure on the U.S., as he’s done with President Obama in the past,” Charles Ebinger, an energy and Middle expert at the Brookings Institutions, told IPS. “He keeps changing the facts on the ground through expansion of settlements and now this on the Golan.
“He keeps taking these actions, whether with the Palestinians or the Syrians. It makes it more and more difficult for the Arabs to come to the table,” he added. “It’s definitely contrary to international law and goes against any number of U.N. Security Council resolutions.”
“The move probably was not intended primarily to stick a thumb in the eye of the United States,” noted Paul Pillar, a former top Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “but coming only a month before President Obama’s scheduled trip to Israel, it demonstrates again that the Netanyahu government evidently is not bothered by doing just that.
“The Israelis may be anticipating a replacement of the (President Bashar Al-)Assad regime by new Syrian rulers who would push harder for return of the Golan Heights. The idea from Israel’s perspective would be to try to strengthen its claim to the territory by creating still more facts not only on the ground but underground,” he told IPS in an email exchange.
Unlike East Jerusalem, Israel has not tried to “annex” the Golan Heights, although in 1981 it extended Israeli law and administration to the territory – a move that was declared “null and void” by the U.N. Security Council. The U.S., which at various times has tried to mediate a peace accord between Syria and Israel, has never recognised the Jewish State’s occupation there.
The Heights, which successive Israeli governments have said they are prepared to return to Damascus under certain conditions, currently hold 32 Jewish settlements with a total population of around 20,000.
In 2008, Turkey reportedly came close to mediating a peace accord between Israel and Syria that included a return of the Heights, but the effort fell apart when Israel launched its “Cast Lead” military operation in Gaza late that year.
Despite the ongoing civil war in Syria, hostilities between Assad’s forces and rebel groups have only rarely crossed the border into the Israeli-controlled territory.
Some analysts said the move appeared designed in part to take advantage of the ongoing chaos inside Syria.
Successive Israeli governments rejected drilling applications in the past mainly out of a desire to avoid inflaming tensions with Damascus, according to one knowledgeable source who declined to be identified.
“With no effective government in Damascus, I guess they figured no harm would come from going ahead,” the source said.
One prominent U.S.-based anti-Assad activist, Husam Aldairi, expressed astonishment at the move, asking “How is it possible to give a licence for drilling in occupied territory?”
Aldairi, who has served as the president of the U.S. section of the Syrian National Council and now serves as vice chairman of the opposition’s National Coalition’s Tribal Council, said the move “will only serve the purpose of supporting Assad against the revolution.”
“I truthfully think that is a very negative thing to do at this point,” he told IPS in an interview in which he stressed that he was speaking in his personal capacity only.
“You’re only agitating the Syrian people. At this point, they will not be too worried about it, but, in the long run, there has to be a peaceful resolution over the Golan Heights. By their own admission, the Israeli government says it’s occupied territory. So why would they invest millions of dollars in occupied territory?”
The licence, which was reportedly contested by the affected settler communities for environmental among other reasons, will permit Genie Israel Oil and Gas Ltd to conduct exploratory drilling in most of the southern part of the Heights.
Genie, which has an exploration licence in the Shfela region of central Asia through another Israeli subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI), and a joint venture with France’s Total to produce shale oil in the U.S. state of Colorado, said it believes the southern Golan contains “significant quantities of conventional oil and gas in relatively tight formations”.
It’s not clear whether the licence approval may have been affected by the political clout and sympathies of the Strategic Advisory Board members, such as Cheney who was a staunch advocate of Israel’s rightist governments during his vice-presidency from 2001 to 2009.
Murdoch’s media empire, which includes Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, has also been a reliable advocate of Netanyahu’s Likud Party positions over the past 15 years, and particularly since 9/11. Until he sold it several years ago, Murdoch also financed William Kristol’s “Weekly Standard”, a hard-line neo-conservative journal.
Steinhardt provided major funding for the Foundation for the Defense of the Democracy (FDD), a particularly hawkish lobby group whose views are close to those of the Likud Party, from its launch just a few days after 9/11 until at least 2008, according to tax records.
Like Cheney and Murdoch’s U.S. publications, FDD championed the Iraq invasion and, in more recent years, has played an important role in drafting and lobbying for draconian sanctions against Iran.
He also co-founded and has donated millions of dollars to Birthright Israel, a programme that provides 10-day, all-expenses-paid trips to Israel to tens of thousands young Jews from around the world each year. In an interview with U.S. journalist Max Blumenthal at a Birthright rally and dance in Israel last year, Steinhardt insisted that “there was no Palestinian people.”
*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
Labels: DICK CHENEY, ISRAEL, SYRIA
Read more...
