It's looking more and more like the elites had good reason to murder Matt Simmons
EXCERPT:
Environmental impact
Outspoken Houston energy guru Matt Simmons, founder and former chairman and CEO of Simmons & Co. International, says the effects on fracking as a result of that move would be profound.
“It’s going to be over very quick,” he suggests. “I think the EPA is going to rule very quickly that ‘frac’ water is carcinogenic. They have to put it back under the (Safe Drinking Water Act). Everyone in the industry says when that happens, it’s over.”
Read more: Fracas erupts over ‘fracking’ practices - Houston Business Journal
youtube Matt Simmons (Bloomberg): Peak Oil Now, Oil Perhaps to $300
Matthew Simmons die Sunday August
EXCERPT:
Matthew Simmons was the founder of Rockland's Ocean Energy Institute, a nonprofit think tank and venture capital fund for expanding offshore energy research and development, which was founded in 2007.
Matthew Simmons founded Simmons & Co. International, based in Houston, one of the leading energy investment banks in the world that caters to energy companies, in 1974.
Matthew Simmons was the former energy adviser to President George Bush. He was also the author of the 2005 book "Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy."
Ocean Energy
EXCERPT:
July 20, 2010Grand Opening -- Ocean Energy Institute Offices
Rockland, Maine (July 20) -- The Ocean Energy Institute will be hosting a VIP celebration for the grand opening of its new office headquarters on Tuesday, July 20. The event is by invitation only and will then be followed by a public open house later at their offices in Rockland.
Among the dignitaries scheduled to speak are Maine Governor John E. Baldacci and Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives Hannah Pingree, along with representatives from the offices of US. Senators Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, as well as US Representatives Chellie Pingree (Maine 1st District) and Michael Michaud (Maine 2nd District). Also expected to attend are state and municipal officials including Rockland Mayor Deborah E. McNeil.
The Ocean Energy Institute, founded in 2007 by Matt Simmons, is a not-for-profit think-tank that is underwriting research into potential areas of ocean energy generation and utilization. OEI will cover the broad range of ocean energy technologies and pursue research in generation, usage, storage, transmission, policy, environmental studies, economics, and public education.
Vail Valley Institute
EXCERPT:
KEYNOTE
Matt Simmons
An Oil Man Reconsiders the Future of Black Gold
Simmons is Chairman, CEO and Founder of Simmons & Company International, a specialized energy investment banking firm. Since 1974, the firm has guided its broad client base to complete nearly $140 billion in transactions, including 550 merger and acquisitions worth over $97 billion. Today the firm has approximately 135 employees with offices in Houston, Texas and Aberdeen, Scotland, and enjoys a leading role as one of the largest energy investment banking groups in the world.
This gutsy and knowledgeable expert took the industry by storm with the 2005 publication of his rigorously researched book, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Wiley, 2005). Twilight tells the provocative and largely unknown story of an oil industry that may soon approach a serious, irreversible decline, suggests that it may come far sooner than we think. Simmons’ revelations were particularly compelling given his past experience as an energy advisor to George W. Bush and to Dick Cheney’s controversial energy taskforce. His message is not to be missed.
Mr. Simmons is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Advisory Council of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He also serves on the board of directors of the Associates of Harvard Business School. He is also a founding organizer of the Ocean Energy Institute in Rockland, Maine, which studies the potential to harness tidal energy and Gulf Stream currents.
Mr. Simmons was raised in Kaysville, Utah. He graduated cum laude from the University of Utah and received an M.B.A. with distinction from Harvard Business School. He served on the faculty of Harvard Business School as a research associate for two years and was a doctoral candidate. He is married and has five daughters.
Twilight Desert Coming Saudi Economy
EXCERPT:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Investment banker Simmons offers a detailed description of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the U.S and our long-standing dependence upon Saudi oil. With a field-by-field assessment of its key oilfields, he highlights many discrepancies between Saudi Arabia's actual production potential and its seemingly extravagant resource claims. Parts 1 and 2 of the book offer background and context for understanding the technical discussion of Saudi oil fields and the world's energy supplies. Parts 3 and 4 contain analysis of Saudi Arabia's oil and gas industry based on the technical papers published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Simmons suggests that when Saudi Arabia and other Middle East producers can no longer meet the world's enormous demand, world leaders and energy specialists must be prepared for the consequences of increased scarcity and higher costs of oil that support our modern society. Without authentication of the Saudi's production sustainability claims, the author recommends review of this critical situation by an international forum. A thought-provoking book. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“…a must read for anyone concerned with our culture of ‘conspicuous consumption’” (Lobster, Winter 2005/06)
“…a realistic look at the future of Saudi Arabian oil supplies” (Wexus, 7th December 2005)
"The Texas energy specialist, Matthew Simmons, has suggested that the world derives false comfort from the Saudi Arabian assurances of willingness to increase production to meet consumer shortfalls." (Financial Times, 16th September 2005)
"Oil industry expert Matthew Simmons thinks...claims and forecasts are exaggerations and unrepresentative...the book goes into good detail..." (Lloyds List, 26th August 2005)
"...an analyst who is warning that the end of booming oil production is nigh, or already upon us..." (The Business, 4th September 2005)
"This book by Matthew Simmons comes at a timely moment...[and is] therefore essential reading for industry, government, the investment community and academia. It has a message for everyone." (Times Higher Education Supplement, 9th September 2005)
"...there are many valuable insights in Simmons' book. His basic points are right on target." (BusinessWeek, August 1, 2005)
"...This is a ground-breaking book by an analyst of unimpeachable authority..." (New Statesman, 25 July 2005)
In 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert discovered a grand illusion in the American oil industry. For tax purposes, he noted, American oil companies regularly delayed the declaration of new oil reserves by years and even decades. The result was a false impression that new oil was being found all the time. In fact, discoveries had peaked in 1936.
Based on this observation, Mr. Hubbert predicted that American oil production would peak in 1969. He was wrong by one year. We briefly produced 10 million barrels a day in 1970 but have never hit that level since. Even with the addition of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, American production has slipped to eight million barrels a day -- which is why we import 60% of our oil.
Across the oil industry, the uneasy feeling is growing that world production may be approaching its own "Hubbert's Peak." The last major field yielding more than a million barrels a day was found in Mexico in 1976. New discoveries peaked in 1960, and production outside the Middle East reached its high point in 1997. Meanwhile world demand continues to accelerate by 3% a year. Indonesia, once a major exporter, now imports its oil.
The Saudis claim to have huge oil reserves. Do they really?
Before an uneasy feeling grows into full-blown pessimism, however, one must consider the supposedly vast oil resources lying beneath Saudi Arabia. The Saudis possess 25% of the world's proven reserves. They routinely proclaim that, for at least the next 50 years, they could easily double their current output of 10 million barrels a day.
But is this true? Matthew R. Simmons, a Texas investment banker with a Harvard Business School degree and 20 years' experience in oil, has his doubts. In "Twilight in the Desert" (John Wiley & Sons, 422 pages, $24.95), Mr. Simmons argues that the Saudis may be deceiving the world and themselves. If only half of his claims prove to be true, we could be in for some nasty surprises.
First, Mr. Simmons notes, all Saudi claims exist behind a veil of secrecy. In 1982, the Saudi government took complete control of Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Co.) after four decades of co-ownership with a consortium of major oil companies. Since then Aramco has never released field-by-field figures for its oil production. In fact, no OPEC member is very forthcoming. The cartel sets production quotas according to a country's reserves, so each member has reason to exaggerate. Meanwhile, OPEC nations are constantly cheating one another by overproducing, so none wants to publish official statistics.
As a result, the world's most reliable source for OPEC production is a little company called Petrologistics, located over a grocery store in Geneva. Conrad Gerber, the principal, claims to have spies in every OPEC port. For all we know, Mr. Gerber is making up his numbers, but everyone -- including the Paris-based International Energy Agency -- takes him seriously, since OPEC produces nothing better.
The Saudis, for their part, obviously enjoy their role as producer of last resort and feel content to let everyone think that they have things under control. Yet as Mr. Simmons observes: "History has frequently shown that once secrecy envelops the culture of either a company or a country, those most surprised when the truth comes out are often the insiders who created the secrets in the first place."
Mr. Simmons became suspicious of Saudi claims after taking a guided tour of Aramco facilities in 2003. To penetrate the veil, he turned to the electronic library of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, which regularly publishes technical papers by field geologists. After downloading and studying more than 200 reports by Aramco personnel, Mr. Simmons came up with his own portrait of Saudi Arabia's oil resources. It is not a pretty picture.
Almost 90% of Saudi production comes from six giant fields, all of them discovered before 1967. The "king" of this grouping -- the 2000-square-mile Ghawar field near the Persian Gulf -- is the largest oil field in the world. But if Saudi geology follows the pattern found elsewhere, it is unlikely that any new fields lie nearby. Indeed, Aramco has prospected extensively outside the Ghawar region but found nothing of significance. In particular, the Arab D stratum -- the source rock of the Ghawar field -- has long since eroded in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The six major fields, having all produced at or near capacity for almost 40 years, are showing signs of age. All require extensive water injection to maintain their current flow.
Based on these observations, Mr. Simmons doubts that Aramco can increase its output to anywhere near the level it claims. In fact, he believes that Saudi production may have already peaked. Is he right?
Mr. Simmons's critics say that, by relying on technical papers, he has biased his survey, since geologists like to concentrate on problem wells the way that doctors focus on sick patients. Still, the experience in America and the rest of the world shows that oil fields don't last forever. Prudhoe Bay, which was producing 1.2 million barrels a day five years after being brought on line in 1976, is now down to less than 400,000.
The mystery of Saudi oil capacity bears an eerie resemblance to Saddam Hussein's apparent belief that his scientists had developed weapons of mass destruction. Who are the deceivers and who is the deceived? No one yet knows the answers. But at least Matthew Simmons is asking the questions. (Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2005)
Energy bulletin
EXCERPT:
Five years later, investors in the company made 60 times their money – a blistering start to Simmons’s career. He set up an office in Boston doing deals in a number of sectors. “But I’d fallen passionately in love with companies selling services to the oil industry,” he says.
When the Yom Kippur war broke out in 1973, sending oil prices soaring, Simmons saw his future: “I foresaw a boom in oil services of which we’d not seen seen the like since the railroad days.”
He moved to Houston and secured funding from Edward Bates & Sons, a bank controlled by Ivory & Sime, and founded by Jimmy Gammell, father of Cairn Energy founder Bill, just one of his long-standing links with Scotland in the early days of the oil boom.
“The industry was full of gruff old boys and we were the young Harvard MBAs. Man alive, it was fun,” he says
Monday, August 30, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Why Hillary, WHY?
EXCERPT:
Meanwhile, according to federal contract data, on August 13, Blackwater was paid another $23 million on a $156 million “security” contract in Afghanistan with the US State Department. That is in addition to Blackwater’s contracts with the Department of Defense and its ongoing work for the CIA as part of its drone bombing raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
US government contractors have had their contracts cancelled for far less than the crimes Blackwater is alleged to have committed. See the recent moves involving the Rendon Group, which prepared dossiers on journalists, for instance. weeks ago, Blackwater operatives, according to the State Department, “are permitted to continue carrying weapons” in Iraq for the foreseeable future on that contract. On July 31, the Obama administration
Sourcewatch and Xe
EXCERPT:
Blackwater is one of two companies which make up The Prince Group, the other being Prince Manufacturing.[8] The Prince Group tapped former Pentagon Inspector General, Joseph E. Schmitz, for chief operating officer and general counsel in September of 2005.[9]
The Prince Group bought Aviation Worldwide Services[10] in May of 2003. AWS consists of STI Aviation, Inc., Air Quest, Inc., and Presidential Airways, Inc. These companies provide the logistical and air support for Blackwater operations. Blackwater itself consists of Blackwater Training Center, Blackwater Target Systems, Blackwater Security Consulting and Blackwater Canine.[11]
Joseph E. Schmitz
EXCERPT:
Joseph Edward Schmitz is the son of the John G. Schmitz, former California State Senator, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and U.S. Presidential candidate (1972). Schmitz attended Catholic schools as a child and Georgetown Preparatory School while his father served in Congress. He holds a Bachelor of Science (1978) from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and a Juris Doctor (1986) from Stanford University. He was on the wrestling team at the Naval Academy. His siblings include Mary Kay Letourneau, Jerome Thomas Schmitz and John Patrick Schmitz.[2]
Mary Kay Letourneau wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Mary Kay Letourneau
Born Mary Katherine Schmitz
January 30, 1962 (1962-01-30) (age 48)
Orange County, California, U.S.
Other names Mary Kay Fualaau
Spouse(s) Steve Letourneau (1984-1999) (divorced)
Vili Fualaau (2005-present)
Children Six (four by Letourneau; two by Fualaau)
Parents John G. Schmitz and Mary E. Schmitz (née Suehr)
Relatives John P. Schmitz and Joseph E. Schmitz (brothers), four other siblings and two half-siblings
Mary Kay Fualauu, (a.k.a Mary Kay Letourneau, born Mary Katherine Schmitz; January 30, 1962), is an American former schoolteacher convicted in 1997 of the statutory "second degree rape of a child"[1] of her 12 year old student, Vili Fualaau, for which she served time in prison. She gave birth to two of Fualaau's children while incarcerated. After her release from prison in 2004, Letourneau married Fualaau and took his name.[2][3
Presidential Airways
EXCERPT:
Presidential Airways has a track record of proven success providing critical expeditionary aviation services in nearly every continent around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic and Colombia.
Customers include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. Military Sealift Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. European Command, the U.S. Department of State, local and state governments and friendly nations around the world.
EXCERPT:
Meanwhile, according to federal contract data, on August 13, Blackwater was paid another $23 million on a $156 million “security” contract in Afghanistan with the US State Department. That is in addition to Blackwater’s contracts with the Department of Defense and its ongoing work for the CIA as part of its drone bombing raids in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
US government contractors have had their contracts cancelled for far less than the crimes Blackwater is alleged to have committed. See the recent moves involving the Rendon Group, which prepared dossiers on journalists, for instance. weeks ago, Blackwater operatives, according to the State Department, “are permitted to continue carrying weapons” in Iraq for the foreseeable future on that contract. On July 31, the Obama administration
Sourcewatch and Xe
EXCERPT:
Blackwater is one of two companies which make up The Prince Group, the other being Prince Manufacturing.[8] The Prince Group tapped former Pentagon Inspector General, Joseph E. Schmitz, for chief operating officer and general counsel in September of 2005.[9]
The Prince Group bought Aviation Worldwide Services[10] in May of 2003. AWS consists of STI Aviation, Inc., Air Quest, Inc., and Presidential Airways, Inc. These companies provide the logistical and air support for Blackwater operations. Blackwater itself consists of Blackwater Training Center, Blackwater Target Systems, Blackwater Security Consulting and Blackwater Canine.[11]
Joseph E. Schmitz
EXCERPT:
Joseph Edward Schmitz is the son of the John G. Schmitz, former California State Senator, member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and U.S. Presidential candidate (1972). Schmitz attended Catholic schools as a child and Georgetown Preparatory School while his father served in Congress. He holds a Bachelor of Science (1978) from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland and a Juris Doctor (1986) from Stanford University. He was on the wrestling team at the Naval Academy. His siblings include Mary Kay Letourneau, Jerome Thomas Schmitz and John Patrick Schmitz.[2]
Mary Kay Letourneau wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Mary Kay Letourneau
Born Mary Katherine Schmitz
January 30, 1962 (1962-01-30) (age 48)
Orange County, California, U.S.
Other names Mary Kay Fualaau
Spouse(s) Steve Letourneau (1984-1999) (divorced)
Vili Fualaau (2005-present)
Children Six (four by Letourneau; two by Fualaau)
Parents John G. Schmitz and Mary E. Schmitz (née Suehr)
Relatives John P. Schmitz and Joseph E. Schmitz (brothers), four other siblings and two half-siblings
Mary Kay Fualauu, (a.k.a Mary Kay Letourneau, born Mary Katherine Schmitz; January 30, 1962), is an American former schoolteacher convicted in 1997 of the statutory "second degree rape of a child"[1] of her 12 year old student, Vili Fualaau, for which she served time in prison. She gave birth to two of Fualaau's children while incarcerated. After her release from prison in 2004, Letourneau married Fualaau and took his name.[2][3
Presidential Airways
EXCERPT:
Presidential Airways has a track record of proven success providing critical expeditionary aviation services in nearly every continent around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, Jordan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic and Colombia.
Customers include the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Transportation Command, U.S. Military Sealift Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. European Command, the U.S. Department of State, local and state governments and friendly nations around the world.
Mind control and Electromagnetic Harassment experiences and how to deal with mind control.
EXCERPT:
May 15
Mind control and Electromagnetic Harassment experiences and how to deal with mind control.
Dr. Joseph C. Sharp
EXCERPT:
This article describes in precise terms how Dr. Joseph C. Sharp and staff transmitted the WORDS for the digits 1 to 10 using a modulated version of an Allan Frey type pulsed microwave transmitter. A detailed description of Frey transmitters can be viewed at:
Kahane terrorists threaten Rahm Emanuel's family
EXCERPT:
It's not simply "hecklers" bothering White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his family, visiting Israel and East Jerusalem for their 13-year-old son's bar mitzvah.
