December 30, 2005

2006: The Year of Revelation?

2005 was a year of indictments – now, let the trials begin!

by Justin Raimondo

In last year's New Year's column, I wrote:

"If 2003 was the year of the liar, and 2004 the year of the war criminal, then let 2005 be the year of justice. That is not a prediction, but only a hope."

It is a hope that, if not yet fulfilled, is at least now well within sight: the indictment [.pdf] of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, signals a sea change in the political atmosphere in this country, one that has put the War Party on the defensive, albeit not yet thrown them into total retreat.

The gang that lied us into war is getting its comeuppance, and all I can say to that is: how sweet it is! Day after day, in the prelude to war with Iraq, they invented lies of exponentially increasing brazenness. They told us Saddam was an agent of al-Qaeda. They were certain that "weapons of mass destruction" were buried beneath Saddam's many palaces, or hidden in an underground labyrinth beneath ancient Babylon. Saddam, they averred, had been behind the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993 – and ranted that he was behind the Oklahoma City federal building bombing, too. They told us he had nukes, or was within a few months of acquiring them, and was readying a first strike against America. Deploying the key argument of the War Party, Condoleezza Rice infamously warned:

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Today, the smoking gun we're looking for is one connecting this administration to any number of crimes committed by public officials as they dragged us down the road to war. And the problem of uncertainty, which the Bush administration sought to solve by asking us to place our collective fate in their hands, is now hanging over the heads of Washington officialdom. It isn't only Scooter Libby: his case is merely the dorsal fin of the whale, most of which is still lurking just beneath the surface.

How the tables have turned – and all in a single year! A fleeting instant in the mind of History, the mere blink of an eye, can turn the fate of nations – as long as it takes to file an indictment against one of the most powerful men in Washington.

"Bulldog" Fitzgerald has his jaws firmly clamped on a large and very tasty bone, and shows no signs of letting go. With Scooter already nailed, he is looking for more morsels torn from the flesh of Team Bush, starting with Karl Rove, the Republican Rasputin, whose counsels have – until very recently – kept the opposition in a state of panicky, cowardly retreat. Yet he has met, in Mr. Fitzgerald, an opponent who, far from running, has been the aggressor, relentlessly pursuing his target like a veritable Nemesis.

Such are the wages of hubris, a cardinal sin to the ancient Greeks, but the favored vice of the New Rome. What the last year has shown is that Washington, D.C., the epicenter of the new Imperial decadence, is bursting at the seams with corruption, like a corpse wriggling with maggots. In 2006, the whole unsightly spectacle will be exposed to the full light of day.

There are so many investigations currently roiling the political waters that keeping track of them is becoming an increasingly difficult task. Let's see, there's the Abramoff scandal, the Lincoln Group brouhaha, the Randy Cunningham affair, the FISA flap, Chalabi-gate, the Niger uranium investigation, "Phase II" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe of prewar intelligence, and, last but not least, the AIPAC espionage case, in which two high-ranking AIPAC lobbyists and a key Pentagon analyst are charged [.pdf] with passing vital U.S. secrets to top Israeli embassy officials.

Okay, so I've left some real stinkers out, but before you write reminding me that I haven't mentioned the torture scandal, the renditions, the secret U.S.-run gulags in Eastern Europe, and any number of other outrages now coming to light – relax. Sure, I remember all that stuff, but more important than merely listing these matters is looking at what they portend.

Once again, I make no predictions, because we must live with uncertainty: it is part – perhaps the essence – of the human condition. Unlike the U.S. government, I'm not asking my readers to take my word for anything in the spirit of blind faith or "patriotic" loyalty to some cause. Certainly I have no illusions about the ability of mortal beings to delude themselves into believing anything: in the end, we have only our hopes and our fears. Last year, I feared for the worst and hoped for the best. In both cases, I was not disappointed.

I have to say that, even in my most pessimistic moments, when my opinion of this administration was at its lowest, and my suspicion of their motives and methods was at its highest, not even then did I ever imagine the sheer scale of the corruption that had eaten away at the very vitals of our republic. Not even Imperial Rome, at its most decadent and depraved, exhibited the kind of voracious greed – for money, for power, for glory – that has infected our ruling elite like some airborne spore. The resulting plague of scandal descending on official Washington has the whole place on a permanent death-watch: who has fallen, and who is likely to fall next? The world capital of a burgeoning Empire is abuzz with rumors of a new wave of indictments.