Nigeria to charge Dick Cheney in $180 million bribery case, issue Interpol arrest warrant
by John Byrne
Global Research, December 2, 2010
The company that Dick Cheney ran prior to becoming Vice President of the United States was atop the tongue of liberals each time his company was awarded a contract in Iraq. Now the company's name, Halliburton, is being spoken somewhere else: Nigeria.
According to a story filed late Wednesday, Cheney will be indicted in a Nigerian bribery case as part of an investigation into an alleged $180 million bribery scandal.
"Last week, Nigeria arrested at least 23 officials from companies including Halliburton, Saipem, Technip and a former subsidiary of Panalpina Welttransport Holding AG in connection with alleged illegal payments to Nigerian officials. Those detained were all freed on bail on Nov. 29," Bloomberg News' Elisha Bala-Gbogbo wrote.
"Authorities in the West African nation are probing Halliburton, Saipem and Technip for the alleged payment of $180 million in bribes to win a $6 billion liquefied natural-gas contract," Bala-Gbogbo added.
"Panalpina is being investigated for illegal payments it allegedly made to Nigerian customs officials on behalf of Royal Dutch Shell Plc."
The prosecuting counsel for the country's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission said that indictments will be handed down in the next three days and that an arrest warrant for Cheney "will be issued and transmitted through Interpol."
Adds Bloomberg, "Obla said charges will be filed against current and former chief executive officers of Halliburton, including Cheney, who was CEO from 1995 to 2000, and its former unit KBR Inc., based in Houston, Texas; Technip SA, Europe’s second-largest oilfield- services provider; Eni SpA, Italy’s biggest oil company; and Saipem Construction Co., a unit of Eni. Obla didn’t identify the former officials whom he said held office when the alleged bribes were paid."
A spokesman for Cheney declined to comment.
The US Securities and Exchange Committee probe focused on the deal as early as 2004. Wrote The Washington Post at the time:
The Nigerian project, started in the early 1990s, was worth almost $5 billion to TSKJ, a partnership that included a KBR predecessor, as well as companies from France, Japan and the Netherlands.
At issue are payments made to Tristar, a Gibraltar company that had a consulting arrangement with a corporation formed by TSKJ to "administer the contracts and execute the work" in Nigeria, a Halliburton spokeswoman said in response to questions.
KBR, the engineering and construction subsidiary of Halliburton, was formed when Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries Inc. in 1998. It was a combination of Halliburton's Brown & Root and Dresser's M.W. Kellogg Co. Officials from the SEC and Cheney's office declined to comment. Early on Thursday, Halliburton said they hadn't seen the new charges, but still denied their involvement.
"Halliburton's oil-field services operations in Nigeria have never in any way been part of the LNG project and none of the Halliburton employees have ever had any connection to or participation in that project," Tara Mullee Agard, a spokeswoman for the Houston-based company, said in an e-mailed response to Bloomberg.
Added Bloomberg: "Halliburton Co., the world's second- largest oilfield-services provider, said it hasn't seen any amended charges by Nigerian authorities who plan to indict current and former employees in a bribery scandal."
Labels: BRIBERY, CORRUPTION, DICK CHENEY, HALIBURTON CORPORATION, KBR, NIGERIA, OIL, ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC, WAR CRIMES
Read more...
Reagan’s Legacy of Deregulation Goes Haywire in the Gulf
18
Share Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 06/10/2010 - 8:38am. Guest Commentary
BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH
The oil spill in the Gulf is the product of decades of conservatives pounding for deregulation, Cheney-era manipulation of federal regulatory agencies, and corporate insatiability.
These days, when watching television news reports – often the extraordinary reporting of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow – about the environmental/economic catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf which took the lives of 11 workers, I can’t help but think of two seemingly disparate things; the administration of Ronald Reagan, and the 1953 coup in Iran.
I’m thinking about our 40th president because the genesis of corporations drilling for oil where-ever and how-ever without being distracted or deterred by common sense rules and regulations, although part of the economic landscape for decades, picked up steam during the Reagan era.
The 1953 coup in Iran, which overthrew the democratically-elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh, came about because the British government, which owned the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company -- more Anglo than Iranian in both ownership and control – helped engineer the coup. And, one year later, the British government renamed the company, the British Petroleum Company.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, the Heritage Foundation burst onto the national scene with the publication of “Mandate for Leadership,” a comprehensive set of policy recommendations which became the intellectual underpinning for the "Reagan Revolution." Heritage’s blueprint included trickle-down economics, a major emphasis on deregulation, and massive cutbacks in social programs.
Although economists – both those supportive of Reagan’s economic initiatives and those opposed – have for years debated how committed the Reagan Administration was to actually advancing deregulation, one thing is clear; under-funded or de-funded government regulatory agencies, government agencies larded with corporate-friendly officials receiving corporate perks and kickbacks, and such mantras as “unleash the creativity of corporations and all will be well” and “drown the government in a bathtub” have dominated conservative policy initiatives over the past three decades.