Zach Emanuel, praying today at the Western Wall in East Jerusalem.
It's a truly scary bunch: Oft-arrested Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel - leaders of the right-wing Kach terrorist organization outlawed by the Israeli government. They were picked up by the Israeli police after their actions almost prevented Emanuel from going up to pray at the Western Wall in East Jerusalem with his son. CBS News reported they had threatened to "take Zach Emanuel "on a day of fun without his father" in order to "teach him a few things about the Jewish peoples' heritage." As a result, the Emanuel family was accompanied throughout their visit by a heavy guard of plainclothes police.
Meir Kahane wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Infiltrating John Birch Society
In the late 1950s to early 1960s Kahane led a life of secrecy. His strong anti-Communist views landed him a position as a consultant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). His assignment was to infiltrate the right-wing John Birch Society and report his findings back to the FBI. For this position Kahane took on the false name Michael King and spent nearly two and a half years posing as a Christian, learning all he could about the John Birch Society.
As reported by Michael T Kaufman in The New York Times (and subsequently followed up by The Village Voice in the early 1980s), Kahane (under his pseudonym Michael King) had an affair with a gentile woman, Gloria Jean D'Argenio.[12] In 1966, Kahane/King sent a letter to Ms D'Argenio where he unilaterally ended their relationship. In response, Ms D'argenio jumped off the Queensboro ("59th Street") Bridge; she died of her injuries the next day. According to Mr Kaufman, Rabbi Kahane admitted to him that "he loved Ms D'Argenio and had sent roses to her grave for months after her death."[13]
[edit] Activism
Main article: Jewish Defense League
Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in New York City in 1968. JDL's self-described purpose was to protect Jews from local manifestations of anti-Semitism. These issues were very relevant at the time of mass exodus of urban Jewish population into suburbs and those unable or unwilling to move often becoming victims of violent crimes in the racially and ethnically changing neighborhoods. JDL members led protests against anti-Semitic teachers in the public school system, provided escorts for elderly Jews and educated Jewish youth in the art of self-defense.[14] However, it was the criticism of the Soviet Union that garnered support for the group, transforming it from a "vigilante club" to an activist organization with membership numbering over 15,000.[15] JDL organized mass rallies in New York against the Soviet Union's policy of persecuting Zionist activists and curbing Jewish immigration to Israel. JDL played lead role in the "Free Soviet Jewry" movement ("Let My People Go!") and pushed for the release of Russian refuseniks and their resettlement in Israel. JDL also protested against the oppression of Jewish population in Muslim countries, fought Neo-Nazis in the United States and resisted Christian missionaries' activity to convert Jews.
Earl Krugal wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Earl Leslie Krugel (November 24, 1942 – November 4, 2005) was the West Coast coordinator of the Jewish Defense League. In 2005, he was sentenced to prison on charges of terrorism after he confessed plotting, with the group's leader Irv Rubin, to blow up the office of Arab-American congressman Darrell Issa and the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California.[2] He was kept in protective custody for three years for the 2001 bomb plot,[3] but was transferred to a medium security federal prison following his sentencing.[3] Three days later, he was murdered by a fellow inmate, who struck him in the head with a block of concrete.[2]
Earl Krugel killed in prison
Written by ck
Wham! One cement block to the head and that’s all she wrote. Earl Krugel, a JDL member sent to prison for 20 years after being convicted for his part in a plot to bomb a California mosque and the office of a U.S. congressman, was murdered in prison. He had only been in the medium security federal penitentiary for three days. Medium security I guess means the guards feel comfortable leaving cement blocks around… anyhow, he’s there for three days when the prison welcome wagon comes along and… well, I’ve already told you. So let’s see, Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the JDL, gets assassinated Nov. 5, 1990 – just 15 years ago – by an Egyptian terrorist who doesn’t get convicted because no one actually saw him pull the trigger (he did eventually get life +15 years for trying to blow up the World Trade Center). Then, his son, Rabbi Binyamin Kahane and his wife Talya, were killed in a shooting attack by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank. Then Irv Rubin, head of the JDL, who got arrested with the unfortunate Earl, slit his throat and fell to his death in prison. Geez, it’s rough being a Kachnik. Anyhow, I don’t mean to make light of Earl’s death, or anyone’s for that matter. He received a 20 year sentence, not the death penalty. American jails suck.
Read all about it here and here, but details are still scant.
Alex Odeh murder
Twenty years later, still no charges in Alex Odeh assassination
Erik Skindrud, The Electronic Intifada, 6 December 2006
Sami Odeh stands with a photo of his slain brother in 2005, 20 years after Alex Odeh's assassination. (Erik Skindrud)
Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh was assassinated in Santa Ana, California 21 years ago. No one was ever charged with the crime. An agreement with the Israeli government prevents the extradition and prosecution of the prime suspects.
On the morning of Oct. 11, 1985 Alex Odeh made his way to his Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee office in Santa Ana, California. Odeh was likely tired as he climbed to the second-story office -- he had been up past midnight the night before, appearing on a late-night talk show where he condemned the killing days earlier of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year old Jewish New Yorker shot and dumped into the Mediterranean by Palestinian gunmen aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship. On the show, Odeh had also repeated his oft-stated belief that peace and cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis was not only necessary, it was possible.
The group's West Coast coordinator, Alex had a busy day in front of him. He was to speak that evening at Friday prayer services at Congregation B'Nai Tzedek, a synagogue in Fountain Valley.
He wouldn't make it. Around 9 a.m. Odeh unlocked the door to the 17th Street office, triggering a powerful pipe bomb that ripped through his face and chest. (The blast also blew out office windows, injuring seven passersby on the street below.) According to his brother Sami -- who still lives in Orange, California -- Alex also inhaled enough hot blast chemicals to cook his lungs from the inside. Sami reached the emergency room at Tustin Community Hospital in time to meet a silent surgeon emerging from an operating room.
"His face told me everything," Sami Odeh recalls.
Sami faced up to the task -- delivering the news to Alex's wife Norma and the 41-year-old's three little girls, Helena, Samya and Susan.
Each October marks another year since the day that is still recalled by Arab Americans in Orange County and by Muslims, Arabs and others around the world (the Odeh family are Palestinian Roman Catholics). More than two decades later, no one has been arrested in connection with Odeh's assassination, nobody has been charged with the crime and nobody is likely to be convicted. The FBI says the case remains open -- even though government documents and newspaper reports strongly suggest that the man who orchestrated the assassination is already in federal custody.
In September 2005, one strand of the mystery was tied up when U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew sentenced Earl Krugel, a 63-year-old former dental assistant from Reseda, to 20 years in prison for conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and assassinate Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), a congressman of Lebanese descent. Following sentencing, defense attorney Jay Lichtman told reporters that Krugel had supplied investigators with four names in connection with the Odeh killing. The names, Krugel said, had been mentioned by the late Irv Rubin -- Krugel's co-conspirator, who committed suicide last year by slashing his throat with a razor blade and leaping from a walkway inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.
Strangely, just three days after arriving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Ariz. (in Nov., 2005), Krugel was murdered in an exercise yard by another prisoner.
After Krugel's death, his wife suggested his killing was related to Odeh's assassination.
"It was all about Alex Odeh and my husband did not know anything about Alex Odeh," Lola Krugel told the Associated Press.
In 1985, Rubin was chairman of the Jewish Defense League, a group of radical pro-Israelis listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Following Odeh's killing, Rubin openly gloated about the Palestinian-born American's death, telling the Los Angeles Times, "No Jew or American should shed one tear for the destruction of a P.L.O. front in Santa Ana or anywhere else in the world."
Rubin was arrested in 2002 after the FBI recorded Krugel and others plotting "a wake-up call" for Arab Americans by destroying one of their "filthy mosques," according to court records.
Before his suicide, Rubin told Krugel that four men had been involved in the Odeh killing. Investigators haven't released the names, but Sami Odeh believes they include three names previously listed by the FBI as suspects: Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs and Andy Green.
Fuchs and Green continue to reside in (relative) safely at Kiryat Araba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. All three were disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the rabidly anti-Arab founder of the JDL.
The presumed mastermind of the Odeh killing, Manning fled to Israel immediately after the Santa Ana incident. He was extradited to the U.S. in 1993, where he was convicted of the 1980 killing of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary who had the misfortune of opening a package bomb aimed at Manning's estranged business associate. (Manning's fingerprints were found on the package by investigators.)
It wasn't the first time Manning had been caught tinkering with explosives, however. In 1972, he was convicted of bombing the Hollywood home of Palestinian activist Mohammed Shaath.
With so many arrows pointing, why wasn't Manning prosecuted for Odeh's killing? In what amounts to a political compromise of Biblical proportions, Manning can't be tried for Odeh's murder because of an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Israel. The reason: the assassination occurred after he became an Israeli citizen.
Manning swallowed 20 sleeping pills on the eve of his extradition in an attempt to escape justice.
According to an internal FBI memo made public in 1987, the agency made multiple requests to Israel for cooperation in solving Odeh's murder. Israel has refused repeatedly, although the details of the behind-doors discussions have never been released. This is despite the fact that both Fuchs and Green -- like Manning -- have been tried and convicted of other bombings and shootings in the U.S. and the West Bank.
The contradiction is more than boggling in the post-9/11 world, where the U.S. government's vow to take action against states that harbor terrorists is repeated regularly. Writing in 2003 about the Odeh killing and several similar incidents, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called the failure "a glaring double standard applied to Arab Americans and Muslims that can be neither denied nor defended."
There was no ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of Odeh's killing by terrorists. There will be no birthday remembrance.
"He was a very intelligent, very calm but passionate young man," recalls Haitham Bundakji, former director of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. "He loved the U.S. as his new country, but he never forgot Palestine, which was his homeland. He believed in the Palestinian people and he worked very hard to shed some light on the other side of the coin, the other side of the issue that most Americans don't hear about."
Arabs, Muslims and others in Orange County, Calif. and elsewhere continue to feel frustrated about the apparently immovable roadblock that still sits in the path to justice.
Contacted for this article, Arab-American academic Jack Shaheen (who spoke at a memorial service for Odeh in November 1985) said the lack of resolution continues to trouble the community.
"Sadly," he said, "the tragedy of Alex's assassination shows that the life of an American civil rights advocate with Palestinian roots is not valued by our government or media as much as the lives of other Americans."
"There is the feeling that the great influence pro-Israel groups have in this country had an influence on the investigation," Bundakji said.
Surprisingly, Sami Odeh, who works as a real estate broker in Orange, Calif., is more sanguine about the case.
"We remain hopeful that eventually, justice will prevail," he said. "I happen to believe that despite the enormous power that the Israeli state wields in this country, the American justice system will continue to push.
"You have to understand that the FBI is up to their ears in cases. I know that the Israelis are making it tremendously difficult for them to do their job, but given enough time, I think they can finish it.
"And even if they aren't brought to justice here -- God will mete out justice eventually. And when He does, He won't be under anyone's political influence."
Erik Skindrud is a magazine editor and journalist in Huntington Beach, California. He attended U.C. Berkeley�s Graduate School of Journalism.
Alex Odeh Memorial Statue Vandalized in “Hate Crime”
EXCERPT:
April/May 1997 pgs. 67-68
California Chronicle
by Pat McDonnell Twair
The sickos are back.
At 4:30 a.m. Feb. 6 Santa Ana police received an anonymous call that red paint had been poured on the Alex Odeh Memorial Statue in front of the Santa Ana Central Library. Police headquarters are just yards from the statue, but for the second time in four months, hatemongers got away with defacing the statue. The first incident happened Oct. 11, on the 11th anniversary of Odeh’s assassination. He was killed in 1985 when a pipe bomb exploded as he opened the door to enter his Santa Ana office. He was the regional director of the American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the night before had said on a radio program that Yasser Arafat was a man of peace.
Police estimate that two gallons of paint were thrown on the statue; two sets of paint-soaked footprints were visible from the statue to the nearby curb. The FBI is treating the vandalism as a hate crime.
JDL Harassment
When the statue was placed in the Santa Ana Civic Center, the Orange County seat, in April 1994, the Jewish Defense League protested vociferously. On Aug. 27, 1996, when the FBI announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Odeh’s killers, JDL hecklers yelled and shouted obscenities at the FBI spokespersons who announced the reward.
In Washington, DC, ADC President Hala Maksoud voiced her concern that the JDL continues without restraint to slander Odeh and to spread hatred against Odeh and, by implication, against Arab Americans. A case in point is the JDL Web site on the Internet that calls Odeh a “terrorism lover.”
In a national statement, Maksoud concluded: “This cowardly act of vandalism highlights the urgency to resolve this case, as Alex’s murderers are still at large.”
Khalil Bendib, the Algerian-American sculptor who created the Odeh statue, told the Washington Report: “I read that there were straight lines of red paint across the neck and wrists as if the perpetrators were trying to kill Alex again. That is sick.”
The same sentiment was echoed by Odeh’s brother, Sami, who viewed the defaced statue and commented: “Whoever did this must be a sick, deranged person.”
Anaheim attorney Stephen Mashney told reporters that not enough is being done to solve violent crimes directed against Arab Americans. “Of course the objective of law enforcement is to protect citizens. But certain groups are not pursued as vigorously as others when it comes to investigating these crimes.”
JDL chairman Irv Rubin again went on record stating: “I think the guy [Odeh] is a war criminal.”
Immediately after the 1985 assassination the FBI identified three suspects, all of them believed to be affiliated with the JDL, who fled to Israel. Two of the suspects were Robert and Rochelle Manning, who took refuge in the settlement of Jewish religious militants at Kiryat Arba outside Hebron on the West Bank. After years of legal delays Israel consented to the extradition of Robert Manning to the U.S., where he is serving a life sentence for his role in a murder-for-hire plot in which a Manhattan Beach, CA secretary was killed by the explosion of a package bomb mailed to her employer. The Israelis claim Rochelle Manning died of a heart attack just before she, too, was to be extradited to California.
David Cole
EXCERPT:
on this affliction of the fanatic is a simple one. The one universal good that outweighs all others must be a person's right to follow any life path they choose so long as they offer no infringement on the rights of others. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of the inalienable rights we all have to our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness, which is to say the sanctity of our own bodies, freedom of movement and association, and freedom of thought.Those who seek to deprive others of any of these outside the unfortunate but necessary repressions of the State we call justice earn for themselves what they gave. The principle is that of equity at its most basic level. As you deprive others of their liberty, so shall society see that you are deprived in equal measure, because there is no justification for any individual to take away any other individual's freedoms, even to the smallest part. That power is and must be confined to our mechanisms of government.
The right to harbor unpopular, even intolerant beliefs, and the right to express them are protected by the Constitution, which spells out the unqualified right of all Americans to unfettered freedom of speech. But intimidation aimed at silencing speech, and thus infringing on that right, be it through slander, threats or force, is not so protected. In fact, people who used those exact methods of intimidation to keep blacks from voting found themselves jailed for conspiring to deprive others of their lawful civil rights.
EXCERPT:
It's not simply "hecklers" bothering White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and his family, visiting Israel and East Jerusalem for their 13-year-old son's bar mitzvah.
Zach Emanuel, praying today at the Western Wall in East Jerusalem.
It's a truly scary bunch: Oft-arrested Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel - leaders of the right-wing Kach terrorist organization outlawed by the Israeli government. They were picked up by the Israeli police after their actions almost prevented Emanuel from going up to pray at the Western Wall in East Jerusalem with his son. CBS News reported they had threatened to "take Zach Emanuel "on a day of fun without his father" in order to "teach him a few things about the Jewish peoples' heritage." As a result, the Emanuel family was accompanied throughout their visit by a heavy guard of plainclothes police.
Meir Kahane wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Infiltrating John Birch Society
In the late 1950s to early 1960s Kahane led a life of secrecy. His strong anti-Communist views landed him a position as a consultant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). His assignment was to infiltrate the right-wing John Birch Society and report his findings back to the FBI. For this position Kahane took on the false name Michael King and spent nearly two and a half years posing as a Christian, learning all he could about the John Birch Society.
As reported by Michael T Kaufman in The New York Times (and subsequently followed up by The Village Voice in the early 1980s), Kahane (under his pseudonym Michael King) had an affair with a gentile woman, Gloria Jean D'Argenio.[12] In 1966, Kahane/King sent a letter to Ms D'Argenio where he unilaterally ended their relationship. In response, Ms D'argenio jumped off the Queensboro ("59th Street") Bridge; she died of her injuries the next day. According to Mr Kaufman, Rabbi Kahane admitted to him that "he loved Ms D'Argenio and had sent roses to her grave for months after her death."[13]
[edit] Activism
Main article: Jewish Defense League
Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in New York City in 1968. JDL's self-described purpose was to protect Jews from local manifestations of anti-Semitism. These issues were very relevant at the time of mass exodus of urban Jewish population into suburbs and those unable or unwilling to move often becoming victims of violent crimes in the racially and ethnically changing neighborhoods. JDL members led protests against anti-Semitic teachers in the public school system, provided escorts for elderly Jews and educated Jewish youth in the art of self-defense.[14] However, it was the criticism of the Soviet Union that garnered support for the group, transforming it from a "vigilante club" to an activist organization with membership numbering over 15,000.[15] JDL organized mass rallies in New York against the Soviet Union's policy of persecuting Zionist activists and curbing Jewish immigration to Israel. JDL played lead role in the "Free Soviet Jewry" movement ("Let My People Go!") and pushed for the release of Russian refuseniks and their resettlement in Israel. JDL also protested against the oppression of Jewish population in Muslim countries, fought Neo-Nazis in the United States and resisted Christian missionaries' activity to convert Jews.
