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Cheney Considered Nuking Iraq
Important news Corporate McPravda ignores:
George Herbert Walker Bush Reveals Cheney Considered Using Nuclear Weapons Against Iraq
George Bush Sr book reveals a more dangerous Dick Cheney than anyone knew
Destiny and Power shows a VP with more authority than almost all his predecessors, making plain Bush Jr’s administration could have been even worse
Julian Borger, Diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Thursday 5 November 2015
EXCERPT...
This unilateralist inclination was clearly the younger Bush’s choice. It was how he intended from the outset to make his foreign policy distinctive from his father’s. And it was this characteristic that made for such a dangerously volatile and over-reaching US response when the 9/11 attacks came.
There is no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld were given more licence and authority than almost all their predecessors once the “war on terror” began. Cheney was certainly the most powerful vice-president of modern times, with a large and assertive staff, something that Bush Sr draws particular attention to.
Cheney and Rumsfeld used their enhanced power to poison the flow of information to the president’s desk about Iraq and its supposed weapons of mass destruction. The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers. But, as even as the ever-forgiving father admits in Meacham’s book, it was President Bush who allowed Cheney to grow his own empire.
SNIP...
Perhaps the most alarming revelation to emerge from the new Bush biography is the elder man’s recollection that while Cheney had been his defence secretary, he had commissioned a study on how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to eliminate a division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.
Apparently the answer was 17, though a more profound conclusion is that Cheney was a more dangerous figure than anyone knew. It adds weight to reporting by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that Cheney also contemplated the use of low-yield nuclear bunker-busters against Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities. The more we hear about the George W Bush administration, the clearer it becomes that the global damage it wrought could have been even worse.
SOURCE: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/05/george-bush-sr-book-reveals-a-more-dangerous-dick-cheney-than-anyone-knew
And people wonder why I'm angry that these traitors walk free.
100 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Mr. Other Priorities' main qualifications for Secretary of Defense seems to have been his voting record in support of War Inc. History unmentioned on campus, what was news left out of the newspapers and off the television screen:
Cheney's Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door
News: As Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor -- whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.
By Robert Bryce
Mother Jones
August 2, 2000
EXCERPT...
In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.
After Bill Clinton's election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant -- which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company's largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.
Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company's help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.
CONTINUED...
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/08/cheney.html
If SecDef Cheney wanted to see how many nukes it took to take out a Division of Republican Guards, it was with Poppy's OK. And you know they were going to make big bucks off the deal.
Ideas like "Justice," "Liberty" and "Democracy" may be missing from humanity's thoughts in the future if we don't wake the heck up now.
Surveillance and Scandal
Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
CONTINUED...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/
Time-Tested Weapons for U.S. Global Power
By Alfred McCoy
Tomgram, Jan. 19, 2014
For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA’s expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA’s surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington’s search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet’s last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America’s closest allies.
[font color="green"]Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA’s global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.[/font color]
A Cost-Savings Bonanza With a Downside
Once upon a time, such surveillance was both expensive and labor intensive. Today, however, unlike the U.S. Army’s shoe-leather surveillance during World War I or the FBI’s break-ins and phone bugs in the Cold War years, the NSA can monitor the entire world and its leaders with only 100-plus probes into the Internet’s fiber optic cables.
This new technology is both omniscient and omnipresent beyond anything those lacking top-secret clearance could have imagined before the Edward Snowden revelations began. Not only is it unimaginably pervasive, but NSA surveillance is also a particularly cost-effective strategy compared to just about any other form of global power projection. And better yet, it fulfills the greatest imperial dream of all: to be omniscient not just for a few islands, as in the Philippines a century ago, or a couple of countries, as in the Cold War era, but on a truly global scale.
CONTINUED...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175795/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy,_it's_about_blackmail,_not_national_security/
Why does this matter, when my house is about to get foreclosed because my job got offshored? It's tied in, when Wall Street and War Inc. are where the really Big Bucks go to get made. For We the People are the ones who ALWAYS get "the haircut."
Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."
CIA moonlights in corporate world
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.
SNIP...
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
CONTINUED...
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh
Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.
Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'
By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph
A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.
Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.
SNIP...
Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.
CONTINUED...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html
Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
The Knights of the Revolving Door
When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013
Paris.
A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.
For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.
For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC
Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.
Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.
Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..
Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.
One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/
Sorry to cut and paste, but the subject needs mention. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude in what are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.
Thank you for grokking the situation, erronis. It is the Hydra. The planet's people are going on a ride that's not of our choosing or making. It's way past time someone asked the scary driver to pull over before the bus flies off the cliff. And as we have to record it all for posterity if there is one's sake, we find that the old iPhone's memory chip is about full.
all see the true republican's color! 
While a lot, if not most, enjoy their big slice of the MIC pie, they have enough knowledge to know what is at stake.