In a recent interview, Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and currently an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary, told the Real News Network that George W. Bush’s Administration, through the offices of vice president Dick Cheney, did all it could “to destroy about a half-century or more's regulatory work with regard to oversight of fisheries, forestry, oil, gas, minerals in general. You name it,” said Wilkerson.
“If it was supervised, if it was overseen, if it was regulated by the federal government, Cheney with his marvelous bureaucratic talent moved in and essentially replaced the people who were in the positions that were central to this regulation, this oversight, with people who were either lobbyists for the industry being regulated or executives from that industry.”
Wilkerson went on to point out that one of the key ways Cheney was able to leave his mark was by consciously converting some “1,600-plus people in the administration” from “being political” appointees to “civil service” status. Civil service positions are not subject to immediate change when a new administration takes over.
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff added that Republicans “have been spouting this deregulation, spouting this ‘the market is the best guide,’ spouting this business about let private industry do everything and all things will be wonderful, and don't have any government interference at all. And what we've done is stripped government regulation and oversight from so many things across this country, we're going to be paying for it for years to come. We're going to be paying dearly for it.
“There are going to be more oil spills, there are going to be more bridges collapsing, there are going to be more hurricanes that surprise us in their devastation and so forth, because we Republicans have stripped government of its ability, of its capacity to do the kinds of things that it should do that no one else can do, certainly not someone with a profit motive can do,” Wilkerson pointed out.
The history of British Petroleum is marked by amazing ingenuity and resourcefulness, outrageous oppression of workers, grossly unfair contractual agreements, a series of destructive incidents, an abysmal environmental record, and the extraordinary hubris of its lead officials. The results of BP’s ingenuity and hubris are currently fouling the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and washing up on its wetlands.
The company was founded in 1901 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and it was the first company to use oil reserves of the Middle East. It changed its name to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1936, and after the 1953 coup it changed its name to the British Petroleum Company. In “Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq,” journalist Stephen Kinzer writes that the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, “principally owned by the British government, had held a monopoly on the extraction, refining, and sale of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian’s grossly unequal contract, negotiated with a corrupt monarch, required it to pay Iran just 16 percent of the money it earned from selling the country’s oil. It probably paid even less than that, but the truth was never known, since no outsider was permitted to audit its books.”
In an earlier book, “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Terror in the Middle East” -- which completely detailed how U.S. and British intelligence developed and executed Operation Ajax, which overthrew the Mossadegh government -- Kinzer quotes the director of Iran's Petroleum Institute, who described the conditions oil workers and their families were subjected to:
“Wages were 50 cents a day. There was no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation. The workers lived in a shanty town called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, without running water or electricity, ... In winter the earth flooded and became a flat, perspiring lake. The mud in town was knee-deep, and ... when the rains subsided, clouds of nipping, small-winged flies rose from the stagnant water to fill the nostrils .... Summer was worse. ... The heat was torrid ... sticky and unrelenting - while the wind and sandstorms shipped off the desert hot as a blower. The dwellings of Kaghazabad, cobbled from rusted oil drums hammered flat, turned into sweltering ovens. ... In every crevice hung the foul, sulfurous stench of burning oil .... in Kaghazad there was nothing - not a tea shop, not a bath, not a single tree. The tiled reflecting pool and shaded central square that were part of every Iranian town, ... were missing here. The unpaved alleyways were emporiums for rats.”
Ironically, as Kinzer writes in “Overthrow,” under a new post-coup arrangement, “British Petroleum ended up with 40 percent of the shares in the new National Iranian Oil Company, American companies received 40 percent, and the remainder was divided among European companies. This consortium agreed to share its profits with Iran on a fifty-fifty basis. In the end, then, the British wound up with considerably less than they would have had if they accepted Iran’s demand for an equal share of oil profits in the late 1940’s.”
Kinzer points out that “The main results of the 1953 coup were the end of democracy in Iran and the emergence, in its place, of a royal dictatorship that, a quarter of a century later, set off a bitterly anti-American revolution.”
Things changed for dramatically during the Thatcher era in Britain. According to an essay titled “Privatization,” written by Robert W. Poole, Jr., and published in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, “the largest and best-known effort [at privatization] was that of Margaret Thatcher’s government in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. Thatcher succeeded in making privatization politically popular while selling off the commanding heights of the British economy: British Airways, British Airports Authority, British Petroleum, British Telecom, and several million units of public housing, to name only a few examples.”
After a series of buyouts and mergers, including deals with Amoco (formerly Standard Oil of Indiana) and Arco (Atlantic Richfield Co.), in 2001 the company formally renamed itself as BP plc, and adopted the tagline "Beyond Petroleum," which remains in use today.