We spent the greater part of 2005 anticipating the consequences of the Fitzgerald investigation, hoping that justice would finally be done. In the final months, it began to look very much like the War Party is in for more than a little payback – and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving bunch. If 2003 was the year of the liar, 2004 the year of the war criminal, and 2005 the year of justice no longer deferred, then 2006 holds out the promise of being the year of revelation, when the dark truth about how and why we were lied into war finally comes out in full view of the American public.

The thing about indictments is their succinctness: they are, ideally, models of briskly laconic and fact-oriented description, just-the-facts-please and no frills, only pure reportage. After the indictments, however, come the trials – and that's when we get to see the bare-bones indictments fleshed out, as the crimes of our rulers are painfully and publicly reconstructed in front of a jury – and judged in the court of public opinion.

The War Party is furiously trying to spin all this as a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the "liberal" media to undermine a war effort that is really going splendidly – and they are stepping on the accelerator in their efforts to gin up yet another war in the Middle East, escalating the rhetoric aimed at Iran and openly threatening Syria with "regime change."

There are indications, too, that the neocons are simply becoming unhinged. Those "weapons of mass destruction" that somehow went missing in Iraq, are, you see, carefully hidden away in Damascus and/or Tehran. Or at least that's the latest War Party line in the Bizarro World fantasy-land of the neoconservatives. Melanie Morgan, a San Francisco radio host and one of the chief movers behind Move America Forward, which is running TV ads in favor of the war, is "baffled that the White House no longer makes the case that Mr. Hussein had WMDs," reports the Wall Street Journal.

Ms. Morgan has drunk so much of the neocon Kool-Aid that she can no longer distinguish ideological hallucinations from reality. Indeed, the partisans of this administration eschew vulgar empiricism and openly disdain the concept of objective reality. Reality? Who gives a sh*t? As one administration official put it:

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors – and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

This year, "history's actors" are going to be put on trial – while prosecutors and juries study what they have done. As the curtain rises on a new year, the whole history of their crimes stands to be revealed. There is a hush in the theater in the moment before the first act of this long-anticipated drama. If, by the end of it, the principals still believe they can create their own reality, they will likely get the chance to prove their point in prison – where the experimental conditions for a flight into complete fantasy are optimal.

"We're an empire now" – but is the transition complete? Methinks that anonymous neocon spoke too soon, mistaking a wish for a fact – a typical failing of the species, by the way. There is yet time to prevent the slide into imperial decadence. We have not yet slid all the way down the slippery slope that separates a "liberator" from a conqueror. The Libby indictment and all the other investigations, probes, and official inquiries into government misconduct stemming from the Iraq war are part of a general counter-attack by the forces of republicanism (small-r) against the partisans of empire. The American body politic, in its fundamentals, is still quite healthy: prosecutor Fitzgerald might be likened to a T-cell, defending against the onslaught of a microbial invasion. His tenacious example is mobilizing the other T-cells – in the Justice Department, in the media, in and around government and official Washington – in a last-ditch attempt to save our old Republic from the incursions of alien intruders, a small but well-placed cabal of warmongers and foreign agents. The AIDS-like infection of the neoconservative "persuasion," which had rendered the body politic's defenses inoperative, is being challenged by a promising but still experimental medicine, which exhibits the potential to not only wipe out these viral invaders, but also holds out the promise of a vaccine. After a year of revelation, in which the dirty secrets of the War Party are flushed out into the open, the disgust of the American people is likely to inoculate them against the fever of war hysteria for a long time to come.

I like reading Justin Raimondo, but it really hard to read a long piece in
[center]
HUGE PRINT. [/center]

I didn't realize how BIG that was going to be. Sorry.

Nothing more radical than checking for radiation when you know some people want to set off a dirty bomb AT THE VERY LEAST.

The real thing at the very most.

'Kay.

We sure don't want that mushroom cloud. Be afraid. Very afraid. It keeps you in a perpetual state of paralysis and fear.

I love this part of the Justin post.



Such are the wages of hubris, a cardinal sin to the ancient Greeks, but the favored vice of the New Rome. What the last year has shown is that Washington, D.C., the epicenter of the new Imperial decadence, is bursting at the seams with corruption, like a corpse wriggling with maggots. In 2006, the whole unsightly spectacle will be exposed to the full light of day.



eeeewwwww.

That's funny coming from the whiners and conspiracy theorists who are scared somebody might listen in on a phone call from Iraq, but aren't afraid of dirty bombs.

Then laugh.

Laughing is easy. The problem is stopping.

die laughing

Why be afraid of either, that's what this goverment wants, i am laughing at you too going at it.

Yeah.... just acquiesce to the terrorists.

we did by attacking Iraq

terrorism is UP UP UP

You may want to reread that.