SANE OFFICERS OPPOSE CHENEY
Commander Opposed "Surge," Called Petraeus a Suck-Up
by Joe Conason
Albion Monitor, Nov. 15, 2007
The Pentagon has launched a preventive strike against a target that military chiefs presumably regard as one of the most active current threats to U.S. and world security -- namely, the office of the vice president of the United States. Thrusting back hard against Vice President Dick Cheney's warmongering, the head of U.S. forces in the Mideast declared that an attack on Iran "is not in the offing," and more or less urged the vice president and his political allies to shut up.
In a front-page interview published on Nov. 12 by the Financial Times, Admiral William Fallon, who heads the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), spoke in diplomatic tones, as top military officers usually tend to do when they make strong political statements. Yet there was no mistaking the admiral's message. While Iran certainly poses a "challenge," he said, U.S. policymakers must engage Tehran to encourage changes in the regime's behavior. But the Iranians won't "come to their senses" while under threat of bombardment, invasion or worse.
"None of this is helped by the stories that just keep going around and around and around that any day now there will be another war, which is just not where we want to go," he said with a degree of exasperation. "It seems to me that we don't need more problems. It astounds me that so many pundits and others are spending so much time yakking about this topic [of war against Iran]."
Most of that bellicose speculation can be traced back to vice presidential circles, including the neo-conservative ideologues (or as the admiral put it, the "pundits"
, who popularized the notions that Iran is an imminent threat to the United States, Israel and the world and that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the next Hitler. Those themes certainly have a familiar ring; the last imminent threat was Iraq, and the last next Hitler was Saddam Hussein. Not content with the great success of their Mesopotamian misadventure, the same people have been urging action against Iran.
Admiral Fallon's remarks follow in the wake of recent statements by both President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney. Not long ago, the president blurted a strange warning that if other nations wish to avert "World War III," then they had best ensure that Iran never obtains "the knowledge" to construct nuclear weapons.
"We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon," growled the vice president, muttering about the "serious consequences" that the Iranians would suffer. Since nobody believes that Tehran will come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon before the Bush administration leaves office, the ominous comments were taken as signals that the White House is contemplating preemptive action. Those signals have emanated for years from the office of the vice president and those associated with him.
More important, the nation's military leaders seem determined to block any rush to war, no matter what the vice president may desire. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have reportedly expressed strong opposition to any military strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, and little enthusiasm for even limited action against Iranian forces. Their reluctance stems from tactical concerns about the impact of conflict with Iran on U.S. forces in Iraq, and strategic worries over waging wars in three Muslim nations in the region simultaneously.
For now, the influence of sane and sensible officers appears to be ascending. Only a few days before Admiral Fallon spoke out, an Associated Press dispatch noted that American officials are quietly reducing our force profile in the Gulf region -- for instance, by withdrawing an aircraft carrier that was sent earlier this year to emphasize the American regional security commitment.
CONTINUED...
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0711a/copyright/jc-cheneyopposed.html
Even more today. Thank goodness they're not all cut from the same cough cloth.
Even some people in my own family.
Now that I'm older and fully understand the ramifications of what they were saying, it makes me want to 
Missing Nukes: Treason of the Highest Order
By Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, October 29, 2007
According to a wide range of reports, several nuclear bombs were “lost” for 36 hours after taking off August 29/30, 2007 on a “cross-country journey” across the U.S., from U.S.A.F Base Minot in North Dakota to U.S.A.F. Base Barksdale in Louisiana. [1] Reportedly, in total there were six W80-1 nuclear warheads armed on AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs) that were “lost.” [2] The story was first reported by the Military Times, after military servicemen leaked the story.
It is also worth noting that on August 27, 2007, just days before the “lost” nukes incident, three B-52 Bombers were performing special missions under the direct authorization of General Moseley, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force. [3] The exercise was reported as being an aerial information and image gathering mission. The base at Minot is also home of the 91st Space Wings, a unit under the command of Air Force Space Command (AFSPC).
According to official reports, the U.S. Air Force pilots did not know that they were carrying weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Once in Louisiana, they also left the nuclear weapons unsecured on the runway for several hours. [4]
U.S. Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans, and Requirements, Major-General Richard Y. Newton III commented on the incident, saying there was an “unprecedented” series of procedural errors, which revealed “an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards” [5]
These statements are misleading. The lax security was not the result of procedural negligence within the U.S. Air Force, but rather the consequence of a deliberate tampering of these procedures.
If a soldier, marine, airman, or sailor were even to be issued a rifle and rifle magazine — weaponry of a far lesser significance, danger, and cost — there is a strict signing and accountability process that involves a chain of command and paperwork. This is part of the set of military checks and balances used by all the services within the U.S. Armed Forces.