BP is the third largest energy company, and the fourth largest company in the world. Being one of the industry’s top dogs isn’t easy. It means that BP has to “drill baby drill” in as many places as possible. And it must “drill baby drill” in deeper and deeper waters. Its scientists/technicians have been brilliant at designing equipment capable of doing so. While BP was becoming a pioneer at deep water drilling, it was assuring government agencies (those that were still paying attention), that what it was doing was safe.
It is more likely than not BP knew all along that what it was doing was extremely risky. The company appears to operate under the assumptions that: a) it doesn’t make mistakes – although its safety and environmental record belies that notion; b) if it does have an accident, it is confident it can bury it, spin it, reframe it, or in some other way deal with it effectively; and, c) even if things go mega-badly, it believes that it can successfully limit its legal liability.
As investigative reporters have pointed out, and re-affirmed by scientists and environmentalists, an event like the one we’re seeing in the Gulf was bound to happen. And, BP has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is not possible to clean up a twenty-first century meltdown with twentieth-century equipment and procedures.
In 1953, a few years after failing to convince the Truman Administration to get rid of Mohammad Mossadegh, the British government found a willing partner in the Eisenhower Administration. The coup in Iran was an example of a desperate imperial Britain attempting to flex its international muscle. It also was a major cause of the unhinging of the Middle East.
The oil spill in the Gulf is corporate imperialism, British Petroleum style. Unfortunately, the sun will not be setting on this imperial venture anytime in the near future.
Labels: DEREGULATION, DICK CHENEY, LARRY WILKERSON, NEOCOLONIALISM, NEOLIBERALISM, OIL, REGULATION
Read more...
Dick Cheney’s “Executive Assassination Ring” – Was British Weapons Expert Dr. David Kelly a Target?
Posted on July 19, 2009 by dandelionsalad
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, July 17, 2009
Antifascist Calling…
Revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency launched a world-wide assassination program, and then concealed its existence from the U.S. Congress and the American people for eight years, carries an implication that death squads may have been employed against political opponents.
The Wall Street Journal reported July 13 that “A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.”
Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman writes, “The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.”
The Washington Post however, revealed July 16 that the assassination plan was sanctioned by President Bush. Unnamed “intelligence officials” told the newspaper that “a secret document known as a ‘presidential finding’ was signed by President George W. Bush that same month, granting the agency broad authority to use deadly force against bin Laden as well as other senior members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”
According to Post reporter Joby Warrick, Bush’s finding “imposed no geographical limitations on the agency’s actions” and that the CIA was “not obliged to notify Congress of each operation envisaged under the directive.” This implies that targets could be hit anywhere, including on the soil of a NATO ally or inside the United States itself.
According to the Los Angeles Times the program “was kept secret from lawmakers for nearly eight years at the direction of former Vice President Dick Cheney.”
Despite these reports and hand-wringing amongst congressional Democrats, there’s something fishy here. After all, isn’t the whole point of America’s “global war on terror” to “capture or kill” al-Qaeda suspects? What’s so secretive or controversial about that?
The descriptions of the operation that have so far emerged however, bear a striking resemblance to charges laid earlier this year when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said that the Bush administration stood-up an “executive assassination ring.”
During a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota in March the veteran journalist told the audience: “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.”
The program was allegedly shut down by Panetta on June 23, a day after leaning of the agency’s clandestine initiative. What make these revelations all the more significant is that the CIA Director only learned of the program fully four months after assuming office.
“The implications,” socialist analyst Bill Van Auken writes, “are clear. The CIA maintained the secrecy ordered by Cheney even after the latter had left office, and continued to conceal the existence and nature of the covert operation not only from Congress, but from the Obama administration itself.”
But was the program shut down? The Washington Post further revealed that the plan, allegedly “on the agency’s back burner for much of the past eight years, was suddenly thrust into the spotlight because of proposals to initiate what one intelligence official called a ’somewhat more operational phase’.”
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell hints that the program was in a “somewhat more operational phase” years earlier, despite repeated denials by CIA officials and congressional staffers.
Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show July 14, “What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people. And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”
According to Wilkerson, the teams may have been dispatched under deep cover, using Joint Special Operations Command as a cut-out, a confirmation of charges made by Seymour Hersh in March. When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was queried by the State Department, “after some hemming and hawing, which was Rumsfeld’s forte, he finally admitted that he had dispatched some of these teams,” Wilkerson explained.
Powell’s former aide told Maddow, “It’s laughable that the CIA has never lied to Congress. “They lie to Congress on a routine basis.” Much the same can be said of General Powell who lied to the entire world “on a routine basis” during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
It must also be said there is precedence for the CIA’s alleged death squad activities during the Bush era. In Vietnam for example, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces jointly ran a secret assassination program that targeted Vietnamese dissidents. As author Douglas Valentine revealed in his definitive study, The Phoenix Program, Operation Phoenix “was a computer-driven program aimed at ‘neutralizing’, through assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture, the civilian infrastructure that supported the insurgency in South Vietnam.”