Earl Krugal wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Earl Leslie Krugel (November 24, 1942 – November 4, 2005) was the West Coast coordinator of the Jewish Defense League. In 2005, he was sentenced to prison on charges of terrorism after he confessed plotting, with the group's leader Irv Rubin, to blow up the office of Arab-American congressman Darrell Issa and the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California.[2] He was kept in protective custody for three years for the 2001 bomb plot,[3] but was transferred to a medium security federal prison following his sentencing.[3] Three days later, he was murdered by a fellow inmate, who struck him in the head with a block of concrete.[2]
Earl Krugel killed in prison
Written by ck
Wham! One cement block to the head and that’s all she wrote. Earl Krugel, a JDL member sent to prison for 20 years after being convicted for his part in a plot to bomb a California mosque and the office of a U.S. congressman, was murdered in prison. He had only been in the medium security federal penitentiary for three days. Medium security I guess means the guards feel comfortable leaving cement blocks around… anyhow, he’s there for three days when the prison welcome wagon comes along and… well, I’ve already told you. So let’s see, Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the JDL, gets assassinated Nov. 5, 1990 – just 15 years ago – by an Egyptian terrorist who doesn’t get convicted because no one actually saw him pull the trigger (he did eventually get life +15 years for trying to blow up the World Trade Center). Then, his son, Rabbi Binyamin Kahane and his wife Talya, were killed in a shooting attack by Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank. Then Irv Rubin, head of the JDL, who got arrested with the unfortunate Earl, slit his throat and fell to his death in prison. Geez, it’s rough being a Kachnik. Anyhow, I don’t mean to make light of Earl’s death, or anyone’s for that matter. He received a 20 year sentence, not the death penalty. American jails suck.
Read all about it here and here, but details are still scant.
Alex Odeh murder
Twenty years later, still no charges in Alex Odeh assassination
Erik Skindrud, The Electronic Intifada, 6 December 2006
Sami Odeh stands with a photo of his slain brother in 2005, 20 years after Alex Odeh's assassination. (Erik Skindrud)
Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh was assassinated in Santa Ana, California 21 years ago. No one was ever charged with the crime. An agreement with the Israeli government prevents the extradition and prosecution of the prime suspects.
On the morning of Oct. 11, 1985 Alex Odeh made his way to his Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee office in Santa Ana, California. Odeh was likely tired as he climbed to the second-story office -- he had been up past midnight the night before, appearing on a late-night talk show where he condemned the killing days earlier of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year old Jewish New Yorker shot and dumped into the Mediterranean by Palestinian gunmen aboard the Achille Lauro cruise ship. On the show, Odeh had also repeated his oft-stated belief that peace and cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis was not only necessary, it was possible.
The group's West Coast coordinator, Alex had a busy day in front of him. He was to speak that evening at Friday prayer services at Congregation B'Nai Tzedek, a synagogue in Fountain Valley.
He wouldn't make it. Around 9 a.m. Odeh unlocked the door to the 17th Street office, triggering a powerful pipe bomb that ripped through his face and chest. (The blast also blew out office windows, injuring seven passersby on the street below.) According to his brother Sami -- who still lives in Orange, California -- Alex also inhaled enough hot blast chemicals to cook his lungs from the inside. Sami reached the emergency room at Tustin Community Hospital in time to meet a silent surgeon emerging from an operating room.
"His face told me everything," Sami Odeh recalls.
Sami faced up to the task -- delivering the news to Alex's wife Norma and the 41-year-old's three little girls, Helena, Samya and Susan.
Each October marks another year since the day that is still recalled by Arab Americans in Orange County and by Muslims, Arabs and others around the world (the Odeh family are Palestinian Roman Catholics). More than two decades later, no one has been arrested in connection with Odeh's assassination, nobody has been charged with the crime and nobody is likely to be convicted. The FBI says the case remains open -- even though government documents and newspaper reports strongly suggest that the man who orchestrated the assassination is already in federal custody.
In September 2005, one strand of the mystery was tied up when U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew sentenced Earl Krugel, a 63-year-old former dental assistant from Reseda, to 20 years in prison for conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City and assassinate Rep. Darrell E. Issa (R-Vista), a congressman of Lebanese descent. Following sentencing, defense attorney Jay Lichtman told reporters that Krugel had supplied investigators with four names in connection with the Odeh killing. The names, Krugel said, had been mentioned by the late Irv Rubin -- Krugel's co-conspirator, who committed suicide last year by slashing his throat with a razor blade and leaping from a walkway inside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.
Strangely, just three days after arriving at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix, Ariz. (in Nov., 2005), Krugel was murdered in an exercise yard by another prisoner.
After Krugel's death, his wife suggested his killing was related to Odeh's assassination.
"It was all about Alex Odeh and my husband did not know anything about Alex Odeh," Lola Krugel told the Associated Press.
In 1985, Rubin was chairman of the Jewish Defense League, a group of radical pro-Israelis listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Following Odeh's killing, Rubin openly gloated about the Palestinian-born American's death, telling the Los Angeles Times, "No Jew or American should shed one tear for the destruction of a P.L.O. front in Santa Ana or anywhere else in the world."
Rubin was arrested in 2002 after the FBI recorded Krugel and others plotting "a wake-up call" for Arab Americans by destroying one of their "filthy mosques," according to court records.
Before his suicide, Rubin told Krugel that four men had been involved in the Odeh killing. Investigators haven't released the names, but Sami Odeh believes they include three names previously listed by the FBI as suspects: Robert Manning, Keith Fuchs and Andy Green.
Fuchs and Green continue to reside in (relative) safely at Kiryat Araba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron in the occupied West Bank. All three were disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, the rabidly anti-Arab founder of the JDL.
The presumed mastermind of the Odeh killing, Manning fled to Israel immediately after the Santa Ana incident. He was extradited to the U.S. in 1993, where he was convicted of the 1980 killing of Patricia Wilkerson, a Manhattan Beach secretary who had the misfortune of opening a package bomb aimed at Manning's estranged business associate. (Manning's fingerprints were found on the package by investigators.)
It wasn't the first time Manning had been caught tinkering with explosives, however. In 1972, he was convicted of bombing the Hollywood home of Palestinian activist Mohammed Shaath.
With so many arrows pointing, why wasn't Manning prosecuted for Odeh's killing? In what amounts to a political compromise of Biblical proportions, Manning can't be tried for Odeh's murder because of an extradition agreement between the U.S. and Israel. The reason: the assassination occurred after he became an Israeli citizen.
Manning swallowed 20 sleeping pills on the eve of his extradition in an attempt to escape justice.
According to an internal FBI memo made public in 1987, the agency made multiple requests to Israel for cooperation in solving Odeh's murder. Israel has refused repeatedly, although the details of the behind-doors discussions have never been released. This is despite the fact that both Fuchs and Green -- like Manning -- have been tried and convicted of other bombings and shootings in the U.S. and the West Bank.
The contradiction is more than boggling in the post-9/11 world, where the U.S. government's vow to take action against states that harbor terrorists is repeated regularly. Writing in 2003 about the Odeh killing and several similar incidents, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called the failure "a glaring double standard applied to Arab Americans and Muslims that can be neither denied nor defended."
There was no ceremony to mark the 20th anniversary of Odeh's killing by terrorists. There will be no birthday remembrance.
"He was a very intelligent, very calm but passionate young man," recalls Haitham Bundakji, former director of the Islamic Society of Orange County in Garden Grove. "He loved the U.S. as his new country, but he never forgot Palestine, which was his homeland. He believed in the Palestinian people and he worked very hard to shed some light on the other side of the coin, the other side of the issue that most Americans don't hear about."
Arabs, Muslims and others in Orange County, Calif. and elsewhere continue to feel frustrated about the apparently immovable roadblock that still sits in the path to justice.
Contacted for this article, Arab-American academic Jack Shaheen (who spoke at a memorial service for Odeh in November 1985) said the lack of resolution continues to trouble the community.
"Sadly," he said, "the tragedy of Alex's assassination shows that the life of an American civil rights advocate with Palestinian roots is not valued by our government or media as much as the lives of other Americans."
"There is the feeling that the great influence pro-Israel groups have in this country had an influence on the investigation," Bundakji said.
Surprisingly, Sami Odeh, who works as a real estate broker in Orange, Calif., is more sanguine about the case.
"We remain hopeful that eventually, justice will prevail," he said. "I happen to believe that despite the enormous power that the Israeli state wields in this country, the American justice system will continue to push.
"You have to understand that the FBI is up to their ears in cases. I know that the Israelis are making it tremendously difficult for them to do their job, but given enough time, I think they can finish it.
"And even if they aren't brought to justice here -- God will mete out justice eventually. And when He does, He won't be under anyone's political influence."
Erik Skindrud is a magazine editor and journalist in Huntington Beach, California. He attended U.C. Berkeley�s Graduate School of Journalism.
Alex Odeh Memorial Statue Vandalized in “Hate Crime”
EXCERPT:
April/May 1997 pgs. 67-68
California Chronicle
by Pat McDonnell Twair
The sickos are back.
At 4:30 a.m. Feb. 6 Santa Ana police received an anonymous call that red paint had been poured on the Alex Odeh Memorial Statue in front of the Santa Ana Central Library. Police headquarters are just yards from the statue, but for the second time in four months, hatemongers got away with defacing the statue. The first incident happened Oct. 11, on the 11th anniversary of Odeh’s assassination. He was killed in 1985 when a pipe bomb exploded as he opened the door to enter his Santa Ana office. He was the regional director of the American- Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the night before had said on a radio program that Yasser Arafat was a man of peace.
Police estimate that two gallons of paint were thrown on the statue; two sets of paint-soaked footprints were visible from the statue to the nearby curb. The FBI is treating the vandalism as a hate crime.
JDL Harassment
When the statue was placed in the Santa Ana Civic Center, the Orange County seat, in April 1994, the Jewish Defense League protested vociferously. On Aug. 27, 1996, when the FBI announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Odeh’s killers, JDL hecklers yelled and shouted obscenities at the FBI spokespersons who announced the reward.
In Washington, DC, ADC President Hala Maksoud voiced her concern that the JDL continues without restraint to slander Odeh and to spread hatred against Odeh and, by implication, against Arab Americans. A case in point is the JDL Web site on the Internet that calls Odeh a “terrorism lover.”
In a national statement, Maksoud concluded: “This cowardly act of vandalism highlights the urgency to resolve this case, as Alex’s murderers are still at large.”
Khalil Bendib, the Algerian-American sculptor who created the Odeh statue, told the Washington Report: “I read that there were straight lines of red paint across the neck and wrists as if the perpetrators were trying to kill Alex again. That is sick.”
The same sentiment was echoed by Odeh’s brother, Sami, who viewed the defaced statue and commented: “Whoever did this must be a sick, deranged person.”
Anaheim attorney Stephen Mashney told reporters that not enough is being done to solve violent crimes directed against Arab Americans. “Of course the objective of law enforcement is to protect citizens. But certain groups are not pursued as vigorously as others when it comes to investigating these crimes.”
JDL chairman Irv Rubin again went on record stating: “I think the guy [Odeh] is a war criminal.”
Immediately after the 1985 assassination the FBI identified three suspects, all of them believed to be affiliated with the JDL, who fled to Israel. Two of the suspects were Robert and Rochelle Manning, who took refuge in the settlement of Jewish religious militants at Kiryat Arba outside Hebron on the West Bank. After years of legal delays Israel consented to the extradition of Robert Manning to the U.S., where he is serving a life sentence for his role in a murder-for-hire plot in which a Manhattan Beach, CA secretary was killed by the explosion of a package bomb mailed to her employer. The Israelis claim Rochelle Manning died of a heart attack just before she, too, was to be extradited to California.
David Cole
EXCERPT:
on this affliction of the fanatic is a simple one. The one universal good that outweighs all others must be a person's right to follow any life path they choose so long as they offer no infringement on the rights of others. Our Declaration of Independence speaks of the inalienable rights we all have to our lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness, which is to say the sanctity of our own bodies, freedom of movement and association, and freedom of thought.Those who seek to deprive others of any of these outside the unfortunate but necessary repressions of the State we call justice earn for themselves what they gave. The principle is that of equity at its most basic level. As you deprive others of their liberty, so shall society see that you are deprived in equal measure, because there is no justification for any individual to take away any other individual's freedoms, even to the smallest part. That power is and must be confined to our mechanisms of government.
The right to harbor unpopular, even intolerant beliefs, and the right to express them are protected by the Constitution, which spells out the unqualified right of all Americans to unfettered freedom of speech. But intimidation aimed at silencing speech, and thus infringing on that right, be it through slander, threats or force, is not so protected. In fact, people who used those exact methods of intimidation to keep blacks from voting found themselves jailed for conspiring to deprive others of their lawful civil rights.
Michael Franti & Spearhead : Time To Go Home youtube
I Know I'm Not Alone Michael Franti youtube
Oh for God's Sake: US combat troops have NOT left Iraq
(It's also been said at least 7,000 contractors to be there as well ...cal)
2010 August 18
by Ian Welsh
.This is positively Orwellian, and people on the progressive side should not be cooperating with it. There are still 50,000 US troops in Iraq and they include brigades which are, absolutely, combat troops. Call them “advisers”, but nothing has changed, they are combat troops.
Update: Oh hey, the plan is to double the number of mercenaries in Iraq, as well.
They Don't Care About US - Prison Version youtube
Iraqi combat troop withdrawal is 'SYMBOLIC'
EXCERPT:
Yes, it is," Engel responded. "Right now we are with the last American combat troops who--and they are in the process of leaving this country right now. We are with the 4-2 Stryker Brigade. I'm broadcasting right now live from the top of a Stryker fighting vehicle. There are 440 American troops in this convoy...as soon as they cross the border into Kuwait. And it is not far to the border, just about 30 miles from here. As soon as all these soldiers leave Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq, will be over."
The symbolic milestone was broadcast with the help of NBC's Bloom Mobile, named after the late NBC News correspondent who died while covering the Iraq War. NBC describes the vehicle as "part tank, part satellite truck" and says it "delivers a live satellite broadcast while reporting from the field."
Global US Troop Deployment 1950-2005
EXCERPT:
Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950-2005Published on May 24, 2006 by Tim Kane, Ph.D. Center for Data Analysis Report #06-02 Print PDF
Download PDF
Heavy deployments of American troops to the Middle East are an essential part of the global war on terrorism. However, the duration of troop deployments has been a source of controversy within the United States. There is controversy about whether there are too many or too few soldiers in Iraq, controversy about the nature of America's geopolitical ambitions, and controversy about the impact on the families of soldiers. Much of the debate is carried on in a fact-free vacuum, lacking the context of American troops' traditional footprint around the globe for the past half-century.
US to rely on 7,000 private contractors in Iraq once 'combat' troops withdraw
EXCERPT:
Under President Barack Obama's plan to end US combat operations this month and withdraw most military forces from Iraq by October 2011, the State Department will double the number of contractors it employs there to about 7000, the officials said.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, confirming a report that appeared in The New York Times, said the larger force of contractors would carry out a variety of tasks.
"We will still have our own security needs to make sure our diplomats and development experts are well protected," Mr Crowley said.
"We have contractors who are guarding our embassy, and we'll have contractors who are, as they are today, helping with our mobility and helping with personal security as our diplomats move around the country."
MSNBC all stars exclusively report on last US combat troops leaving Iraq
EXCERPT:
Now we know where Rachel Maddow has been hiding these past few days: Baghdad. The MSNBC primetime star traveled to Iraq, along with embedded NBC reporter Richard Engel, to deliver an exclusive report on the final American combat troops leaving the country. Back home, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Lawrence O’Donnell rung in the special occasion.
While 50,000 non-combat troops will remain in Iraq to help rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and train the Iraqi military, this marks the definitive end of American military combat. The coverage began on NBC Nightly News, with Richard Engel breaking the story there. Engel was embedded with the troops themselves in the “Bloom-mobile,” the truck used by late NBC journalist David Bloom, who died suddenly reporting from Iraq (video from NBC’s coverage with Brian Williams here. Meanwhile, the networks primetime mainstays discussed the meaning of the departure with Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Public Affairs P.J. Crowley on MSNBC.