Oda appears to have been agreeing with the idea of building a wall along the U.S.A.-Mexico border.

world's biggest, baddest army attacks unarmed oilrich country:

guess what?

orphans grow up to be terrorists.

YOU DID TOO?

Et tu, Brute?

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek.

It's really nice to have someone come along and interpret posts for us. Are you interested in a part time job?

It appears the critic don't take kindly to being critiqued.

Apparently you did as you totally missed what oda was saying.

Not to mention that you consider a cut in profit to be the same as a loss. You make me laugh with your arrogant ignorance, though. Do carry on.

The pay's not much, but the perks are nothing at all.

When do I get my bonus?

I suppose you'll want another one next year.

I'm not made out of smileys ya know.

that's not much of an answer


(slow pitch)

OK, monty.

Someone else not quite as twisted wouldn't understand that.

"I'm not made of airports!" The Rodney Dangerfield episode.

Your not much of a helper.

no, no, no, no.
















I have to laugh at my own jokes. That's not a good sign.

Back to ethics. This could be very funny if Abramoff cooperates.


The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail
Nonprofit Group Linked to Lawmaker Was Funded Mostly by Clients of Lobbyist

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005; Page A01

The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.

During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.



Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).

Russians? oh my...

The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

A spokesman for DeLay, who is fighting in a Texas state court unrelated charges of illegal fundraising, denied that the contributions influenced the former House majority leader's political activities. The Russian energy executives who worked with Abramoff denied yesterday knowing anything about the million-dollar London transaction described in tax documents.

Whatever the real motive for the contribution of $1 million -- a sum not prohibited by law but extraordinary for a small, nonprofit group -- the steady stream of corporate payments detailed on the donor list makes it clear that Abramoff's long-standing alliance with DeLay was sealed by a much more extensive web of financial ties than previously known.

Records and interviews also illuminate the mixture of influence and illusion that surrounded the U.S. Family Network. Despite the group's avowed purpose, records show it did little to promote conservative ideas through grass-roots advocacy. The money it raised came from businesses with no demonstrated interest in the conservative "moral fitness" agenda that was the group's professed aim.

In addition to the million-dollar payment involving the London law firm, for example, half a million dollars was donated to the U.S. Family Network by the owners of textile companies in the Mariana Islands in the Pacific, according to the tax records. The textile owners -- with Abramoff's help -- solicited and received DeLay's public commitment to block legislation that would boost their labor costs, according to Abramoff associates, one of the owners and a DeLay speech in 1997.

A quarter of a million dollars was donated over two years by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, Abramoff's largest lobbying client, which counted DeLay as an ally in fighting legislation allowing the taxation of its gambling revenue.

The records, other documents and interviews call into question the very purpose of the U.S. Family Network, which functioned mostly by collecting funds from domestic and foreign businesses whose interests coincided with DeLay's activities while he was serving as House majority whip from 1995 to 2002, and as majority leader from 2002 until the end of September.



After the group was formed in 1996, its director told the Internal Revenue Service that its goal was to advocate policies favorable for "economic growth and prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and the general well-being of the United States." DeLay, in a 1999 fundraising letter, called the group "a powerful nationwide organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizen control" by mobilizing grass-roots citizen support.

But the records show that the tiny U.S. Family Network, which never had more than one full-time staff member, spent comparatively little money on public advocacy or education projects. Although established as a nonprofit organization, it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to Buckham and his lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group.

There is no evidence DeLay received a direct financial benefit, but Buckham's firm employed DeLay's wife, Christine, and paid her a salary of at least $3,200 each month for three of the years the group existed. Richard Cullen, DeLay's attorney, has said that the pay was compensation for lists Christine DeLay supplied to Buckham of lawmakers' favorite charities, and that it was appropriate under House rules and election law.


well of course


Some of the U.S. Family Network's revenue was used to pay for radio ads attacking vulnerable Democratic lawmakers in 1999; other funds were used to finance the cash purchase of a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's congressional office. DeLay's associates at the time called it "the Safe House."

DeLay made his own fundraising telephone pitches from the townhouse's second-floor master suite every few weeks, according to two former associates. Other rooms in the townhouse were used by Alexander Strategy Group, Buckham's newly formed lobbying firm, and Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), DeLay's leadership committee.

They paid modest rent to the U.S. Family Network, which occupied a single small room in the back.

'Red Flags' on Tax Returns

Nine months before the June 25, 1998, payment of $1 million by the London law firm James & Sarch Co., as recorded in the tax forms, Buckham and DeLay were the dinner guests in Moscow of Marina Nevskaya and Alexander Koulakovsky of the oil firm Naftasib, which in promotional literature counted as its principal clients the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior.