Those programs never died and have since morphed into above top secret “Special Access Programs” used with deadly effect in Central- and South America during the 1980s and across the Middle East today.
One Scandal Leads to Another
The latest scandal comes on the heels of revelations that the Bush administration’s massive secret surveillance programs targeting the American people went far beyond well-publicized warrantless wiretapping.
A new 38-page declassified report issued July 10 by inspectors general of the CIA, National Security Agency, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence, collectively called the acknowledged “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and cross-agency top secret “Other Intelligence Activities” the “President’s Surveillance Program.”
The IG’s report failed to disclose what these programs actually did, and probably still do today under the Obama administration. Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state’s war against the American people and perhaps, other regime opponents.
The CIA’s Office of Inspector General said that “the program was an additional resource to enhance the CIA’s understanding of terrorist networks and to help identify potential threats to the U.S. homeland,” and that the “PSP was one of many tools available to them, and that the tools were often used in combination.” However, “some officers told the CIA OIG that there was insufficient legal guidance on the use of PSP-derived information.” (pp. 33-34)
But with a thin reed provided by President Bush’s executive orders, presidential findings and 2001 congressional authorization for war against al-Qaeda, why would there be “insufficient legal guidance”? If “PSP-derived information” was used to target alleged al-Qaeda operatives there wouldn’t be need for additional legal guidance. If however, the CIA “was very deeply involved in domestic activities” as Seymour Hersh averred, and used NSA information for political dirty tricks it would be a violation of the CIA’s charter, one that comes with serious consequences including jail time.
Investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who broke the NSA spy story in The New York Times in 2005, reported July 11 that intelligence officials “‘had difficulty citing specific instances’ when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists.”
True enough as far as it goes, but perhaps these programs were highly efficacious in silencing those who were deemed politically suspect, even within the defense and security apparatus itself.
While major media in the United States insist that the Agency’s assassination program was meant to target al-Qaeda assets, one question inevitably raises its head: did the CIA and allied intelligence services murder political opponents? Were covert actions carried out by the CIA–at home or on the soil of America’s allies–”against people they thought to be enemies of the state,” as Hersh revealed?
More pointedly, was the British bioweapons expert Dr. David Kelly, who leaked information to the press that the British and American governments had falsified the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, murdered for exposing the fraudulent evidence for war or worse, planning an exposé on the West’s continued development of offensive biological weapons?
The David Kelly File
Dr. David Kelly was an unlikely dissident. In fact Kelly wasn’t a dissident at all, but a prominent figure in Britain’s bioweapons defense establishment.
The former head of the microbiology department at Porton Down, the UK’s secret biological and chemical warfare research facility, at the time of his 2003 death Kelly was a consummate insider, a trusted keeper of state secrets; dangerous and deadly secrets that could topple governments.
A civilian employee of Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), Dr. Kelly was a biological weapons expert and former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. His off-the-record conversations with journalist Andrew Gilligan about the British government’s fraudulent claim that Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” set off a firestorm that continues to smolder.
While David Kelly wasn’t a spy, he did enjoy unprecedented access to the world of secret intelligence. Indeed, according to author Gordon Thomas Kelly had helped orchestrate the defection of a top Russian microbiologist Vladimir Pasechnik (who turned up dead in 2001, allegedly from a stroke) and played a part in the FBI’s investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States by trying to identify the origin of the Ames strain used in the fatal mailings.
In 2008, the multiyear, multimillion dollar “Amerithrax” investigation was closed when the Bureau claimed that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the killer. Ivins, a top anthrax expert at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland committed suicide. According to the FBI version, the scientist killed himself just as the Bureau was about to arrest him for the crime.
Many were unconvinced that Ivins was the anthrax “lone gunman.” Indeed, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a target of the 2001 attacks, charged FBI Director Robert Mueller with staging a cover-up.
During 2008 hearings, Leahy angrily chided Mueller: “If he is the one who sent the letter, I do not believe in any way, shape or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress and the American people. I do not believe that at all. I believe there are others involved, either as accessories before or after the fact, I believe there are others who can be charged with murder.”
Richard Spertzel, Ivins’ former boss at Ft. Detrick told investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler, “He’s dead and they can close the case and he can’t defend himself. Nice and convenient isn’t it?”
Thomas claims that Kelly had worked with two American scientists, Benito Que and Don Wiley, who also turned up dead under highly suspicious circumstances.
It was originally claimed by authorities that Que was bludgeoned to death during an attempted carjacking in Miami. “Strangely enough,” The Toronto Globe & Mail reported in 2002, “his body showed no signs of a beating. Doctors then began to suspect a stroke.”
