Corruption In Authority
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Corruption In Authority
This thread is for corruption committed by the Police/Feds/Politicians/Judges and should fill up quickly since their treasonous acts are so numerous.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Forensic Fraud
"...expert witnesses testify the way they are paid to testify, and it is almost always the prosecution that has all
the money. Some paid experts testify exclusively for the prosecution side, knowing that if they ever testify for
the defense, they will be blackballed."
- Paul Carpenter, "Expert illuminates perjury problem involving experts; There is virtually no accountability"
Allentown Morning Call , March 31, 2002
www.corpus-delicti.com/forensic_fraud.html
This is an archive of more than a hundred cases involving alleged, admitted, and/ or demonstrable forensic fraud. That is, it is an archive of cases where forensic science and law enforcement experts have provided sworn testimony, documents, or reports intended for the court that contain deceptive or misleading information, findings, opinions, or conclusions. Such information, findings, or conclusions have been deliberately offered by the expert in order to secure an unfair or unlawful gain as determined by their employers, by the courts, and in many cases by their own admission. Subsequently, no opinions have been added to the referenced sources.
This archive is maintained solely for educational and informational purposes, to raise professional and public awareness regarding the nature and extent of forensic fraud. Curiously, though fraud in these contexts is largely considered a crime, it only infrequently results in consequences for the fraudster - ranging from demotion, to firing, to criminal prosecution.
It should be noted that this is not an archive of mere forensic mistakes, mishaps, or misidentifications (these can be found here).
"...expert witnesses testify the way they are paid to testify, and it is almost always the prosecution that has all
the money. Some paid experts testify exclusively for the prosecution side, knowing that if they ever testify for
the defense, they will be blackballed."
- Paul Carpenter, "Expert illuminates perjury problem involving experts; There is virtually no accountability"
Allentown Morning Call , March 31, 2002
www.corpus-delicti.com/forensic_fraud.html
This is an archive of more than a hundred cases involving alleged, admitted, and/ or demonstrable forensic fraud. That is, it is an archive of cases where forensic science and law enforcement experts have provided sworn testimony, documents, or reports intended for the court that contain deceptive or misleading information, findings, opinions, or conclusions. Such information, findings, or conclusions have been deliberately offered by the expert in order to secure an unfair or unlawful gain as determined by their employers, by the courts, and in many cases by their own admission. Subsequently, no opinions have been added to the referenced sources.
This archive is maintained solely for educational and informational purposes, to raise professional and public awareness regarding the nature and extent of forensic fraud. Curiously, though fraud in these contexts is largely considered a crime, it only infrequently results in consequences for the fraudster - ranging from demotion, to firing, to criminal prosecution.
It should be noted that this is not an archive of mere forensic mistakes, mishaps, or misidentifications (these can be found here).
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
Homan Square detainee: I was sexually abused by police at Chicago 'black site'
For psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago police for incommunicado detentions, where police inserted something into his rectum.
“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Perez, 33, told the Guardian.
It was 21 October 2012. The day before, Perez had been driving his Rav-4 on his restaurant delivery route when he says police accosted him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez knew so they could arrange a sting. But Perez was less cooperative than they had hoped.
Now, Perez was handcuffed by his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room on the second floor of Homan Square. Behind him were two police officers that a lawsuit Perez recently re-filed identifies as Jorge Lopez and Edmund Zablocki. They had been threatening him with a stint at the infamously violent Cook County jail if he didn’t cooperate.
“They’re gonna think you’re a little sexy bitch in jail,” Perez recalled one of them saying. The lawsuit quotes Lopez: “I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.”
Perez claims he was bent over in front of the bench and a piece of detritus. He recalled smelling urine and seeing bloodstains in the room. The police officers pulled his shirt up and slowly moved a metallic object down his bare skin. Then they pulled his pants down.
“He’s talking all this sexual stuff, he’s really getting fucking weird about it, too,” Perez remembered. He began shaking, the beginnings of a panic attack.
“They get down to where they’re gonna insert it, this is where I feel that it’s something around my rear end, and he said some stupid comment and then he jammed it in there and I started jerking and going all crazy – I think I kicked him – and I just go into a full-blown panic attack … The damage it caused, it pretty much swole my rear end like a baboon’s butt.”
Whatever the object was, the police suggested it was the barrel of a handgun. After Perez involuntarily jerked from the penetration, Officer Edmund Zablocki is alleged to have told him: “I almost blew your brains out.”
Perez claims all of this occurred to persuade him to purchase $170 worth of heroin from the dealer.
‘After they did that, I would have done anything for them’
Perez is now the 13th person the Guardian has interviewed since February who has described being taken by police to a warehouse on Chicago’s west side; kept without a record of his whereabouts available to the public; and shackled for hours or even days without access to a lawyer. Most of them have been poor and black or Hispanic. Some allege physical abuse; all allege that they were in an inherently coercive environment. Few were charged with a crime, and police took those who were to actual police stations for booking after detention at Homan. Police and local media have dismissed their stories, focusing instead on the atmospherics of how secretive the facility is or the rhetoric used to describe it.
The abuse Perez alleges is reminiscent of an earlier era of police torture in Chicago, when Darrell Cannon had a shotgun barrel jammed into his mouth. Decades after Cannon’s abuse, Chicago established last week a reparations fund for police torture survivors. Perez is still seeking justice.
He initially filed a lawsuit against the police detailing his allegations of sexual abuse in 2013, which attracted attention from Courthouse News and Vice. But what he has since learned is that his ordeal took place at Homan Square, the off-the-books detention center considered by lawyers and activists to be the law enforcement analogue of a CIA black site. Weeks ago, four other people detained at Homan Square from 2006 to 2015 joined his lawsuit.