David Bloom wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Operation Iraqi Freedom reporting
He will be remembered for his creation of the "Bloom Mobile," an Army tank recovery vehicle retrofitted by Miramar, Florida-based company Maritime Telecommunications Network, with live television and satellite transmission equipment so he could continuously broadcast reports as troops made their way toward Baghdad. [1]
[edit] Death
Bloom was traveling with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq when he suddenly died due to deep vein thrombosis and a pulmonary embolism. [2]
The David Bloom Award was established by the Radio & Television Association in 2006 to honor excellence in enterprise reporting. ABC World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff received the award in its first year.
[edit] Personal
Bloom considered his most passionate role that of the family man, and was survived by his wife, Melanie, and three daughters: Nicole, Christine, and Ava. The Blooms were residents of Pound Ridge, New York, at the time of his death.
Bill Clinton agrees with Bush about the New World Order youtube
Seventeen Little Children - Karl Lang (Waco) youtube
Michael Franti: Hey World (Don't Give Up) youtube
I Know I'm Not Alone lyrics
Michael Franti
Lyrics to I Know I'm Not Alone :
Whatever happen to the sun
It seems to always come
Back when we were young
We'd sing and party all night long
The season don't ever come on time no more
War paints over the years
and anger fills our tears
What happen to the sun
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
Everytime I read the news
I'm always more confused
Tellin' me to choose
But there's only lies to choose from
And how many died today
How many lost thier homes or shot a gun
Or a love one
What happen to our sons
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
And I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
I know I'm far away from home but I know I'm not alone
I know I'm far away from home but I know I'm not alone
I Know I'm Not Alone Michael Franti youtube
Oh for God's Sake: US combat troops have NOT left Iraq
(It's also been said at least 7,000 contractors to be there as well ...cal)
2010 August 18
by Ian Welsh
.This is positively Orwellian, and people on the progressive side should not be cooperating with it. There are still 50,000 US troops in Iraq and they include brigades which are, absolutely, combat troops. Call them “advisers”, but nothing has changed, they are combat troops.
Update: Oh hey, the plan is to double the number of mercenaries in Iraq, as well.
They Don't Care About US - Prison Version youtube
Iraqi combat troop withdrawal is 'SYMBOLIC'
EXCERPT:
Yes, it is," Engel responded. "Right now we are with the last American combat troops who--and they are in the process of leaving this country right now. We are with the 4-2 Stryker Brigade. I'm broadcasting right now live from the top of a Stryker fighting vehicle. There are 440 American troops in this convoy...as soon as they cross the border into Kuwait. And it is not far to the border, just about 30 miles from here. As soon as all these soldiers leave Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq, will be over."
The symbolic milestone was broadcast with the help of NBC's Bloom Mobile, named after the late NBC News correspondent who died while covering the Iraq War. NBC describes the vehicle as "part tank, part satellite truck" and says it "delivers a live satellite broadcast while reporting from the field."
Global US Troop Deployment 1950-2005
EXCERPT:
Global U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950-2005Published on May 24, 2006 by Tim Kane, Ph.D. Center for Data Analysis Report #06-02 Print PDF
Download PDF
Heavy deployments of American troops to the Middle East are an essential part of the global war on terrorism. However, the duration of troop deployments has been a source of controversy within the United States. There is controversy about whether there are too many or too few soldiers in Iraq, controversy about the nature of America's geopolitical ambitions, and controversy about the impact on the families of soldiers. Much of the debate is carried on in a fact-free vacuum, lacking the context of American troops' traditional footprint around the globe for the past half-century.
US to rely on 7,000 private contractors in Iraq once 'combat' troops withdraw
EXCERPT:
Under President Barack Obama's plan to end US combat operations this month and withdraw most military forces from Iraq by October 2011, the State Department will double the number of contractors it employs there to about 7000, the officials said.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley, confirming a report that appeared in The New York Times, said the larger force of contractors would carry out a variety of tasks.
"We will still have our own security needs to make sure our diplomats and development experts are well protected," Mr Crowley said.
"We have contractors who are guarding our embassy, and we'll have contractors who are, as they are today, helping with our mobility and helping with personal security as our diplomats move around the country."
MSNBC all stars exclusively report on last US combat troops leaving Iraq
EXCERPT:
Now we know where Rachel Maddow has been hiding these past few days: Baghdad. The MSNBC primetime star traveled to Iraq, along with embedded NBC reporter Richard Engel, to deliver an exclusive report on the final American combat troops leaving the country. Back home, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Lawrence O’Donnell rung in the special occasion.
While 50,000 non-combat troops will remain in Iraq to help rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and train the Iraqi military, this marks the definitive end of American military combat. The coverage began on NBC Nightly News, with Richard Engel breaking the story there. Engel was embedded with the troops themselves in the “Bloom-mobile,” the truck used by late NBC journalist David Bloom, who died suddenly reporting from Iraq (video from NBC’s coverage with Brian Williams here. Meanwhile, the networks primetime mainstays discussed the meaning of the departure with Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Public Affairs P.J. Crowley on MSNBC.
David Bloom wikipedia
EXCERPT:
Operation Iraqi Freedom reporting
He will be remembered for his creation of the "Bloom Mobile," an Army tank recovery vehicle retrofitted by Miramar, Florida-based company Maritime Telecommunications Network, with live television and satellite transmission equipment so he could continuously broadcast reports as troops made their way toward Baghdad. [1]
[edit] Death
Bloom was traveling with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq when he suddenly died due to deep vein thrombosis and a pulmonary embolism. [2]
The David Bloom Award was established by the Radio & Television Association in 2006 to honor excellence in enterprise reporting. ABC World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff received the award in its first year.
[edit] Personal
Bloom considered his most passionate role that of the family man, and was survived by his wife, Melanie, and three daughters: Nicole, Christine, and Ava. The Blooms were residents of Pound Ridge, New York, at the time of his death.
Bill Clinton agrees with Bush about the New World Order youtube
Seventeen Little Children - Karl Lang (Waco) youtube
Michael Franti: Hey World (Don't Give Up) youtube
I Know I'm Not Alone lyrics
Michael Franti
Lyrics to I Know I'm Not Alone :
Whatever happen to the sun
It seems to always come
Back when we were young
We'd sing and party all night long
The season don't ever come on time no more
War paints over the years
and anger fills our tears
What happen to the sun
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
Everytime I read the news
I'm always more confused
Tellin' me to choose
But there's only lies to choose from
And how many died today
How many lost thier homes or shot a gun
Or a love one
What happen to our sons
But I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
And I know, I know, I know I'm not alone
I know I'm far away from home but I know I'm not alone
I know I'm far away from home but I know I'm not alone
And what about the Mosque in NY........ What's all the fuss? Bin Ladin family's architect????
Minoru Yamasaki man who made twin towers and Rockefeller influence
EXCERPT:
Thursday, September 11, 2008 Minoru Yamasaki: The man who made the Twin Towers
Yamasaki and Roth were commissioned by Port Authority, on an inspiration from the Rockefellers, to build a gargantuan office space on a relatively small area of land -- 12 million square feet of usable space over a mere 16 acres, all the while with trains rushing beneath it and the Hudson River right next door
The World Trade Center and the bin ladin family
The Mosque to Commerce
Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center.
By Laurie Kerr
Posted Friday, Dec. 28, 2001, at 11:58 AM ET
We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.
View of the King Fahd Dhahran Air TerminalThe story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes.
Saudi banknote, 1966
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related on washingtonpost.com
Click here for Entertainment's reviews, movie times, and upcoming movies guide.For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.
View of the World Trade Center plazaYamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.
View of a World Trade Center towerAt the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.
The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.
Advertisement
In the early '70s, as the trade towers were nearing completion, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil revenues, and the state embarked on a massive modernization and building campaign. Yamasaki was premier among the many foreign architects hired during this period. Unwilling to take on too much work, Yamasaki decided to accept just three choice projects in Saudi Arabia: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency head office, the Eastern Province International Airport, and the King Fahd Royal Reception Pavilion at Jeddah Airport. In all three projects he continued his explorations in melding traditional Islamic form with modern materials, methods, and functions.
As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.) While Osama was in college in the mid-'70s, Yamasaki was designing his second generation of Saudi work, and the World Trade Center—then the tallest building in the world times two—came to completion in New York. This period was the high-water mark both for Yamasaki's world reputation and for the Saudis' national construction plan—which in Saudi Arabia must have brought a heightened sense of importance to the World Trade Center.
Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.
13 Evil Bloodlines
1 1. The Astor Bloodline
2. 2. The Bundy Bloodline
3.3. The Collins Bloodline
4.4. The DuPont Bloodline
5.5. The Freeman Bloodline
6 6. The Kennedy Bloodline
7 7. The Li Bloodline
8.8. The Onassis Bloodline
9 9. The Reynolds bloodline
110. The Rockefeller Bloodline
11. The Rothschild Bloodline
12. The Russell Bloodline
13. The Van Duyn Bloodline
Minoru Yamasaki man who made twin towers and Rockefeller influence
EXCERPT:
Thursday, September 11, 2008 Minoru Yamasaki: The man who made the Twin Towers
Yamasaki and Roth were commissioned by Port Authority, on an inspiration from the Rockefellers, to build a gargantuan office space on a relatively small area of land -- 12 million square feet of usable space over a mere 16 acres, all the while with trains rushing beneath it and the Hudson River right next door
The World Trade Center and the bin ladin family
The Mosque to Commerce
Bin Laden's special complaint with the World Trade Center.
By Laurie Kerr
Posted Friday, Dec. 28, 2001, at 11:58 AM ET
We all know the basic reasons why Osama Bin Laden chose to attack the World Trade Center, out of all the buildings in New York. Its towers were the two tallest in the city, synonymous with its skyline. They were richly stocked with potential victims. And as the complex's name declared, it was designed to be a center of American and global commerce. But Bin Laden may have had another, more personal motivation. The World Trade Center's architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was a favorite designer of the Binladin family's patrons—the Saudi royal family—and a leading practitioner of an architectural style that merged modernism with Islamic influences.
View of the King Fahd Dhahran Air TerminalThe story starts in the late 1950s, when Yamasaki, a second-generation Japanese-American, won the commission to design the King Fahd Dhahran Air Terminal in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. His design had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form. The Saudis admired it so much that they put a picture of it on one of their banknotes.
Saudi banknote, 1966
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related on washingtonpost.com
Click here for Entertainment's reviews, movie times, and upcoming movies guide.For Yamasaki, an architect with a keen mathematical mind and a taste for ornamental pattern-work, this brush with the intricate geometries of Islamic architecture was inspiring, and he began to incorporate arabesques and arches into his work. For the next 12 to 15 years he played with Islamic forms in projects as diverse as the Federal Science Pavilion at the Seattle World's Fair, the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, and even the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Ill.
View of the World Trade Center plazaYamasaki received the World Trade Center commission the year after the Dhahran Airport was completed. Yamasaki described its plaza as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area." True to his word, Yamasaki replicated the plan of Mecca's courtyard by creating a vast delineated square, isolated from the city's bustle by low colonnaded structures and capped by two enormous, perfectly square towers—minarets, really. Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.
View of a World Trade Center towerAt the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra.
The shimmering filigree is the mark of the holy. According to Oleg Grabar, the great American scholar of Islamic art and architecture, the dense filigree of complex geometries alludes to a higher spiritual reality in Islam, and the shimmering quality of Islamic patterning relates to the veil that wraps the Qa'ba at Mecca. After the attack, Grabar spoke of how these towers related to the architecture of Islam, where "the entire surface is meaningful" and "every part is both construction and ornament." A number of designers from the Middle East agreed, describing the entire façade as a giant "mashrabiya," the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.
Advertisement
In the early '70s, as the trade towers were nearing completion, Saudi Arabia was awash in oil revenues, and the state embarked on a massive modernization and building campaign. Yamasaki was premier among the many foreign architects hired during this period. Unwilling to take on too much work, Yamasaki decided to accept just three choice projects in Saudi Arabia: the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency head office, the Eastern Province International Airport, and the King Fahd Royal Reception Pavilion at Jeddah Airport. In all three projects he continued his explorations in melding traditional Islamic form with modern materials, methods, and functions.
As a scion of the Binladin contracting firm, destined to inherit some portion of its vast operations, Osama Bin Laden would certainly have been aware of Yamasaki's Saudi Arabian projects. Indeed, his family may have built them. (Minoru Yamasaki Associates won't say, but the Binladens were involved with almost all royal construction.) While Osama was in college in the mid-'70s, Yamasaki was designing his second generation of Saudi work, and the World Trade Center—then the tallest building in the world times two—came to completion in New York. This period was the high-water mark both for Yamasaki's world reputation and for the Saudis' national construction plan—which in Saudi Arabia must have brought a heightened sense of importance to the World Trade Center.
Having rejected modernism and the Saudi royal family, it's no surprise that Bin Laden would turn against Yamasaki's work in particular. He must have seen how Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality. Such mixing of the sacred and the profane is old hat to us—after all, Cass Gilbert's classic Woolworth Building, dubbed the Cathedral to Commerce, is decked out in extravagant Gothic regalia. But to someone who wants to purify Islam from commercialism, Yamasaki's implicit Mosque to Commerce would be anathema. To Bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but also a false idol.
13 Evil Bloodlines
1 1. The Astor Bloodline
2. 2. The Bundy Bloodline
3.3. The Collins Bloodline
4.4. The DuPont Bloodline
5.5. The Freeman Bloodline
6 6. The Kennedy Bloodline
7 7. The Li Bloodline
8.8. The Onassis Bloodline
9 9. The Reynolds bloodline
110. The Rockefeller Bloodline
11. The Rothschild Bloodline
12. The Russell Bloodline
13. The Van Duyn Bloodline
Brad Pitt blasts oil spill execs says death penalty might be considered
Spike Lee If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise youtube
Brad Pitt blasts oil spill execs says death penalty might be considered
Brad Pitt blasts oil spill execs
23/08/2010 13:32
Email · Print
Brad Pitt says that executives responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill deserve the death penalty.
The Inglourious Basterds star speaks out against those behind the oil rig explosion in a new documentary titled If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. The oil spill last April caused the worst environmental disaster in US history with millions of gallons of oil flooding into the sea.
Of the people responsible for the disaster, Brad says: “I was never for the death penalty before; I am willing to look at it again.”
The oil spill, which happened after an explosion on the BP operated Deepwater Horizon rig, resulted in the decimation of wildlife and habitat of marine and coastal animals, as well as loss of livelihood for many fishermen and other people who depend of the area for work. As yet the root cause of the disaster remains unconfirmed.
Brad’s comments are at the end of the documentary, filmed by Spike Lee, about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the closest major US city to the Deepwater rig, five years after the hurricane devastated the city, leaving 80 per cent of it waterlogged.
Brad spearheaded the Make it Right project after the natural disaster, which built 150 affordable and sustainable homes in one of the areas of New Orleans that was worst hit.
The documentary originally ended on a positive note, with the New Orleans saints NFL team winning the Super Bowl, but after the oil spill, Spike extended the programme to include the effects of it.
He said: "This would have been a much more upbeat documentary for sure."
An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico during the 87-day spill. An operation to seal the leak will not be completed until next month.
Spike Lee If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise youtube
Brad Pitt blasts oil spill execs says death penalty might be considered
Brad Pitt blasts oil spill execs
23/08/2010 13:32
Email · Print
Brad Pitt says that executives responsible for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill deserve the death penalty.
The Inglourious Basterds star speaks out against those behind the oil rig explosion in a new documentary titled If God is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise. The oil spill last April caused the worst environmental disaster in US history with millions of gallons of oil flooding into the sea.
Of the people responsible for the disaster, Brad says: “I was never for the death penalty before; I am willing to look at it again.”
The oil spill, which happened after an explosion on the BP operated Deepwater Horizon rig, resulted in the decimation of wildlife and habitat of marine and coastal animals, as well as loss of livelihood for many fishermen and other people who depend of the area for work. As yet the root cause of the disaster remains unconfirmed.
Brad’s comments are at the end of the documentary, filmed by Spike Lee, about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the closest major US city to the Deepwater rig, five years after the hurricane devastated the city, leaving 80 per cent of it waterlogged.
Brad spearheaded the Make it Right project after the natural disaster, which built 150 affordable and sustainable homes in one of the areas of New Orleans that was worst hit.
The documentary originally ended on a positive note, with the New Orleans saints NFL team winning the Super Bowl, but after the oil spill, Spike extended the programme to include the effects of it.
He said: "This would have been a much more upbeat documentary for sure."
An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico during the 87-day spill. An operation to seal the leak will not be completed until next month.
Monday, August 23, 2010
This first youtube is 28 mins. and the Doping e Coli starts midway......about 15 mins. It's a must watch and then pass far and wide.
Frontiers: Doping e Coli youtube
Aspartame made from genetically modified e-coli youtube
GM E-coli
EXCERPT:
"These alcohols are typically trace byproducts in fermentation," Liao said. "To modify an organism to produce these compounds usually results in toxicity in the cell. We bypassed this difficulty by leveraging the native metabolic networks in E. coli but altered its intracellular chemistry using genetic engineering to produce these alcohols."
