Reply #44: Innocent people suffered. It's the Bush system [View All]

[seemslikeadream]

While chairing the BCCI subcommittee, and before he married Teresa Heinz, Kerry would ofter sit at the bar at Capitol Hill's Tex-Mex Red River Grill offering anyone who would listen to stories (even a second and third time) about what his investigation had discovered about the illegal activities of the Reagan Bush administration: the arms for drugs operations in Central America that involved Noriega; the later convicted Reagan officials John Poindexter, Richard Secord, Elliott Abrams, and Oliver North; Iranian con-man and neo-con hero Manucher Ghorbanifar; Saudi tycoon Adnan Khashoggi, who Perle recently attempted to lure into his Trireme Partners Middle East investment scheme; Gaith Pharoan, who was involved with Saudi billionaire banker Khalid Bin Mahfouz in business deals with George W. Bush's Harker Engery and Bin Laden family investments in Texas; how Hill & Knowlton, the firm that concocted the phony story about Iraqi troops tossing babies from incubators during their invasion of Kuwait, was shilling for BCCI and providing regulators with false information about the bank's business relationships; BCCI's involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program; it's bankrolling of convicted arms dealer Sarkis Sarkenalian's illegal weapons smuggling to Iraq in the 1980s; hawalah transfers that allowed Afghan mujaheddin to evade international financial surveillance mechanisms (including the pumping of millions of dollars of Saudi and Omani money into Usama bin Laden's coffers in Afghanistan and Pakistan); and the 1980 "October Surprise" involving negotiations between Reagan campaign chief William Casey to delay the release of US hostages until after the US election, thus sinking the prospects of President Carter. When BCCi's illegal activities on behalf of the Bush family and their CIA friends around the world became the subject of criminal probes and media investigations in the mid-1980s, the Bushes, as they normally do, cut and run. BCCI collapsed and Enron took its place.

http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen02192004.html