Buckham, a graduate of the University of Tennessee, had worked for DeLay since 1995, after serving in other congressional offices and then as executive director of the Republican Study Committee, a group of fiscally conservative House members.

Their other dining companions were Abramoff and Washington lawyer Julius "Jay" Kaplan, whose lobbying firms collected $440,000 in 1997 and 1998 from an obscure Bahamian firm that helped organize and indirectly pay for the DeLay trip, in conjunction with the Russians. In disclosure forms, the stated purpose of the lobbying was to promote the policies of the Russian government.

Kaplan and British lawyer David Sarch had worked together previously. (Sarch died a month before the $1 million was paid.) Buckham's trip with DeLay was his second to Moscow that year for meetings with Nevskaya and Koulakovsky; on the earlier one, the DeLay aide attracted media attention by returning through Paris aboard the Concorde, a $5,500 flight.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...480.html?sub=AR

As Mad Magazine has proven, humor can be multiple choice.

No legal bar exists to a $1 million donation by a foreign entity to a group such as the U.S. Family Network, according to Marcus Owens, a Washington lawyer who directed the IRS's office of tax-exempt organizations from 1990 to 2000 and who reviewed, at The Post's request, the tax returns filed by the U.S. Family Network.

But "a million dollars is a staggering amount of money to come from a foreign source" because such a donor would not be entitled to claim the tax deduction allowed for U.S. citizens, Owens said. "Giving large donations to an organization whose purposes are as ambiguous as these . . . is extraordinary. I haven't seen that before. It suggests something else is going on.

"There are any number of red flags on these returns."

I'll take door #3 Monty.

Simpsons. The billionaire Monty Burns tries to get his goofball son (Rodney Dangerfield) into a high class college. He asks what kind of donation it would take and they told him that a large donation is usually necessary to admit a questionable student, such as a new building addition to the University. In Larry's case it would have to be an international airport.

"What!! Are you mad! I'm not made of airports ya know!"

Yesterday the judge gave Abramoff until Tues. to take the deal or go to trial in FL at the end of the week.

I'll bet he takes the deal.

I hope he blows the lid off of it all.

Me too.

Not likely that dude has some of the most powerful people America by the gonads, he never expected to be prosecuted because of that and if the boys don't come to his aid, and soon, he will deep-six their corrupt arses.

Or they might kill him...

Yep. Assassinations R us.

Foster him? Good idea.

With the DeLay, Abramoff, Fitzgerald, Frist, secret wiretapping, on and on, we can't forget the Pentagon Spy case.



Pentagon Employee Pleads Guilty to Spying for Israel

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ALEXANDRIA, Virginia


A Pentagon employee admitted in court here Oct. 5 that he had provided classified defense information to an Israeli diplomat and two employees of a pro-Israel lobby group.

Lawrence Franklin, 58, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and terrorism issues, worked at the time of the events for the No. 3 official at the Pentagon, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

Asked how he pleaded on three charges against him, Franklin told U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis: “Guilty, your honor.”



Franklin was charged in June with having transmitted secret information about an unidentified Middle Eastern country to an Israeli diplomat and two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 2003 and 2004, and with unlawful retention of classified materials.

Both AIPAC employees also were charged in August in the “conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it.”

Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s former political director, and Keith Weissman, formerly an Iran expert at the organization, are suspected of having passed along information furnished by Franklin to Israel.

Franklin indicated Oct. 5 that he knew the Israeli diplomat was a political officer at the Israeli embassy.

Wearing a gray suit and red tie, the gray-haired expert said he was frustrated with U.S. Mideast policy.

He said that he hoped that the AIPAC employees could influence that policy through their contacts at the National Security Council. He admitted that he knew that those employees, whom he contacted between 1999 and 2004, were not authorized to receive the information.

The judge set a sentencing hearing for Jan. 20. Franklin could spend as much as 10 years in prison, according to justice officials.

Rosen and Weissman pleaded not guilty. Their trial begins on Jan. 3. AIPAC fired them both in April.

After the affair became public, Israel denied any involvement.

In 1987, U.S. citizen Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison for spying for Israel. The affair sparked a crisis between the United States and Israel. Israel promised not to spy on the United States in the future.



http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=1157665&C=mideast

I wonder if they'll cut a deal?

Pardons gonna be flying like snowflakes.

all for the good of the Republican party. Woo hoo.

If the BUSH CIA and BUSH LED US MILITARY were not allowing the attack on 911, just what were they doing?

Liberalism is a mental disease!

you just can't be that stupid