The research team modified key pathways in E. coli to produce several higher-chain alcohols from glucose, a renewable carbon source, including isobutanol, 1-butanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol, 3-methyl-1-butanol and 2-phenylethanol.
Intralylix
Food Safety
Foodborne illness of microbial origin continues to be a serious food safety problem worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has estimated1 that foodborne pathogens cause approximately 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths each year in the United States alone. At the present time, the leading causes of death due to foodborne bacterial pathogens are Listeria and Salmonella, followed closely by other foodborne pathogens such as Escherichia coli (E. coli O157:H7, in particular) and Campylobacter jejunii. Bacteriophages may provide a natural, non-toxic, safe, and effective means for significantly reducing or eliminating contamination of foods with specific pathogenic bacteria, thereby eliminating the risk, or significantly reducing the magnitude and severity, of foodborne illness caused by the consumption of foods contaminated with those bacteria. Intralytix has developed and is continuing to develop bacteriophage-based products targeting some of the deadliest foodborne bacterial pathogens, including L. monocytogenes and E. coli O157:H7.
Listeria monocytogenes and ListShield™
Disease caused by L. monocytogenes (listeriosis) has one of the highest fatality rates (approximately 20%) among all foodborne bacterial diseases and, therefore, is of particular concern for human safety. Several outbreaks of foodborne listeriosis have been reported since 1980, when the bacterium was first associated with foodborne transmission. A variety of contaminated foods, including coleslaw, unpasteurized cheese, pasteurized milk, delicatessen meat, and other ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products have been reported to be sources of the etiologic agent. The high fatality rate associated with listeriosis caused the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture to establish a “zero tolerance” for L. monocytogenes in RTE foods. However, eliminating L. monocytogenes from food processing plants has proved to be a very difficult task and foods contaminated with L. monocytogenes have continued to be important public health problem which have resulted in numerous food recalls.
Intralytix has developed a bacteriophage-based preparation, designated ListShield™, to reduce or eliminate the risk of foodborne listeriosis. The preparation consists of six naturally occurring bacteriophages isolated from the environment and exhaustively studied and carefully selected for inclusion in ListShield™ by Intralytix’s scientists. The preparation, when sprayed onto RTE foods, significantly reduces (usually by 100 to 1000-fold) contamination of those foods with L. monocytogenes. ListShield™ is an all-natural product, and media and components of animal origin are not used during its preparation. Also, it does not contain preservatives or known, potentially allergenic substances (wheat, milk, soy, etc.), and it does not alter the general composition, taste, odor or color of foods. On 18 August 2006, the FDA approved ListShield™ as an additive for RTE foods (21 CFR §172.785). At the present time, Intralytix is the only company in the world to have received FDA approval for using a bacteriophage-based preparation as a food additive. Intralytix considers ListShield™ to be one of the safest and most environmentally friendly natural products for significantly reducing the risk of foodborne human listeriosis due to the consumption of contaminated RTE foods.
ListShield™ is a Star K-certified kosher product and can be used on all foods without affecting their kosher designation.
Escherichia coli O157:H7 and EcoShield™
E. coli O157:H7 is a significant contributor to foodborne illnesses worldwide. It has been estimated to cause approximately 62,000 cases of foodborne disease/year (and ca. 1,800 foodborne illness-related hospitalizations/year) in the United States alone, at an annual cost of ca. 0.7 billion dollars.
Intralytix has developed a new phage-based product, designated EcoShield™, which is effective against E. coli O157:H7. Similar to ListShield™, EcoShield™ is 100% natural, and it does not contain preservatives or any known, potentially allergenic substances. The product is highly effective in reducing contamination of various foods (e.g., ground beef, fruits, vegetables, etc.) with E. coli O157:H7, thus providing a much-needed modality for significantly reducing or eliminating contamination of various food products with the bacterium.
EcoShield™ is a Star K-certified kosher product and can be used on all foods without affecting their kosher designation.
References:
1. Mead, P. S., Slutsker, L., Dietz, V., McCaig, L. F., Bresee, J. S., Shapiro, C., Griffin, P. M., and Tauxe, R. V., Food-related illness and death in the United States, Emerg Infect Dis 5 (5), 607-25, 1999.
2. Buzby, J. C., Children and microbial foodborne illness, Food Review 24, 32-37, 2001.
Viral Meat Spray
HEALTH NEWS
FDA Oks Spray-On Virus Additives for Meat
Written by Rita Jenkins| 20 August, 2006 04:38 GMT
The FDA has approved a spray-on mixture of bacteria-killing viruses as additives to cold cuts, wieners and sausages to destroy Listeria microbes, which kill hundreds of people in the US each year. The latest US-approved additive to ready-to-eat lunchmeat and poultry products is a combination of six bacteriophages -- parasitic viruses that destroy the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, which sickens thousands and kills hundreds of people each year.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday declared the virus mix safe to spray on such foods as cold cuts, hot dogs, sausages, sliced ham and turkey prior to packaging.
Foods like these are especially vulnerable to Listeria because they are often not reheated prior to consumption, explained Andrew Zajac of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety. Cooking meat kills the Listeria bacterium, but foods can become contaminated after processing.
The FDA's approval of the mixture -- the first time viruses have been approved for use as a food additive -- is a "huge milestone" in the fight against food-borne illnesses, said John Vazzana, chief executive officer of Intralytix. Pregnant women, newborns and adults with weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable to listeriosis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 2,500 people become seriously ill with the infection each year, and 500 ultimately die from it.
Bacteriaphages are grown in a preparation of the same bacteria they are designed to kill, and then purified.
According to Intralytix, typical phages have hollow heads that store their viral DNA and tunnel tails with tips that bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages.
These "young" phages burst from the host cell, thereby destroying it, and go on to infect more bacteria. The viruses will not kill any organism other than their target bacteria.
Prior to issuing its approval, the FDA was concerned that the virus preparation might contain toxic residues associated with the bacteria. Tests found no residues present, however. In small quantities, such residues would be unlikely to cause any health problems, the FDA said.
Salem News GM Foods
EXCERPT:
Our United States Bill of Rights prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Wikipedia defines Liberty as a concept of political philosophy and it identifies the condition in which an individual has the right to act according to his or her own willl. Has this not taken place against our will?
From Monsanto’s Web Site: “Our Human Rights Policy is guided by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which provides the most widely recognized definition of human rights… Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world; Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people; Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…”
Author's note: Little of this information that I’m sharing with you is new. This debate has gone on for at least two decades. In mainstream media it has received very little coverage, because typically they are guided by advertising dollars. Food manufacturers have plenty of that. This article was written using a compilation of the research, which is diligently noted below. As a consumer, there is something you can do about it. Your dollar says it all. Think about what you buy. Below is a shopping list put out by the Center for Food Safety to help you determine what may or may not contain genetically modified foods products or ingredients?
Recent Victories - Center for Food Safety Victories/v
Frontiers: Doping e Coli youtube
Aspartame made from genetically modified e-coli youtube
GM E-coli
EXCERPT:
"These alcohols are typically trace byproducts in fermentation," Liao said. "To modify an organism to produce these compounds usually results in toxicity in the cell. We bypassed this difficulty by leveraging the native metabolic networks in E. coli but altered its intracellular chemistry using genetic engineering to produce these alcohols."
The research team modified key pathways in E. coli to produce several higher-chain alcohols from glucose, a renewable carbon source, including isobutanol, 1-butanol, 2-methyl-1-butanol, 3-methyl-1-butanol and 2-phenylethanol.
Intralylix
Food Safety
Foodborne illness of microbial origin continues to be a serious food safety problem worldwide. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has estimated1 that foodborne pathogens cause approximately 76 million illnesses and 5,000 deaths each year in the United States alone. At the present time, the leading causes of death due to foodborne bacterial pathogens are Listeria and Salmonella, followed closely by other foodborne pathogens such as Escherichia coli (E. coli O157:H7, in particular) and Campylobacter jejunii. Bacteriophages may provide a natural, non-toxic, safe, and effective means for significantly reducing or eliminating contamination of foods with specific pathogenic bacteria, thereby eliminating the risk, or significantly reducing the magnitude and severity, of foodborne illness caused by the consumption of foods contaminated with those bacteria. Intralytix has developed and is continuing to develop bacteriophage-based products targeting some of the deadliest foodborne bacterial pathogens, including L. monocytogenes and E. coli O157:H7.
Listeria monocytogenes and ListShield™
Disease caused by L. monocytogenes (listeriosis) has one of the highest fatality rates (approximately 20%) among all foodborne bacterial diseases and, therefore, is of particular concern for human safety. Several outbreaks of foodborne listeriosis have been reported since 1980, when the bacterium was first associated with foodborne transmission. A variety of contaminated foods, including coleslaw, unpasteurized cheese, pasteurized milk, delicatessen meat, and other ready-to-eat (RTE) meat products have been reported to be sources of the etiologic agent. The high fatality rate associated with listeriosis caused the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety Inspection Service of the United States Department of Agriculture to establish a “zero tolerance” for L. monocytogenes in RTE foods. However, eliminating L. monocytogenes from food processing plants has proved to be a very difficult task and foods contaminated with L. monocytogenes have continued to be important public health problem which have resulted in numerous food recalls.
Intralytix has developed a bacteriophage-based preparation, designated ListShield™, to reduce or eliminate the risk of foodborne listeriosis. The preparation consists of six naturally occurring bacteriophages isolated from the environment and exhaustively studied and carefully selected for inclusion in ListShield™ by Intralytix’s scientists. The preparation, when sprayed onto RTE foods, significantly reduces (usually by 100 to 1000-fold) contamination of those foods with L. monocytogenes. ListShield™ is an all-natural product, and media and components of animal origin are not used during its preparation. Also, it does not contain preservatives or known, potentially allergenic substances (wheat, milk, soy, etc.), and it does not alter the general composition, taste, odor or color of foods. On 18 August 2006, the FDA approved ListShield™ as an additive for RTE foods (21 CFR §172.785). At the present time, Intralytix is the only company in the world to have received FDA approval for using a bacteriophage-based preparation as a food additive. Intralytix considers ListShield™ to be one of the safest and most environmentally friendly natural products for significantly reducing the risk of foodborne human listeriosis due to the consumption of contaminated RTE foods.
ListShield™ is a Star K-certified kosher product and can be used on all foods without affecting their kosher designation.
Escherichia coli O157:H7 and EcoShield™
E. coli O157:H7 is a significant contributor to foodborne illnesses worldwide. It has been estimated to cause approximately 62,000 cases of foodborne disease/year (and ca. 1,800 foodborne illness-related hospitalizations/year) in the United States alone, at an annual cost of ca. 0.7 billion dollars.
Intralytix has developed a new phage-based product, designated EcoShield™, which is effective against E. coli O157:H7. Similar to ListShield™, EcoShield™ is 100% natural, and it does not contain preservatives or any known, potentially allergenic substances. The product is highly effective in reducing contamination of various foods (e.g., ground beef, fruits, vegetables, etc.) with E. coli O157:H7, thus providing a much-needed modality for significantly reducing or eliminating contamination of various food products with the bacterium.
EcoShield™ is a Star K-certified kosher product and can be used on all foods without affecting their kosher designation.
References:
1. Mead, P. S., Slutsker, L., Dietz, V., McCaig, L. F., Bresee, J. S., Shapiro, C., Griffin, P. M., and Tauxe, R. V., Food-related illness and death in the United States, Emerg Infect Dis 5 (5), 607-25, 1999.
2. Buzby, J. C., Children and microbial foodborne illness, Food Review 24, 32-37, 2001.
Viral Meat Spray
HEALTH NEWS
FDA Oks Spray-On Virus Additives for Meat
Written by Rita Jenkins| 20 August, 2006 04:38 GMT
The FDA has approved a spray-on mixture of bacteria-killing viruses as additives to cold cuts, wieners and sausages to destroy Listeria microbes, which kill hundreds of people in the US each year. The latest US-approved additive to ready-to-eat lunchmeat and poultry products is a combination of six bacteriophages -- parasitic viruses that destroy the Listeria monocytogenes bacterium, which sickens thousands and kills hundreds of people each year.
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday declared the virus mix safe to spray on such foods as cold cuts, hot dogs, sausages, sliced ham and turkey prior to packaging.
Foods like these are especially vulnerable to Listeria because they are often not reheated prior to consumption, explained Andrew Zajac of the FDA's Office of Food Additive Safety. Cooking meat kills the Listeria bacterium, but foods can become contaminated after processing.
The FDA's approval of the mixture -- the first time viruses have been approved for use as a food additive -- is a "huge milestone" in the fight against food-borne illnesses, said John Vazzana, chief executive officer of Intralytix. Pregnant women, newborns and adults with weakened immune systems are especially vulnerable to listeriosis. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that 2,500 people become seriously ill with the infection each year, and 500 ultimately die from it.
Bacteriaphages are grown in a preparation of the same bacteria they are designed to kill, and then purified.
According to Intralytix, typical phages have hollow heads that store their viral DNA and tunnel tails with tips that bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages.
These "young" phages burst from the host cell, thereby destroying it, and go on to infect more bacteria. The viruses will not kill any organism other than their target bacteria.
Prior to issuing its approval, the FDA was concerned that the virus preparation might contain toxic residues associated with the bacteria. Tests found no residues present, however. In small quantities, such residues would be unlikely to cause any health problems, the FDA said.
Salem News GM Foods
EXCERPT:
Our United States Bill of Rights prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Wikipedia defines Liberty as a concept of political philosophy and it identifies the condition in which an individual has the right to act according to his or her own willl. Has this not taken place against our will?
From Monsanto’s Web Site: “Our Human Rights Policy is guided by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which provides the most widely recognized definition of human rights… Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world; Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people; Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law…”
Author's note: Little of this information that I’m sharing with you is new. This debate has gone on for at least two decades. In mainstream media it has received very little coverage, because typically they are guided by advertising dollars. Food manufacturers have plenty of that. This article was written using a compilation of the research, which is diligently noted below. As a consumer, there is something you can do about it. Your dollar says it all. Think about what you buy. Below is a shopping list put out by the Center for Food Safety to help you determine what may or may not contain genetically modified foods products or ingredients?
Recent Victories - Center for Food Safety Victories/v
Negro Spies vs Jew Spies (Nixon) youtube
Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove youtube
New Tapes Reveal Depth of Nixon's Anti-Semitism
Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove
EXCERPT:
By George Lardner Jr. and Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 1999; Page A31
Beset by the leak of a top-secret history of the Vietnam War and rising unemployment statistics that were hurting his standing in the polls in summer of 1971, President Richard M. Nixon lashed out repeatedly at "the Jews" he saw at the root of his problems.
Source: scanned from The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers: A Summary, 1969-1974, published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1979
The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers, 1969-1974
These memoes and other documents from the Nixon White House cover a period of peak conflict between the President's staff and public broadcasting.
The documents were released by the government five years later in response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 1978 by the second Carnegie Commission. These summaries were prepared and released during the Carter Administration by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the successor agency of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, a central player in the 1969-74 conflict.
The summaries were published as The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers 1969-1974 by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.
Foreword to NAEB printing | NTIA letters of transmittal
1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974
Foreword [to NAEB publication]
In publishing The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers 1969-1974, the NAEB is making available to its members and other interested parties a record of a particularly critical period in the history of public broadcasting. Distribution of this summary whose origin and content are explained in the covering memoranda, is intended to illustrate a chapter in the study and analysis of certain constitutional issues in and the structural framework of public broadcasting, and to bring to light "a pattern of practices" that will focus serious attention on the need for insulation from political interference.
This summary can be regarded as a companion document to a Public Telecommunications Review reprint of a series of articles written by Dr. Robert K. Avery and Dr. Robert Pepper, The Politics of Interconnection: A History of Public Television at the National Level. Another treatment of public broadcasting's recent history, the Avery/Pepper series includes the articles "Interconnection Connection"; "Interconnection Disconnection"; "Interconnection Reconnection"; and "Interconnection Redirection." This PTR series is now available in reprint form from the NAEB.
As part of the continuing examination of the statutory and internal structure of public broadcasting, the NAEB hopes to stimulate, through the PTR, further discussion and opinion on these basic issues. It is hoped that interested parties, among them constitutional scholars and communications attorneys, will examine these issues placing them in current contexts as well as citing past incidences.
NTIA letters of transmittal
February 23, 1979
Ms. Sheila Mahony
Executive Director
Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting
1270 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
Dear Ms. Mahony:
This is in further response to your November 9, 1978, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) , 5 U.S.C. Section 552, request for all records within the custody of NTIA dealing with public broadcasting from 1967 to the present.
Pursuant to your request, we have made a search of NTIA files, including those of NTIA's predecessor, the Office of Telecommunications Policy, and located more than 10,000 pages of material regarding public broadcasting.
Having now reviewed all of the material--this accounts for the time it has taken us to respond to you--we find that many of the documents are exempt from disclosure under 5 U.S.C. Section 552(b) (5), which allows agencies to withhold "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with an agency." This exception has been interpreted to allow an agency to withhold policy memorandums which are a part of the deliberative or advisory process or which involve attorney work product, although purely factual material must be disclosed.