Military servicemen qualified to speak on the subject will confirm that there is a stringent nuclear weapons handling procedure. There is a rigorous, almost inflexible, chain of command in regards to the handling of nuclear weapons and not just any soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is allowed to handle nuclear weapons. Only servicemen specialized in specific handling and loading procedures, are perm certified to handle, access and load nuclear warheads.
Every service personnel that moves or even touches these weapons must sign a tracking paper and has total accountability for their movement. There is good reason for the paperwork behind moving these weapons. The military officers that order the movement of nuclear weapons, including base commanders, must also fill out paper forms.
In other words, unauthorized removal of nuclear weapons would be virtually impossible to accomplish unless the chain of command were bypassed, involving, in this case, the deliberate tampering of the paperwork and tracking procedures.
The strategic bombers that carried the nuclear weapons also could not fly with their loaded nuclear weaponry without the authorization of senior military officials and the base commander. The go-ahead authorization of senior military officials must be transmitted to the servicemen that upload the nuclear weapons. Without this authorization no flights can take place.
In the case of the missing nukes, orders were given and flight permission was granted. Once again, any competent and eligible U.S. Air Force member can certify that this is the standard procedure.
There are two important questions to be answered in relation to the “lost” nukes incident:
[font color="green"]1. Who gave the order to arm the W80-1 thermonuclear warheads on the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMs)? At what level in the military hierarchy did this order originate? How was the order transmitted down the command chain?
2. If this was not a procedural error, what was the underlying military-political objective sought by those who gave the orders?[/font color]
CONTINUED...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/missing-nukes-treason-of-the-highest-order/7158
Gee whiz. That story dropped off the media radar faster than the names ahead of Cheney on the MEDICARE heart transplant waiting list.
Seems like taking other peoples' property is a most profitable industry. Take Barrick Gold, one of Poppy Bush's favorite charities, and what they did to The Guardian and Greg Palast for pointing it out.
Their crime? Telling the truth.
Poppy Strikes Gold
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast
EXCERPT...
And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.
The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.
They could well afford it. [font color="green"]In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka![/font color]
Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.
Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.(1) There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company's International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.
CONTINUED...
http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/
Wow. So his flock of supporters in the media and elsewhere wanted it known: George Herbert Walker Bush did do something nice when he was President. It just happened to be that it was for a rich, powerful corporation.
The story continues, in which Mr. Palast details how said gold mining company employed fascist tactics to take over the mine, part of which involved bulldozing the miners homes and mines, some with the miners still inside. Let that, uh, sink in. For his trouble in reporting the story, Barrick threatened to sue.
The Truth Buried Alive
—By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)
Source: UTNE Reader
April 2003 Issue
EXCERPT...
Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, [font color="red"]I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can’t otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.(1)[/font color]
Panicked, the Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)
The Goldfingers didn’t stop there. [font color="green"]Barrick’s lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over Web publications of my story in America, because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights.[/font color] Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. Web site, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the Internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.
And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.
I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation’s president asking for an investigation–instead, Lissu’s law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu’s sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims’ families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the “Ralph Nader of Canada”, head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference–and in August tipped the story to the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national paper.
CONTINUED...
http://www.mapcruzin.com/palast-2.htm
Greg Palast told the truth, including the bits about the buried alive gold miners, as it happens. So, the Big Corporation sued and sued and sued. With their deep pockets, they can buy justice, judges, prime ministers, presidents and whoever and whatever else they need to turn a buck.
Just rush in as a pre-emptive neocon and use them yourself! For every elite Republican Guard taken out there would have been thousands of civilian casualties, but such is the case with "collateral damage".
but who was appointed to be president by the (small cap u.s. corrupt supreme court).
Oh, I get it, when you get appointed, anyone can be president and you can make unilateral decisions to explode a nuclear device without consulting Congress.
Gee, just like now, I am still waiting for the authorization vote in the House on Syria, that hasn't been taken in who knows when, going on two years now and counting, I think, because they don't want to be on the "record" because there spineless hypocrites.
Hey, Ayn Rand Ryan are you going to bring this vote up------------------- or are you going to cut more social programs to pay for something that hasn't been voted on, your another piece of work
And it has cost the taxpayers how much now, around 20+ million a day in Syria, just on aircraft and cruise missile and drones, not including ships, and personnel.
And then finally this war criminal walks around going fishing and visiting and having a nice criminal chats spewing his psychopathic wisdow on the set(s) of Face the Nation to sell a book, Meet the Press to continue to sell a book, and whatever other so called MSM right wing broadcast with his condescending voice of hypocrisy
Hey war pig----------------do you know this name;
Marine 1st Lt. Therrell Shane Childers
Hey, war pig do you know this name:
Army Specialist David Hickman
This were the two men, who were the first American and the last American man to die based on your lie and your criminal team lie
Go to hell
Honk----------------for a political revolution Bernie 2016