Wiley, according to the Canadian newspaper “was an expert on how the immune system responds to viral attacks such as the classic doomsday plagues of HIV, ebola and influenza.” After planning a trip to Graceland with his son police “found his rental car on a bridge outside Memphis, Tenn. His body was later found in the Mississippi River. Forensic experts said he may have had a dizzy spell and have fallen off the bridge.”
As it turned out, the pair were “engaged in DNA sequencing that could provide ‘a genetic marker based on genetic profiling’.” Thomas writes: “The research could play an important role in developing weaponized pathogens to hit selected groups of humans–identifying them by race. Two years ago, both men were found dead, in circumstances never fully explained.”
Coincidence, or something more sinister?
By summer 2003, it was obvious that Saddam Hussein’s regime did not possess WMDs and that the entire pretext for invading Iraq was based on a lie, concocted by the American regime, and in particular by Vice President Richard Cheney and the neoconservative mafia in control of America’s defense and security apparatus.
Tasked to the Defence Intelligence Staff, Kelly read a draft of the Joint Intelligence Committee’s (JIC) dossier on Iraq’s reputed WMDs. He was unhappy with many of the report’s conclusions, according to multiple press reports. He disputed the infamous claim that the Iraqi Army was capable of launching battlefield biological and chemical weapons within “45 minutes” of an order from Saddam. This dubious claim, one of many, was inserted into the report at the insistence of MI6 political masters acting through the JIC.
During a trip to Iraq in June 2003, Kelly inspected what were alleged by the Bush administration to be “mobile weapons laboratories,” a claim infamously made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations in February 2003. The Observer reported that a British scientist, who turned out to be David Kelly, told the newspaper: “They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were–facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.”
One of the key pieces of evidence to emerge was the JIC’s, and Kelly’s, involvement with Operation Rockingham, a secret program for weapons inspections in Iraq.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter told the Sunday Herald that Operation Rockingham was a “dirty tricks” unit “designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq.”
Describing the unit as “dangerous,” Ritter told investigative journalist Neil Mackay, “Rockingham was spinning reports and emphasizing reports that showed non-compliance (by Iraq with UN inspections) and quashing those which showed compliance. It was cherry-picking intelligence.”
A political firestorm ensued, which threatened the viability of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour government. Heads would have to roll; one of those heads as it turned out, would be David Kelly’s.
After an appearance before Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee on July 15, 2003, Kelly was visibly upset by his shoddy treatment by MPs. In an email to New York Times reporter Judith Miller, a serial-fabricator who had stitched-up evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, Kelly said there “were many dark actors playing games.”
During the whitewash known as The Hutton Inquiry, a British ambassador David Broucher reported a conversation he had with Kelly in Geneva. The ambassador asked Kelly what would happen if Iraq were invaded? The bioweapons expert replied, “I will probably be found dead in the woods.”
Two days after giving testimony before Parliament he was.
“A Wet Operation, a Wet Disposal”
In The Strange Death of David Kelly, Liberal-Democratic MP Norman Baker builds a strong case that the scientist was murdered. Despite Lord Hutton’s dubious findings that Kelly killed himself, several troubling facts intruded to upend the British government’s apple cart. To summarize:
The lack of fingerprints found on the knife allegedly used by the scientist to slit his wrists; the lack of blood found at the scene, despite a verdict that he had sliced open an artery; unexplained contusions on Kelly’s scalp; the position of the body discovered by searchers differed markedly from that alleged by detectives; bottled water, knife and wristwatch said to be found by detectives were not observed by the searchers who actually discovered the body; eight computers removed from Kelly’s home and office by MI6 agents; missing dental records; the level of painkillers found in Kelly’s stomach was “less than a third” of what is considered a fatal overdose by medical experts. On and on it goes…
One source told Baker that Dr. Kelly’s death was “a wet operation, a wet disposal,” a term used in intelligence circles to denote an assassination.
Six years after Kelly’s murder, a group of British doctors have announced that “they were mounting a legal challenge to overturn the finding of suicide,” The Mail on Sunday reports.
A 12-page opinion concludes: “The bleeding from Dr Kelly’s ulnar artery is highly unlikely to have been so voluminous and rapid that it was the cause of death. We advise the instructing solicitors to obtain the autopsy reports so that the concerns of a group of properly interested medical specialists can be answered.”
One motive which may have led to Kelly’s murder was that the scientist was writing a book “exposing highly damaging government secrets before his mysterious death,” The Sunday Express reported July 5.
According to published reports, Kelly intended to reveal that he had warned Prime Minister Tony Blair “there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion.” Despite warnings that the book would breach Britain’s draconian Officials Secrets Act, Kelly sought advice on how he might bring his findings into a publishable form.