The decision to withhold documents is discretionary and, in this case, we have determined that the public interest would be served if certain of the exempt documents were disclosed.
Specifically, many of the Nixon Administration policy documents show a pattern of practices that evidence the extent to which public broadcasting has been subject to political pressures--practices which are germane to issues raised both by your Commission's recent report and current legislative activities of the House and Senate Communications Subcommittees. These issues include the sensitive problem of the government's relationship to a First Amendment medium. This goes to the essence of current proposals to provide public broadcasting greater insulation from political interference. Therefore, in addition to making available to you all Carter, Ford and Nixon Administration documents which are of a strictly factual nature, we are also making available those Nixon Administration policy memorandums which bear on the subjects of public broadcasting programming and system control.
Based upon discussion between counsel, we are enclosing approximately 1,000 pages of material. Consistent with the above, we will provide such additional material as you may request.
Department of Commerce regulations provide that a fee of seven cents per page be charged for duplication costs in connection with FOIA requests. We would appreciate remittance of a check or money order in the amount of $70.00, payable to the U.S. Department of Commerce, to cover the cost of the enclosed material.
Sincerely,
Henry Geller
[Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, U.S. Department of Commerce]
February 22, 1979
TO: C.L. Haslam
FROM: Gregg P. Skall
SUBJECT: Carnegie Commission FOIA Request
The attached is a summary of the policy documents NTIA plans to provide to the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting. As you know, this is a working document that we have prepared to aid in reviewing the requested. material. There are very few changes from the draft I sent you two weeks ago.
The summary quotes only from policy documents that are covered by the Carnegie request. Since no other material was used in its preparation, the summary represents only a condensation of roughly 10,000 pages of material, and should be understood to be only a reasonable effort to summarize that material.
There has been no attempt to comment or editorialize on the documents. We consider the summary a strictly factual, chronological accounting.
I hope this is helpful to you.
Source: scanned from The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers: A Summary, 1969-1974, published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1979
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Broadcasting PolicyBase
A service of Current Publishing Committee and the National Public Broadcasting Archives
Web page created Jan. 27, 2000
E-mail: webcurrent.org
Foundation for Floridas future and Jeb Bush more
Our Vision: An education system that allows each child to achieve his or her God-given potential and prepares all students to succeed in the 21st Century economy.
Our Mission: To make Florida's education system a model for the nation.
Message From the Chairman
A quality education can change a life. It can break the cruel cycle of poverty and end generations of dependence on government. It opens the door to opportunity and provides the skills for success after school. An engaging and challenging education is the proven path to prosperity and a life-long love of learning.
Florida has made great strides to improve the quality of education. A decade ago, the Sunshine State ranked at the bottom nationally. Nearly one-third of third graders couldn’t read on grade level and close to half of fourth graders were functionally illiterate. Too many students were dropping out of school, while those who stayed weren’t gaining the knowledge to succeed after graduation.
So much has changed since then. Today, Florida’s elementary and middle school students are reading above the national average. Math proficiency is on the rise. More students are taking and passing rigorous courses that prepare them for college. The graduation rate has jumped by double digits and fewer students are dropping out.
Our success was built on a foundation of core principles. Starting with the A+ Plan in 1999 and continuing today, our reforms combine high expectations, standardized measurement, a clear and achievable system of accountability, rewards and consequences for performance, effective teaching in the classroom and more choices to customize education to each student.
The path to rising student achievement was not easy or painless. In the first year schools were graded on the simple A-F letter scale, Florida had more Ds and Fs than As and Bs. When Florida ended social promotion for third graders who couldn’t read, the retention rate skyrocketed. Every time we raised the bar, scores and grades dropped – for a time – but then slowly climbed back to the higher levels of achievement.
Thanks to the courageous leadership of the Florida Legislature, the state didn’t abandon reform when times got tough. Instead, lawmakers focused on the long-term benefits of providing a quality education to every student in our state. As a result, Florida did what few other states have accomplished – reversed a generation of decline in public schools.
The results of our reform prove what we have said for more than a decade – all students can achieve when schools are organized around the singular goal of learning.
While Florida is now a model for the nation, our job is far from done. We must continue to reform education to keep the promise of a quality education for all Sunshine State students. Join us today.
Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove youtube
New Tapes Reveal Depth of Nixon's Anti-Semitism
Nixon Tape Discusses Homosexuals at Bohemian Grove
EXCERPT:
By George Lardner Jr. and Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 6, 1999; Page A31
Beset by the leak of a top-secret history of the Vietnam War and rising unemployment statistics that were hurting his standing in the polls in summer of 1971, President Richard M. Nixon lashed out repeatedly at "the Jews" he saw at the root of his problems.
Source: scanned from The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers: A Summary, 1969-1974, published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1979
The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers, 1969-1974
These memoes and other documents from the Nixon White House cover a period of peak conflict between the President's staff and public broadcasting.
The documents were released by the government five years later in response to a Freedom of Information Act request in 1978 by the second Carnegie Commission. These summaries were prepared and released during the Carter Administration by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the successor agency of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, a central player in the 1969-74 conflict.
The summaries were published as The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers 1969-1974 by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.
Foreword to NAEB printing | NTIA letters of transmittal
1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974
Foreword [to NAEB publication]
In publishing The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers 1969-1974, the NAEB is making available to its members and other interested parties a record of a particularly critical period in the history of public broadcasting. Distribution of this summary whose origin and content are explained in the covering memoranda, is intended to illustrate a chapter in the study and analysis of certain constitutional issues in and the structural framework of public broadcasting, and to bring to light "a pattern of practices" that will focus serious attention on the need for insulation from political interference.
This summary can be regarded as a companion document to a Public Telecommunications Review reprint of a series of articles written by Dr. Robert K. Avery and Dr. Robert Pepper, The Politics of Interconnection: A History of Public Television at the National Level. Another treatment of public broadcasting's recent history, the Avery/Pepper series includes the articles "Interconnection Connection"; "Interconnection Disconnection"; "Interconnection Reconnection"; and "Interconnection Redirection." This PTR series is now available in reprint form from the NAEB.
As part of the continuing examination of the statutory and internal structure of public broadcasting, the NAEB hopes to stimulate, through the PTR, further discussion and opinion on these basic issues. It is hoped that interested parties, among them constitutional scholars and communications attorneys, will examine these issues placing them in current contexts as well as citing past incidences.
NTIA letters of transmittal
February 23, 1979
Ms. Sheila Mahony
Executive Director
Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting
1270 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
Dear Ms. Mahony:
This is in further response to your November 9, 1978, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) , 5 U.S.C. Section 552, request for all records within the custody of NTIA dealing with public broadcasting from 1967 to the present.
Pursuant to your request, we have made a search of NTIA files, including those of NTIA's predecessor, the Office of Telecommunications Policy, and located more than 10,000 pages of material regarding public broadcasting.
Having now reviewed all of the material--this accounts for the time it has taken us to respond to you--we find that many of the documents are exempt from disclosure under 5 U.S.C. Section 552(b) (5), which allows agencies to withhold "inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with an agency." This exception has been interpreted to allow an agency to withhold policy memorandums which are a part of the deliberative or advisory process or which involve attorney work product, although purely factual material must be disclosed.
The decision to withhold documents is discretionary and, in this case, we have determined that the public interest would be served if certain of the exempt documents were disclosed.
Specifically, many of the Nixon Administration policy documents show a pattern of practices that evidence the extent to which public broadcasting has been subject to political pressures--practices which are germane to issues raised both by your Commission's recent report and current legislative activities of the House and Senate Communications Subcommittees. These issues include the sensitive problem of the government's relationship to a First Amendment medium. This goes to the essence of current proposals to provide public broadcasting greater insulation from political interference. Therefore, in addition to making available to you all Carter, Ford and Nixon Administration documents which are of a strictly factual nature, we are also making available those Nixon Administration policy memorandums which bear on the subjects of public broadcasting programming and system control.
Based upon discussion between counsel, we are enclosing approximately 1,000 pages of material. Consistent with the above, we will provide such additional material as you may request.
Department of Commerce regulations provide that a fee of seven cents per page be charged for duplication costs in connection with FOIA requests. We would appreciate remittance of a check or money order in the amount of $70.00, payable to the U.S. Department of Commerce, to cover the cost of the enclosed material.
Sincerely,
Henry Geller
[Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, U.S. Department of Commerce]
February 22, 1979
TO: C.L. Haslam
FROM: Gregg P. Skall
SUBJECT: Carnegie Commission FOIA Request
The attached is a summary of the policy documents NTIA plans to provide to the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting. As you know, this is a working document that we have prepared to aid in reviewing the requested. material. There are very few changes from the draft I sent you two weeks ago.
The summary quotes only from policy documents that are covered by the Carnegie request. Since no other material was used in its preparation, the summary represents only a condensation of roughly 10,000 pages of material, and should be understood to be only a reasonable effort to summarize that material.
There has been no attempt to comment or editorialize on the documents. We consider the summary a strictly factual, chronological accounting.
I hope this is helpful to you.
Source: scanned from The Nixon Administration Public Broadcasting Papers: A Summary, 1969-1974, published by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, 1979
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Broadcasting PolicyBase
A service of Current Publishing Committee and the National Public Broadcasting Archives
Web page created Jan. 27, 2000
E-mail: webcurrent.org
Foundation for Floridas future and Jeb Bush more
Our Vision: An education system that allows each child to achieve his or her God-given potential and prepares all students to succeed in the 21st Century economy.
Our Mission: To make Florida's education system a model for the nation.
Message From the Chairman
A quality education can change a life. It can break the cruel cycle of poverty and end generations of dependence on government. It opens the door to opportunity and provides the skills for success after school. An engaging and challenging education is the proven path to prosperity and a life-long love of learning.
Florida has made great strides to improve the quality of education. A decade ago, the Sunshine State ranked at the bottom nationally. Nearly one-third of third graders couldn’t read on grade level and close to half of fourth graders were functionally illiterate. Too many students were dropping out of school, while those who stayed weren’t gaining the knowledge to succeed after graduation.
So much has changed since then. Today, Florida’s elementary and middle school students are reading above the national average. Math proficiency is on the rise. More students are taking and passing rigorous courses that prepare them for college. The graduation rate has jumped by double digits and fewer students are dropping out.
Our success was built on a foundation of core principles. Starting with the A+ Plan in 1999 and continuing today, our reforms combine high expectations, standardized measurement, a clear and achievable system of accountability, rewards and consequences for performance, effective teaching in the classroom and more choices to customize education to each student.
The path to rising student achievement was not easy or painless. In the first year schools were graded on the simple A-F letter scale, Florida had more Ds and Fs than As and Bs. When Florida ended social promotion for third graders who couldn’t read, the retention rate skyrocketed. Every time we raised the bar, scores and grades dropped – for a time – but then slowly climbed back to the higher levels of achievement.
Thanks to the courageous leadership of the Florida Legislature, the state didn’t abandon reform when times got tough. Instead, lawmakers focused on the long-term benefits of providing a quality education to every student in our state. As a result, Florida did what few other states have accomplished – reversed a generation of decline in public schools.
The results of our reform prove what we have said for more than a decade – all students can achieve when schools are organized around the singular goal of learning.
While Florida is now a model for the nation, our job is far from done. We must continue to reform education to keep the promise of a quality education for all Sunshine State students. Join us today.
Pat Tillman Movie in Bay Area Sept. 3, 2010
Pat Tillman movie likely to revive debate over football player's death
Julia Prodis Sulek
jsulek@mercurynews.com
Posted: 08/21/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT
Pat Tillman and brother Kevin, after they enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2002. Courtesy the...«123»Six years after San Jose native and football star Pat Tillman was shot to death on an Afghanistan hillside, a new, high-profile documentary is likely to bring the controversy over how he died and the military's bungled attempt at a cover-up back to the forefront of public debate.
"The Tillman Story" -- directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by actor Josh Brolin -- opened in New York and Los Angeles to rave reviews Friday.
While the documentary sheds little new light on the military cover-up of Tillman's "friendly fire" death at the hands of fellow soldiers in April 2004 and doesn't provide satisfactory answers to persistent questions, the film makes one thing perfectly clear: Military officials who used Tillman's death as a propaganda tool "lied to the wrong family."
The documentary -- which opens Sept. 3 in the Bay Area -- also provides a glimpse into the guilt and anguish of two soldiers who were with Tillman the day he died, who knew it was American soldiers who fired the shots that killed him, not enemy soldiers as the military first had led the family -- and the nation -- to believe. One soldier had been huddled next to him when gunfire sprayed across Tillman's head, and the other kept the truth to himself as he accompanied Tillman's body -- and brother -- home to San Jose.
In its review, the Los Angeles Times said that "thanks to Bar-Lev's skill and the remarkable personalities of the Tillman clan, 'The
Tillman Story' is utterly entertaining, even as it infuriates." Slate called it "a thoughtful and nuanced story about a mother and son's mutual devotion, a fresh take on relationships that spring from wartime tragedy, and an important lesson for today's military families." And The New York Times, in its review, described the film as a "sorrowful, devastating documentary" about "the cynical chain of command that lied to (the Tillman family) and used their son as a propaganda tool."
Director Bar-Lev -- who coproduced the Oscar-nominated documentary "Trouble the Water," about Hurricane Katrina -- said he was not only interested in how Tillman died, but also in the myth surrounding the man himself. When Tillman gave up a multimillion-dollar NFL contract after 9/11 to join the Army Rangers with his brother, Kevin, he instantly became the most famous enlisted man.
"What I hope for the film is that Pat becomes more heroic when people understand who he was," Bar-Lev said in an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
The movie is rich in film clips and family photos of Tillman's youth growing up in the tiny San Jose enclave of New Almaden, playing football for Leland High and for the Arizona Cardinals, getting married to his high school sweetheart and heading off to war with Kevin. It shows him as an intellectual, an avid reader of philosophy, a mentor who took a scrawny young recruit under his wing. That very recruit, Bryan O'Neal, was beside him when Tillman was shot, when he shouted to his fellow soldiers firing from the canyon below, "I'm Pat f----ing Tillman."
In the movie, O'Neal said he still struggles with guilt.
"I blamed myself for quite some time that maybe Pat wasn't in a place he should be because I didn't put forth more effort," O'Neal said. "Because of my lack of faith, he may be suffering for it."
Russell Baer, another Army Ranger and close friend of the Tillman brothers, said he was ordered to keep quiet about what really happened on the hillside. He kept the truth to himself on the entire flight accompanying the body with Kevin Tillman, and in meeting with the family, who asked what had happened.
"I didn't say two words to Kevin the whole time we were flying home. I was afraid he might ask me what happened to Pat," Baer said. To the family, "I gave them my narrative excluding certain possibilities."
Afterward, he refused orders to rejoin his platoon and named his first son after Tillman.
As much as Bar-Lev admired the Tillman family's resolve to find the truth, they also presented challenges.
Just as Tillman never spoke publicly about why he joined the Army, his family declined to discuss it as well, saying only that his reasons were complex. Media outlets have been left with repeats of an interview he gave, along with the rest of the Cardinals players, about his feelings of patriotism the day after the Sept. 11 attacks.
That left a soldier, interviewed in the documentary, to fill in the blank, saying there was a "low mumble" among soldiers in their unit "that he was looking to be a political leader."
The family also refused to share Tillman's handwritten journal entries with Bar-Lev, even though they had given them to best-selling novelist Jon Krakauer for his book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman." Bar-Lev said Tillman's widow, Marie, told him she didn't want her husband's journal "in the hands of a moviemaker" who would likely hire an actor to do a voice-over of Tillman's written words.
Still, what Bar-Lev came to appreciate about the family, he said, is that the information they resisted giving him, the questions they refused to answer, were their way of "holding onto Pat."
As Marie Tillman said in the documentary about the media storm after her husband's death: "I had a sense of holding on to what I could. Pat, who he was as a person, was lost."
Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, didn't return a phone call to talk about the movie. In a clip from the documentary taken from the congressional hearings into the fratricide investigation, she considered the cover-up reprehensible.
"To write these glorious tales is a disservice to Pat," Mary Tillman says in the movie. "It might not be pretty, it might not be out of a John Wayne movie," she said, but he deserved the truth.
'The Tillman Story'
Opens: Sept. 3 in the Bay Area
Narrator: Josh Brolin
Director: Amir Bar-Lev
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Watch Mary Tillman Interview
Pat Tillman's Mom and Michael Moore speak out about Stanley McChrystal's appointment at Yale
Mother of Pat Tillman, Michael Moore, speak out about Gen. McChrystal's appointment to teach at Yale
Gatecrasher
Friday, August 20th 2010, 4:00 AM
Quraishi/PoolGeneral Stanley McChrystal was recently fired from his post for indiscreet comments made to a Rolling Stone reporter. Yale University announced that it appointed him a Senior Fellow.
Lee/EverettPat Tillman (l.) and his brother Kevin. Related NewsThe mother of Pat Tillman and filmmaker Michael Moore have something to say about Yale University’s hiring of Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Mary Tillman, whose discovery that McChrystal orchestrated the cover-up of her son’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan, is depicted in Amir Bar-Lev���s documentary "The Tillman Story" tells us the Ivy League institution’s hiring of the general that President Obama fired is "insulting." And Moore wonders if university administrators would re-think their offer after seeing some of the jaw-dropping information in the film.