These reports also suggest that Kelly threatened to “lift the lid” on a larger scandal, “his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.”
Investigative journalists Bob Coen and Eric Nadler in their book Dead Silence: Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail and a companion 90-minute documentary, Anthrax War, provide startling evidence that Kelly’s death is linked to a secret world of germ warfare research.
Indeed, according to Coen and Nadler, David Kelly’s secret dealings included a connection with Dr. Wouter Basson, the cardiologist who was the former head of the South African apartheid regime’s clandestine biological and chemical warfare program, Project Coast.
During Basson’s 1999 trial and subsequent acquittal, evidence presented by some 150 witnesses, including operatives linked to South African snatch-and-kill squads, tied Basson to chemical and biological research used in extrajudicial executions by the apartheid regime. It was further alleged that Project Coast had conducted active research into the fabrication of “ethnic weapons” that would specifically target South Africa’s black population.
In Anthrax War, Basson states that his findings were shared with foreign scientists, including those affiliated with weapons research in Britain and the United States. According to a 2001 piece in The New Yorker,
Basson had already put the fear into American intelligence during his T.R.C. [Truth and Reconciliation Committee] appearance, where he handed over fourteen pages of notes from a visit to the United States in 1981. American Air Force officers had been eager to develop joint “medical projects” with South Africa, he wrote. … Basson says that in 1995 his life was threatened on the street by a C.I.A. agent. The American Embassy in Pretoria admits privately that the United States government is “terribly concerned” that Basson may start talking about his sources of information and technology. The Embassy hopes that an impression of “unwitting coöperation” is all that emerges in the way of an American connection. (William Finnegan, “The Poison Keeper,” The New Yorker, January 15, 2001)
Coen and Nadler uncovered evidence that Kelly had discovered a “Porton Down-South Africa connection” linked to a global bioweapons black market. The investigative journalists told the Express, “We have proved there is a black market in anthrax. David Kelly was of particular interest to us because he was a world expert on anthrax and he was involved in some degree with assisting the secret germ warfare programme in apartheid South Africa.”
Andrew Mackinlay, a British MP blamed for humiliating Kelly “to the point of suicide” started “asking questions in the House of Lords” after the scientist’s death “about Kelly’s relationship with these bad actors in Pretoria, even making inquiries about South African links to Pasechnik’s Regma firm.”
Founded in 2000 by the deceased scientist, Regma Bio Technologies was headquartered on the Porton Down campus and had signed a contract with the U.S. Navy for anti-anthrax research.
What Mackinlay discovered about the entire operation was highly disturbing to say the least. His inquiry sparked “the convening of an extraordinary ‘handling strategy meeting’ involving thirteen officials from different government agencies. But any and all information about UK-South African germ work was withheld from the MP.”
Mackinlay told Coen and Nadler, “This is one of the most closely guarded secrets of the British government.”
The question is, did David Kelly threaten to reveal these “closely guarded secrets” in the book he was preparing, and was this a motive for certain “dark actors” to eliminate a person now considered “an enemy of the state”?
These programs are not Cold War relics. Biological weapons research continues today and remain one of America’s most deadly secrets. As the 2001 anthrax attacks which employed a weaponized version of the bacteria to sow terror, and subsequent FBI cover-up illustrate, such programs remain fully operational.
The evidence suggests that Dr. David Kelly, as Norman Baker avers “may have signed his own death warrant” by threatening to reveal this secret underworld menacing all humanity with unimaginable horrors.
That an out-of-control agency like the CIA has the means, motives and opportunity to silence critics and that “no geographical limitations” were placed “on the agency’s actions,” should give pause to a society that considers itself a democracy.
Media revelations so far have suggested that the CIA and Special Operations Forces were assembling teams to “put bullets in [the al Qaeda leaders'] heads” as The Wall Street Journal reported.
But perhaps the Obama administration’s trepidation in exploring this and other Bush-era programs through congressional hearings or the mechanism of a special prosecutor has much to do with fear of opening a proverbial can of worms.
One never knows where such an investigation might lead.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military “Civil Disturbance” Planning, distributed by AK Press.
© Copyright Tom Burghardt, Antifascist Calling…, 2009
Labels: ASSASSINATION, DICK CHENEY
Read more...
Democrats slam Cheney
AFP.
WASHINGTON. Democrats yesterday lashed out at former vice president Dick Cheney, accusing him of abusing his power, amid reports he ordered the CIA to withhold information from Congress about a secret counter terrorism programme.
Lawmakers vowed to hold hearings on the nature of the alleged top secret programme and efforts to keep members of the US legislature in the dark.
"This is a question of whether the former vice president of the United States denied certain sensitive information to the intelligence leaders in Congress. That is not acceptable," said a senior member of the US Senate, Democrat Kent Conrad, who called the alleged failure to notify Congress about the programme "a serious breach".