This week, Yale announced that McChrystal had been appointed a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and will be teaching a graduate course on the complexity of leadership at the university this fall. The general retired this year after the president relieved him of command after he made disparaging remarks to interviewer Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone magazine.
But even before he was fired, McChrystal had become the subject of controversy thanks, in large part, to Mary Tillman���s dogged investigation into the military’s cover-up of the death of her son, which is covered in "The Tillman Story," which opens today.
When asked Tillman if she had any comment on McChrystal’s hiring, she released the following statement: "McChrystal showed poor judgment and he exercised little restraint during his interview with Michael Hastings. His involvement in the tortures at Camp Nama and in the cover-up of Pat’s death has never been satisfactorily scrutinized. The House Armed Services Committee failed to vet him properly in the spring of 2009. The fact that Yale wants to employ him to instruct courses on leadership is extremely insulting and unsettling."
Meanwhile, Moore says the film is "one scene after another where you’re sitting there with your jaw opening, wondering, ‘How come I don’t know this.’" And the filmmaker adds, "You see that McChrystal and his office were coordinating the big lie that was put out about how Pat Till man was killed, when, in fact, they knew the truth." The military initially sold a story about Tillman’s heroic death fighting Afghan forces when, in reality, he’d been killed by friendlies.
Moore says administrators should watch the documentary and take a look at the documents, many "redacted" that the Tillman family dug up on Pat’s death. The filmmaker adds that if the university’s administrators have "any integrity and they care about their institution," then "maybe they’d reconsider" whether they wanted McChrystal "lecturing at their institution of higher learning."
Yale University Press Secretary Thomas Conroy responds: "Part of the strength of a great university is bringing a wide range of knowledgeable views before its students. McChrystal, he adds, "seems well-positioned to speak to the issues that form the topic of the seminar he will be teaching."
Conroy adds that The Jackson Institute "is recruiting several policy practitioners with the goal of contributing to a better understanding by students of global affairs. The institute believes general McChrystal complements a team of teachers who will do that."
With Carson Griffith cgriffith@nydailynews.com
Where Men Win Glory Odyssey (Pat Tillman)
Book Description
The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey.
Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.
Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.
In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.
Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Exclusive: Jon Krakauer in Afghanistan
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. There may be no better example of the tragic aftermath of 9/11 than the story of pro-football-player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman, whose death in the wilds of Afghanistan in 2004 created a scandal of government cover-up. In this masterful work, bestselling adventure writer Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) renders an intimate portrait of Tillman and brilliantly captures the sadness, madness and heroism of the post-9/11 world. After the attacks, Tillman, a rising football star, eschewed a $3.6 million NFL deal with the Arizona Cardinals to join the military with his brother. From the outset, Pat was elevated by politicians and pundits as a symbol of America’s resolve, a role he detested and shunned, believing his football career afforded him no special status. After a grueling three-year training with the elite Army Rangers, however, instead of fighting terrorists, he found himself first deployed to Iraq--a war he called "an imperial whim." Tillman was later redeployed to Afghanistan, where he was killed in an almost unfathomable incident of friendly fire, which the Army obfuscated for weeks while the government hailed Tillman as a hero. Drawing on interviews with family, fellow soldiers and correspondence, Krakauer’s page-turning account captures every detail--Tillman’s extraordinary character, including the “tragic virtues” that led him to give up a comfortable life and athletic stardom for the army; the harshness of military training and life; the rugged terrain of remote Afghanistan--and, of course, the ravages of war. Most critically, Krakauer, by telling Tillman's personal story and blowing apart the "cynical cover-up" that followed his killing, Krakauer lays bare the best--and worst--of America's War on Terror.
Pat Tillman movie likely to revive debate over football player's death
Julia Prodis Sulek
jsulek@mercurynews.com
Posted: 08/21/2010 12:00:00 AM PDT
Pat Tillman and brother Kevin, after they enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2002. Courtesy the...«123»Six years after San Jose native and football star Pat Tillman was shot to death on an Afghanistan hillside, a new, high-profile documentary is likely to bring the controversy over how he died and the military's bungled attempt at a cover-up back to the forefront of public debate.
"The Tillman Story" -- directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev and narrated by actor Josh Brolin -- opened in New York and Los Angeles to rave reviews Friday.
While the documentary sheds little new light on the military cover-up of Tillman's "friendly fire" death at the hands of fellow soldiers in April 2004 and doesn't provide satisfactory answers to persistent questions, the film makes one thing perfectly clear: Military officials who used Tillman's death as a propaganda tool "lied to the wrong family."
The documentary -- which opens Sept. 3 in the Bay Area -- also provides a glimpse into the guilt and anguish of two soldiers who were with Tillman the day he died, who knew it was American soldiers who fired the shots that killed him, not enemy soldiers as the military first had led the family -- and the nation -- to believe. One soldier had been huddled next to him when gunfire sprayed across Tillman's head, and the other kept the truth to himself as he accompanied Tillman's body -- and brother -- home to San Jose.
In its review, the Los Angeles Times said that "thanks to Bar-Lev's skill and the remarkable personalities of the Tillman clan, 'The
Tillman Story' is utterly entertaining, even as it infuriates." Slate called it "a thoughtful and nuanced story about a mother and son's mutual devotion, a fresh take on relationships that spring from wartime tragedy, and an important lesson for today's military families." And The New York Times, in its review, described the film as a "sorrowful, devastating documentary" about "the cynical chain of command that lied to (the Tillman family) and used their son as a propaganda tool."
Director Bar-Lev -- who coproduced the Oscar-nominated documentary "Trouble the Water," about Hurricane Katrina -- said he was not only interested in how Tillman died, but also in the myth surrounding the man himself. When Tillman gave up a multimillion-dollar NFL contract after 9/11 to join the Army Rangers with his brother, Kevin, he instantly became the most famous enlisted man.
"What I hope for the film is that Pat becomes more heroic when people understand who he was," Bar-Lev said in an interview at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco.
The movie is rich in film clips and family photos of Tillman's youth growing up in the tiny San Jose enclave of New Almaden, playing football for Leland High and for the Arizona Cardinals, getting married to his high school sweetheart and heading off to war with Kevin. It shows him as an intellectual, an avid reader of philosophy, a mentor who took a scrawny young recruit under his wing. That very recruit, Bryan O'Neal, was beside him when Tillman was shot, when he shouted to his fellow soldiers firing from the canyon below, "I'm Pat f----ing Tillman."
In the movie, O'Neal said he still struggles with guilt.
"I blamed myself for quite some time that maybe Pat wasn't in a place he should be because I didn't put forth more effort," O'Neal said. "Because of my lack of faith, he may be suffering for it."
Russell Baer, another Army Ranger and close friend of the Tillman brothers, said he was ordered to keep quiet about what really happened on the hillside. He kept the truth to himself on the entire flight accompanying the body with Kevin Tillman, and in meeting with the family, who asked what had happened.
"I didn't say two words to Kevin the whole time we were flying home. I was afraid he might ask me what happened to Pat," Baer said. To the family, "I gave them my narrative excluding certain possibilities."
Afterward, he refused orders to rejoin his platoon and named his first son after Tillman.
As much as Bar-Lev admired the Tillman family's resolve to find the truth, they also presented challenges.
Just as Tillman never spoke publicly about why he joined the Army, his family declined to discuss it as well, saying only that his reasons were complex. Media outlets have been left with repeats of an interview he gave, along with the rest of the Cardinals players, about his feelings of patriotism the day after the Sept. 11 attacks.
That left a soldier, interviewed in the documentary, to fill in the blank, saying there was a "low mumble" among soldiers in their unit "that he was looking to be a political leader."
The family also refused to share Tillman's handwritten journal entries with Bar-Lev, even though they had given them to best-selling novelist Jon Krakauer for his book "Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman." Bar-Lev said Tillman's widow, Marie, told him she didn't want her husband's journal "in the hands of a moviemaker" who would likely hire an actor to do a voice-over of Tillman's written words.
Still, what Bar-Lev came to appreciate about the family, he said, is that the information they resisted giving him, the questions they refused to answer, were their way of "holding onto Pat."
As Marie Tillman said in the documentary about the media storm after her husband's death: "I had a sense of holding on to what I could. Pat, who he was as a person, was lost."
Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, didn't return a phone call to talk about the movie. In a clip from the documentary taken from the congressional hearings into the fratricide investigation, she considered the cover-up reprehensible.
"To write these glorious tales is a disservice to Pat," Mary Tillman says in the movie. "It might not be pretty, it might not be out of a John Wayne movie," she said, but he deserved the truth.
'The Tillman Story'
Opens: Sept. 3 in the Bay Area
Narrator: Josh Brolin
Director: Amir Bar-Lev
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes
Watch Mary Tillman Interview
Pat Tillman's Mom and Michael Moore speak out about Stanley McChrystal's appointment at Yale
Mother of Pat Tillman, Michael Moore, speak out about Gen. McChrystal's appointment to teach at Yale
Gatecrasher
Friday, August 20th 2010, 4:00 AM
Quraishi/PoolGeneral Stanley McChrystal was recently fired from his post for indiscreet comments made to a Rolling Stone reporter. Yale University announced that it appointed him a Senior Fellow.
Lee/EverettPat Tillman (l.) and his brother Kevin. Related NewsThe mother of Pat Tillman and filmmaker Michael Moore have something to say about Yale University’s hiring of Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Mary Tillman, whose discovery that McChrystal orchestrated the cover-up of her son’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan, is depicted in Amir Bar-Lev���s documentary "The Tillman Story" tells us the Ivy League institution’s hiring of the general that President Obama fired is "insulting." And Moore wonders if university administrators would re-think their offer after seeing some of the jaw-dropping information in the film.
This week, Yale announced that McChrystal had been appointed a Senior Fellow at Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and will be teaching a graduate course on the complexity of leadership at the university this fall. The general retired this year after the president relieved him of command after he made disparaging remarks to interviewer Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone magazine.
But even before he was fired, McChrystal had become the subject of controversy thanks, in large part, to Mary Tillman���s dogged investigation into the military’s cover-up of the death of her son, which is covered in "The Tillman Story," which opens today.
When asked Tillman if she had any comment on McChrystal’s hiring, she released the following statement: "McChrystal showed poor judgment and he exercised little restraint during his interview with Michael Hastings. His involvement in the tortures at Camp Nama and in the cover-up of Pat’s death has never been satisfactorily scrutinized. The House Armed Services Committee failed to vet him properly in the spring of 2009. The fact that Yale wants to employ him to instruct courses on leadership is extremely insulting and unsettling."
Meanwhile, Moore says the film is "one scene after another where you’re sitting there with your jaw opening, wondering, ‘How come I don’t know this.’" And the filmmaker adds, "You see that McChrystal and his office were coordinating the big lie that was put out about how Pat Till man was killed, when, in fact, they knew the truth." The military initially sold a story about Tillman’s heroic death fighting Afghan forces when, in reality, he’d been killed by friendlies.
Moore says administrators should watch the documentary and take a look at the documents, many "redacted" that the Tillman family dug up on Pat’s death. The filmmaker adds that if the university’s administrators have "any integrity and they care about their institution," then "maybe they’d reconsider" whether they wanted McChrystal "lecturing at their institution of higher learning."
Yale University Press Secretary Thomas Conroy responds: "Part of the strength of a great university is bringing a wide range of knowledgeable views before its students. McChrystal, he adds, "seems well-positioned to speak to the issues that form the topic of the seminar he will be teaching."
Conroy adds that The Jackson Institute "is recruiting several policy practitioners with the goal of contributing to a better understanding by students of global affairs. The institute believes general McChrystal complements a team of teachers who will do that."
With Carson Griffith cgriffith@nydailynews.com
Where Men Win Glory Odyssey (Pat Tillman)
Book Description
The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey.
Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.
Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.
In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.
Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amazon Exclusive: Jon Krakauer in Afghanistan
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. There may be no better example of the tragic aftermath of 9/11 than the story of pro-football-player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman, whose death in the wilds of Afghanistan in 2004 created a scandal of government cover-up. In this masterful work, bestselling adventure writer Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) renders an intimate portrait of Tillman and brilliantly captures the sadness, madness and heroism of the post-9/11 world. After the attacks, Tillman, a rising football star, eschewed a $3.6 million NFL deal with the Arizona Cardinals to join the military with his brother. From the outset, Pat was elevated by politicians and pundits as a symbol of America’s resolve, a role he detested and shunned, believing his football career afforded him no special status. After a grueling three-year training with the elite Army Rangers, however, instead of fighting terrorists, he found himself first deployed to Iraq--a war he called "an imperial whim." Tillman was later redeployed to Afghanistan, where he was killed in an almost unfathomable incident of friendly fire, which the Army obfuscated for weeks while the government hailed Tillman as a hero. Drawing on interviews with family, fellow soldiers and correspondence, Krakauer’s page-turning account captures every detail--Tillman’s extraordinary character, including the “tragic virtues” that led him to give up a comfortable life and athletic stardom for the army; the harshness of military training and life; the rugged terrain of remote Afghanistan--and, of course, the ravages of war. Most critically, Krakauer, by telling Tillman's personal story and blowing apart the "cynical cover-up" that followed his killing, Krakauer lays bare the best--and worst--of America's War on Terror.
BCCI
EXCERPT:
BCCI and Argentine Arms Deals
In response to the Foreign Relations Committee subpoena to BCCI, BCCI's liquidators produced documents concerning two proposed arms sales involving Argentina that had been maintained at BCCI's offices in Miami.
The first set of documents held at BCCI-Miami referred to the sale by the Argentine Air Force of what handwritten notes described as "22 units of Aircraft plus adequate space parts, including 6 spare engines at a price of $110,000,000.00," consisting of Mirage IIIC/B jets manufactured in France and "modified to Argentine Air Force requirements following years of combat experience."(26)
The prospectus included technical drawings of the Mirage jets and basic military specifications, with a commitment that the "AAF," or Argentine Air Force, would provide all technical documentation in support of the planes, ground support equipment, and, if the "customer country" wished, a full program of flight training in Argentina for customer country pilots. (27)
This proposal had never gone through the legal processes in Argentina required for such sales, and was a secret in Argentina until the Subcommittee released these documents. As former Argentine Defense Secretary Raul Alconada Sempe testified before the Subcommittee, the sales had never been authorized, and that if such a proposal had been made legally, it would have required notification to the Argentine parliament:
Sales without the Defense Minister knowing, from 1983 on, it was impossible, because it was only the Defense Ministry that authorized such sales. What does exist, and I think this is a general problem throughout all countries, is that there are countries that have arms, countries that need arms, and the famous middleman crop up. The brokers, the sales agents, and these are the people that try to match the buyer and the seller. . . . They just try to look for such a deal. This is what may have happened.(28)
Following the conclusion of the hearing, investigators in Argentina determined that the sale appeared to be a proposal made unofficially by a general in the Argentine air force to various countries in the Middle East, including Iraq. BCCI had offered to act as a broker and possible financier for the proposed sale of the Mirage jets, which represented a substantial percentage of the total possessed by Argentina. However, the general involved had never been able to convince Argentine governmental figures that the transaction was in the interest of Argentina, and the proposal died.
Other BCCI documents describe BCCI's involvement in a possible sale of night vision equipment by Litton Electron Devices in Arizona to the Government of Argentina, guaranteed by an Argentine government bank, through a company owned by the Argentine government. It is not clear from the documents whether BCCI ultimately financed the night-vision equipment sales or not.
Litton Electron Devices Tempe AZ
Address:
Litton Electron Devices, Tempe Mailing Address:
Litton Electron Devices
1215 S. 52nd St.
Tempe, AZ 85281
USA
BANGLADESH
When BCCI was closed globally on July 5, 1991, one of the nations that was worst hit was Bangladesh, which had deposits of $171 million at the time of its closure. Following the collapse, some 40,000 depositors threatened a hunger strike after losing their life savings, 500 depositors actually conducted a sit-down strike in the capitol's financial district, and another thirty depositors threatened to engage in self-immolation if the government did not find a way to restore some of their losses. One month later the Bangladeshi government promised to provide up to $1400 to each of the banks depositors, as a means of ending the highly-publicized strikes.
Thus, the impoverished government of one of the poorest countries in the world was forced, in essence, to raid its own treasury to alleviate the suffering of the small depositors to make up for millions stolen from Bangladesh by BCCI and former Bangladeshi government officials, including the man who had been president and dictator of Bangladesh throughout the 1980's, Mohammed Ershad. These schemes included massive tax evasion and an equally massive and illegal currency trafficking ring involving then-president Ershad, top aides, and President Ershad's mistress, which continued until Ershad was deposed in December, 1990.
According to various press accounts, supplemented by information from BCCI insiders provided the Subcommittee, President Ershad worked with his brother-in-law, former Bangladeshi diplomat A.G.M. Mohiuddin, to smuggle millions of dollars out of Bangladesh through BCCI into the United States. BCCI also hired various relatives of Ershad to work at BCCI branches in Hong Kong, Britain and Canada, and in return, Bangladesh hired one of BCCI's top officers to serve as Bangladesh's first ambassador to Brunei -- whose embassy functioned primarily as a sales office in Brunei for BCCI.(29)
The BCCI-Ershad connection was essential to the Bangladesh president because given his country's impoverishment, he had relatively limited opportunities outside of what BCCI could bring him to get rich. His salary was only $13,000 a year as president, but through making use of BCCI he was able to move millions of dollars of fund siphoned out of Bangladesh governmental accounts.
As BCCI officer Abdur Sakhia testified in response to a question about payments by BCCI to the leading political families of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including President Ershad:
The payoff [came] either in the form of cash, or hiring of their relatives, contribution to their favorite charities, payment of their medical bills. It took various shapes. So in some cases cash may have been given, in some cases their relatives were hired, in other cases their charities were funded, their projects were financed at favorable rates, loans at favorable rates. So it took different shapes and forms.(30)
In the case of Bangladesh, the payoffs in fact came in almost every shape and form. By far the most detailed account of these payoffs was provided by the Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to Bangladesh to interview government officials, BCCI officers, and private business there about the relationship between BCCI and Bangladesh after BCCI's collapse. Its account has been generally corroborated by testimony to the Subcommittee from statements by BCCI officials, including Sakhia and Chinoy. As the Times found:
Here, in a land that perpetually ranks among the poorest of the world's poor, BCCI stretched the law to its limits to avoid paying desperately needed government taxes, to skirt national banking regulations and to remit as much profit as possible out of Bangladesh and into the bank's international web of corporations and subsidiaries.(31)
The practices described in the Los Angeles Times article were typical of BCCI's practices in other countries. After the Central Bank of Bangladesh forbid BCCI from exporting profits in Bangladesh abroad -- the "flight capital" BCCI specialized in -- BCCI created the BCCI Foundation, a charitable trust based in Bangladesh, whose official purpose was to fund scholarships, rural health care centers and school libraries. Funding for the BCCI Foundation came from BCCI's banking operations in Bangladesh. Those profits became tax-free because they were given to the Foundation. And the foundation in turn gave funds not principally to the needy, but to a joint venture investment bank, called the Bank of Small Industries & Commerce or BASIC, staffed by BCCI officials, in which President Ershad and his top aides had a financial stake.(32)
Towards the end of Ershad's rule in Bangladesh, the scheme had become sufficiently transparent that it created outrage within the country. For example, the Foundation's most important scholarship program, to provide interest-free loans to talented college students, received about $10,500 in donations from the Foundation in 1990, in a year when the Foundation earned over $21,000 in interest alone.(33)
In the meantime, BCCI hired three of Ershad's close relatives, along twelve other sons and daughters of prime ministers, finance ministers, police chiefs, central bank governors and deputy governors.(34)
In late 1990, Ershad resigned under fire, and was tried for a variety of arms trafficking offenses in Bangladesh, and sentenced to a ten year prison term, while awaiting trial on additional corruption charges, including some pertaining to his relationship with BCCI. Following BCCI's collapse, the new government retained an investigative firm in New York in an attempt to trace what the new government contended as much as $520 million in funds misappropriated from the Bangladesh treasury by BCCI, Ershad, and his relatives. The investigators have alleged that Ershad moved millions of dollars through BCCI accounts in London and Hong Kong.(35)
Even disaster relief aid provided by foreign governments to Bangladesh to help victims of a devastating cyclone in 1990 wound up being deposited in BCCI and lost with the closure of the bank.(36)
Thus, BCCI, which promoted itself as a Third World Bank devoted to assisting the Third World in development, stole millions from Bangladesh, in concert with Bangladesh's ruling political family, in what one BCCI official was later to describe as "a perverse, reverse Robin Hood."(37)
BCCI and the Bush family
EXCERPT:
‘Frauds-R-Us’
The Bush Family Saga
Part II - Part I Here
BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce)
By William Bowles
05/11/03: (Information Clearing House)
"BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the '80s in what has been called the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau."
BCCI and the cover-up Continues today
EXCERPT:
2. BCCI SYSTEMATICALLY BRIBED WORLD LEADERS AND POLITICAL FIGURES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
BCCI's systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. BCCI records and testimony from former BCCI officials together document BCCI's systematic securing of Central Bank deposits of Third World countries; its provision of favors to political figures; and its reliance on those figures to provide BCCI itself with favors in times of need.
These relationships were systematically turned to BCCI's use to generate cash needed to prop up its books. BCCI would obtain an important figure's agreement to give BCCI deposits from a country's Central Bank, exclusive handling of a country's use of U.S. commodity credits, preferential treatment on the processing of money coming in and out of the country where monetary controls were in place, the right to own a bank, secretly if necessary, in countries where foreign banks were not legal, or other questionable means of securing assets or profits. In return, BCCI would pay bribes to the figure, or otherwise give him other things he wanted in a simple quid-pro-quo.
The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
3. BCCI DEVELOPED A STRATEGY TO INFILTRATE THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM, WHICH IT SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED, DESPITE REGULATORY BARRIERS THAT WERE DESIGNED TO KEEP IT OUT.
In 1977, BCCI developed a plan to infiltrate the U.S. market through secretly purchasing U.S. banks while opening branch offices of BCCI throughout the U.S., and eventually merging the institutions. BCCI had significant difficulties implementing this strategy due to regulatory barriers in the United States designed to insure accountability. Despite these barriers, which delayed BCCI's entry, BCCI was ultimately successful in acquiring four banks, operating in seven states and the District of Colombia, with no jurisdiction successfully preventing BCCI from infiltrating it.
The techniques used by BCCI in the United States had been previously perfected by BCCI, and were used in BCCI's acquisitions of banks in a number of Third World countries and in Europe. These included purchasing banks through nominees, and arranging to have its activities shielded by prestigious lawyers, accountants, and public relations firms on the one hand, and politically-well connected agents on the other. These techniques were essential to BCCI's success in the United States, because without them, BCCI would have been stopped by regulators from gaining an interest in any U.S. bank. As it was, regulatory suspicion towards BCCI required the bank to deceive regulators in collusion with nominees including the heads of state of several foreign emirates, key political and intelligence figures from the Middle East, and entities controlled by the most important bank and banker in the Middle East.
Equally important to BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans, beginning with Bert Lance, and continuing with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, well-connected former federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators. Wittingly or not, these individuals provided essential assistance to BCCI through lending their names and their reputations to BCCI at critical moments. Thus, it was not merely BCCI's deceptions that permitted it to infiltrate the United States and its banking system. Also essential were BCCI's use of political influence peddling and the revolving door in Washington.
EXCERPT:
BCCI and Argentine Arms Deals
In response to the Foreign Relations Committee subpoena to BCCI, BCCI's liquidators produced documents concerning two proposed arms sales involving Argentina that had been maintained at BCCI's offices in Miami.
The first set of documents held at BCCI-Miami referred to the sale by the Argentine Air Force of what handwritten notes described as "22 units of Aircraft plus adequate space parts, including 6 spare engines at a price of $110,000,000.00," consisting of Mirage IIIC/B jets manufactured in France and "modified to Argentine Air Force requirements following years of combat experience."(26)
The prospectus included technical drawings of the Mirage jets and basic military specifications, with a commitment that the "AAF," or Argentine Air Force, would provide all technical documentation in support of the planes, ground support equipment, and, if the "customer country" wished, a full program of flight training in Argentina for customer country pilots. (27)
This proposal had never gone through the legal processes in Argentina required for such sales, and was a secret in Argentina until the Subcommittee released these documents. As former Argentine Defense Secretary Raul Alconada Sempe testified before the Subcommittee, the sales had never been authorized, and that if such a proposal had been made legally, it would have required notification to the Argentine parliament:
Sales without the Defense Minister knowing, from 1983 on, it was impossible, because it was only the Defense Ministry that authorized such sales. What does exist, and I think this is a general problem throughout all countries, is that there are countries that have arms, countries that need arms, and the famous middleman crop up. The brokers, the sales agents, and these are the people that try to match the buyer and the seller. . . . They just try to look for such a deal. This is what may have happened.(28)
Following the conclusion of the hearing, investigators in Argentina determined that the sale appeared to be a proposal made unofficially by a general in the Argentine air force to various countries in the Middle East, including Iraq. BCCI had offered to act as a broker and possible financier for the proposed sale of the Mirage jets, which represented a substantial percentage of the total possessed by Argentina. However, the general involved had never been able to convince Argentine governmental figures that the transaction was in the interest of Argentina, and the proposal died.
Other BCCI documents describe BCCI's involvement in a possible sale of night vision equipment by Litton Electron Devices in Arizona to the Government of Argentina, guaranteed by an Argentine government bank, through a company owned by the Argentine government. It is not clear from the documents whether BCCI ultimately financed the night-vision equipment sales or not.
Litton Electron Devices Tempe AZ
Address:
Litton Electron Devices, Tempe Mailing Address:
Litton Electron Devices
1215 S. 52nd St.
Tempe, AZ 85281
USA
BANGLADESH
When BCCI was closed globally on July 5, 1991, one of the nations that was worst hit was Bangladesh, which had deposits of $171 million at the time of its closure. Following the collapse, some 40,000 depositors threatened a hunger strike after losing their life savings, 500 depositors actually conducted a sit-down strike in the capitol's financial district, and another thirty depositors threatened to engage in self-immolation if the government did not find a way to restore some of their losses. One month later the Bangladeshi government promised to provide up to $1400 to each of the banks depositors, as a means of ending the highly-publicized strikes.
Thus, the impoverished government of one of the poorest countries in the world was forced, in essence, to raid its own treasury to alleviate the suffering of the small depositors to make up for millions stolen from Bangladesh by BCCI and former Bangladeshi government officials, including the man who had been president and dictator of Bangladesh throughout the 1980's, Mohammed Ershad. These schemes included massive tax evasion and an equally massive and illegal currency trafficking ring involving then-president Ershad, top aides, and President Ershad's mistress, which continued until Ershad was deposed in December, 1990.
According to various press accounts, supplemented by information from BCCI insiders provided the Subcommittee, President Ershad worked with his brother-in-law, former Bangladeshi diplomat A.G.M. Mohiuddin, to smuggle millions of dollars out of Bangladesh through BCCI into the United States. BCCI also hired various relatives of Ershad to work at BCCI branches in Hong Kong, Britain and Canada, and in return, Bangladesh hired one of BCCI's top officers to serve as Bangladesh's first ambassador to Brunei -- whose embassy functioned primarily as a sales office in Brunei for BCCI.(29)
The BCCI-Ershad connection was essential to the Bangladesh president because given his country's impoverishment, he had relatively limited opportunities outside of what BCCI could bring him to get rich. His salary was only $13,000 a year as president, but through making use of BCCI he was able to move millions of dollars of fund siphoned out of Bangladesh governmental accounts.
As BCCI officer Abdur Sakhia testified in response to a question about payments by BCCI to the leading political families of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, including President Ershad:
The payoff [came] either in the form of cash, or hiring of their relatives, contribution to their favorite charities, payment of their medical bills. It took various shapes. So in some cases cash may have been given, in some cases their relatives were hired, in other cases their charities were funded, their projects were financed at favorable rates, loans at favorable rates. So it took different shapes and forms.(30)
In the case of Bangladesh, the payoffs in fact came in almost every shape and form. By far the most detailed account of these payoffs was provided by the Los Angeles Times, which sent a reporter to Bangladesh to interview government officials, BCCI officers, and private business there about the relationship between BCCI and Bangladesh after BCCI's collapse. Its account has been generally corroborated by testimony to the Subcommittee from statements by BCCI officials, including Sakhia and Chinoy. As the Times found:
Here, in a land that perpetually ranks among the poorest of the world's poor, BCCI stretched the law to its limits to avoid paying desperately needed government taxes, to skirt national banking regulations and to remit as much profit as possible out of Bangladesh and into the bank's international web of corporations and subsidiaries.(31)
The practices described in the Los Angeles Times article were typical of BCCI's practices in other countries. After the Central Bank of Bangladesh forbid BCCI from exporting profits in Bangladesh abroad -- the "flight capital" BCCI specialized in -- BCCI created the BCCI Foundation, a charitable trust based in Bangladesh, whose official purpose was to fund scholarships, rural health care centers and school libraries. Funding for the BCCI Foundation came from BCCI's banking operations in Bangladesh. Those profits became tax-free because they were given to the Foundation. And the foundation in turn gave funds not principally to the needy, but to a joint venture investment bank, called the Bank of Small Industries & Commerce or BASIC, staffed by BCCI officials, in which President Ershad and his top aides had a financial stake.(32)
Towards the end of Ershad's rule in Bangladesh, the scheme had become sufficiently transparent that it created outrage within the country. For example, the Foundation's most important scholarship program, to provide interest-free loans to talented college students, received about $10,500 in donations from the Foundation in 1990, in a year when the Foundation earned over $21,000 in interest alone.(33)
In the meantime, BCCI hired three of Ershad's close relatives, along twelve other sons and daughters of prime ministers, finance ministers, police chiefs, central bank governors and deputy governors.(34)
In late 1990, Ershad resigned under fire, and was tried for a variety of arms trafficking offenses in Bangladesh, and sentenced to a ten year prison term, while awaiting trial on additional corruption charges, including some pertaining to his relationship with BCCI. Following BCCI's collapse, the new government retained an investigative firm in New York in an attempt to trace what the new government contended as much as $520 million in funds misappropriated from the Bangladesh treasury by BCCI, Ershad, and his relatives. The investigators have alleged that Ershad moved millions of dollars through BCCI accounts in London and Hong Kong.(35)
Even disaster relief aid provided by foreign governments to Bangladesh to help victims of a devastating cyclone in 1990 wound up being deposited in BCCI and lost with the closure of the bank.(36)
Thus, BCCI, which promoted itself as a Third World Bank devoted to assisting the Third World in development, stole millions from Bangladesh, in concert with Bangladesh's ruling political family, in what one BCCI official was later to describe as "a perverse, reverse Robin Hood."(37)
BCCI and the Bush family
EXCERPT:
‘Frauds-R-Us’
The Bush Family Saga
Part II - Part I Here
BCCI (Bank of Credit & Commerce)
By William Bowles
05/11/03: (Information Clearing House)
"BCCI defrauded depositors of $10 billion in the '80s in what has been called the "largest bank fraud in world financial history" by former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau."
BCCI and the cover-up Continues today
EXCERPT:
2. BCCI SYSTEMATICALLY BRIBED WORLD LEADERS AND POLITICAL FIGURES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
BCCI's systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. BCCI records and testimony from former BCCI officials together document BCCI's systematic securing of Central Bank deposits of Third World countries; its provision of favors to political figures; and its reliance on those figures to provide BCCI itself with favors in times of need.
These relationships were systematically turned to BCCI's use to generate cash needed to prop up its books. BCCI would obtain an important figure's agreement to give BCCI deposits from a country's Central Bank, exclusive handling of a country's use of U.S. commodity credits, preferential treatment on the processing of money coming in and out of the country where monetary controls were in place, the right to own a bank, secretly if necessary, in countries where foreign banks were not legal, or other questionable means of securing assets or profits. In return, BCCI would pay bribes to the figure, or otherwise give him other things he wanted in a simple quid-pro-quo.
The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
3. BCCI DEVELOPED A STRATEGY TO INFILTRATE THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM, WHICH IT SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED, DESPITE REGULATORY BARRIERS THAT WERE DESIGNED TO KEEP IT OUT.
In 1977, BCCI developed a plan to infiltrate the U.S. market through secretly purchasing U.S. banks while opening branch offices of BCCI throughout the U.S., and eventually merging the institutions. BCCI had significant difficulties implementing this strategy due to regulatory barriers in the United States designed to insure accountability. Despite these barriers, which delayed BCCI's entry, BCCI was ultimately successful in acquiring four banks, operating in seven states and the District of Colombia, with no jurisdiction successfully preventing BCCI from infiltrating it.
The techniques used by BCCI in the United States had been previously perfected by BCCI, and were used in BCCI's acquisitions of banks in a number of Third World countries and in Europe. These included purchasing banks through nominees, and arranging to have its activities shielded by prestigious lawyers, accountants, and public relations firms on the one hand, and politically-well connected agents on the other. These techniques were essential to BCCI's success in the United States, because without them, BCCI would have been stopped by regulators from gaining an interest in any U.S. bank. As it was, regulatory suspicion towards BCCI required the bank to deceive regulators in collusion with nominees including the heads of state of several foreign emirates, key political and intelligence figures from the Middle East, and entities controlled by the most important bank and banker in the Middle East.
Equally important to BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans, beginning with Bert Lance, and continuing with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, well-connected former federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators. Wittingly or not, these individuals provided essential assistance to BCCI through lending their names and their reputations to BCCI at critical moments. Thus, it was not merely BCCI's deceptions that permitted it to infiltrate the United States and its banking system. Also essential were BCCI's use of political influence peddling and the revolving door in Washington.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)