Speaking yesterday on CNN television, Conrad said CIA notification to key members of Congress about its secret programmes "is required by law. That’s a serious matter".
Meanwhile, Representative Anna Eshoo, a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, said she would call for the panel to hire an outside counsel to investigate the issue.
"We have to know who gave the order for this, who gave the order to conceal this, where did they draw the money for this," the Democrat told the Washington Post in reports published yesterday.
Eshoo said the committee may have to use its subpoena power to interview some officials who oversaw intelligence issues during the Bush administration.
Officials were vague yesterday about the precise nature of the highly secret programme.
But an intelligence official speaking to the Washington Post said the project remained in the planning stages and never crossed the agency’s threshold for reporting to the administration and congressional overseers.
Two former agency officials told the daily it involved a series of proposals designed to provide US intelligence agencies with a "needed capability" — without providing details as to what was meant.
The latest proposal was aired in the spring of 2008 but was not carried out, the officials said, although they told The Post that it did not involve interrogations of detainees or surveillance of US-based communications.
Both were highly controversial practices that have been roundly condemned in many quarters, as the United States prosecuted its "war on terror" during the George W. Bush administration.
The New York Times, which first broke the story about the role alleged to have been played by Cheney in keeping the CIA programme under wraps, reported that Central Intelligence Agency chief, Leon Panetta, ended the programme when he first learned of its existence on June 23.
Panetta is reported to have revealed Cheney’s role in a closed briefing one day later to the Senate and House intelligence committees.
"Because this programme never went fully operational and hadn’t been briefed as Panetta thought it should have been, his decision to kill it was neither difficult nor controversial," an intelligence official told the newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity. — AFP.
Labels: DICK CHENEY, NEOCONSERVATISM, WAR CRIMES
Read more...
Torture is cowardly, shameful, Fidel reminds Cheney
Written by Larry Moonze in Havana, Cuba
Thursday, June 04, 2009 11:26:38 PM
FORMER Cuban president Fidel Castro has reminded former US vice-president Dick Cheney that torture is a cowardly and shameful act that can never be justified.
Commenting on Cheney's defence of the George W Bush regime's administering of the so-called 'enhanced interrogation programme' on Guantanamo Bay terror-inmates to extract incriminating evidence, Fidel said regardless the pain caused by the terror actions against the US on September 11, 2001 torture could never be justified.
He observed that Cheney's attacks on US President Barack Obama, following the decision to make public torture memos, were really tough.
"But I don't want to voice any opinion on that subject. Nevertheless, it is my duty to remember that terrorism didn't just come out of the blue. It was the method thought up by the United States to combat the Cuban Revolution," Fidel stated in Cubadebate essay posted onWednesday evening. "General Dwight Eisenhower himself, the [then] president of the United States, was the first one to use terrorism against our homeland and this wasn't just a group of bloody actions against our people but dozens of events right from 1959 escalating later to hundreds of terrorist actions each year using flammable substances, high power explosives, precision infrared-ray sophisticated weapons, poisons such as cyanide, fungus, hermorrhage dengue, swine fever, anthrax, viruses and bacteria that attacked crops, plants, animals and human beings."
He recalled those actions were not just aimed at the Cuban economy and the people but also directed to eliminate the leaders of the revolution.
"Thousands of people were affected and the economy whose objective is to maintain food supplies, healthcare and the most basic peoples' services has been submitted to a relentless blockade that is being applied in extraterritorial terms," Fidel stated. "I do not invent these facts. They are on the record in the declassified US government documents. In our country despite the very serious dangers that have threatened us for decades, we have never tortured anyone to obtain information. Regardless of the pain caused by the actions against the people of the United States on September 11, 2001, actions that everyone strongly condemned, torture is a cowardly and shameful act that can never be justified."
In his national security address at the American Enterprise Institute last Saturday, Cheney said the September 11 attacks made necessary a shift of policy aimed at a clear strategic threat of the United States.
He said the al-qaeda was seeking nuclear technology adding that the US had an anthrax attack whose source was unknown.
Cheney recalled on the fateful day, he was in his office when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour.
He said that was Flight 77 that ended up hitting the Pentagon.
"With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now," said Cheney. "A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post in the White House basement."
But Fidel mocked Cheney on this score.
"Cheney's narrative makes it clear that nobody had foreseen that situation and he pays lip service to US pride in assuming that someone buried in a cave some 15 or 20,000 kilometres away could force the president of the United States to take up his command post in the White House basement," noted Fidel.
Cheney said since wars were not won on the defensive, the Bush administration moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries.
"In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of our country required collecting information that could be gained only through tough interrogations," said Cheney. "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme. The interrogations were used after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do."
Labels: DICK CHENEY, FIDEL CASTRO, TORTURE
Read more...