Videos Perez acquired through his legal proceedings, excerpts of which the Guardian is publishing, show him inside the warehouse complex and corroborate the dates and times of his detention there.
The effect of the sexual torture was similar to Cannon’s. Cannon falsely confessed to a murder. Perez told Lopez and Zablocki he would make the buy. He called “D”, whom court papers allege is a man named Dwayne, and arranged to purchase heroin with $170 the police gave him.
“After they did that, I would have done anything for them,” said Perez, who was not charged with any crime related to his Homan Square detention.
The Chicago police department has reacted with indignation and non-specific denials of the Guardian’s Homan Square reporting, and have taken particular umbrage at allegations of physical abuse.
“The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever,” the police said in a 1 March statement.
The police downplayed Homan’s detention operations, part of their media pushback, saying that like other police facilities around the city, it contains “several standard interview rooms”. Most people interviewed at Homan Square are “low-level arrests from the narcotics unit”.
Yet the videos show police leading Perez, hands confined behind his back, through a door inside Homan marked “prisoner entrance”, suggesting a more routinized detention function than the police have described. Perez was never formally arrested: he was neither booked nor permitted legal counsel nor charged.
“No inmates are supposed to be there. Certainly they’re not supposed to be held there,” said Perez’s attorney, Scott Kamin.
The other people who signed onto Perez’s lawsuit have also told their stories for the first time. Their further revelations, including confinement in fetid and humiliating conditions, now mark 17 first-hand accounts of detention at Homan Square since the Guardian began reporting on the warehouse in February. The most recent occurred fewer than three weeks before the initial report.
Jose Martinez is alleged to have been cuffed to a bench for nine hours before being booked at an actual police station in September 2011. He claims that he was shackled “without food, water or use of the restroom” in a “locked room that smelled like urine and feces”.
Two other individuals, Estephanie Martinez and Calvin Coffey, described relieving themselves while shackled in Homan Square interrogation rooms. Martinez, locked up in August 2006, was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez’s handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom. Coffey, taken to Homan Square on 6 February 2015 on suspicion of “narcotic activity”, defecated on the floor after two hours of fruitless requests for the bathroom. A police officer “made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap”, the lawsuit alleges.
Juanita Berry was with Coffey at the time of his detention and was taken with him to Homan Square. Handcuffed to a “ring or a bar on the wall” at Homan Square, the lawsuit alleges, officers told her to get them two handguns “or else they would charge her with aiding in the delivery of controlled substance”. After “several hours and many threats”, Berry agreed.
After Berry acquired a gun from an unspecified acquaintance, satisfied police allegedly drove her to a Dunkin’ Donuts and let her go without charge.
Berry’s account echoes that of a different Chicago man, not a party to the lawsuit, whom the Guardian has separately interviewed. The man, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as Young OG so as not to risk his further police harassment, said Homan Square police kept him detained for nearly an entire day before he agreed to get them guns.
Young OG, a black man in his 30s, was picked up by masked police, guns drawn, after he stopped at a gas station with a friend in late 2013 for cigarettes. It was mid-morning and Young OG was confused over whether he was getting robbed or stopped by police.
“It was a real-life kidnapping,” he said.
At Homan Square, police kept Young OG confined with a twist tie on his right wrist, “another twist tie through that twist tie to the bar”, he said. Young OG was kept, he said, in an office-like space – he saw a desk nearby – without furniture, causing him to sit on a dirty floor and lay on his hooded sweatshirt, his body aching. He was not fed, not booked, not permitted a lawyer and afforded one brief bathroom break.
“The man told me to take two minutes to cop a squat and drop a knot. I’ll never forget it,” he said.
Late that evening, police came to Young OG, woke him up, and said they wanted him to provide them with weapons. One officer had what looked like packets of heroin. “It’s gonna be yours before the night’s over if you don’t cooperate with us,” Young OG recalled a masked officer telling him.
“As soon as you help us, the sooner you’ll get out of here,” he recalled an officer saying. A white officer “went straight to guns”, saying that Young OG needed to get them for the police.
Young OG was allowed to call his friend, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as “Head”. He told Head: “Police got us, bro, they’re trying to pin us on some bullshit.” With the knowledge of the police, Young OG instructed Head to place any gun he could find in a garbage can behind Young OG’s grandmother’s house.
Head did as his friend asked. He said he didn’t see any police cars near Young OG’s grandmother’s house in the pre-dawn hours, but did see an unmarked Crown Victoria. “By 2.30, they were picking the shit out from the garbage,” Head said.
Police let Young OG and his friend go later that morning without charge. Young OG never got his cellphone, his ID or his wallet back.
The Chicago police department did not respond to a list of questions sent to them for this story, as has been its typical practice with the Guardian’s Homan Square reporting.
Last month, the Guardian sued the Chicago police department after attempts at acquiring official police records about Homan Square under the Freedom of Information Act proved fruitless. The police are scheduled to file their first response on Friday. Among the records sought are a tally of how many people have been taken to Homan Square, as well as any video evidence of interrogations and detentions there – evidence that Angel Perez’s case has independently turned up.
Perez occasionally smoked marijuana, racking up a few cannabis possession arrests over the years, and purchased it from a man who he only knew as “D”, apparently the “Dwayne” who had come on the police’s radar. Police interpreted the half a Vicodin they found in his car as an indication of a deeper involvement in drugs. A self-described sci-fi writer and “nerdy guy”, he said he had little experience with aggression before Homan Square.
At Homan, he alleges, a large officer “sat on my chest while he’s yelling at me … I was freaking the fuck out … He pushes his palms up against my face, my eyeballs, just kind of pushing me down.”
It was also his first experience with severe anxiety: “I never had panic attacks before that point. At the time, I thought I was having a heart attack, because I couldn’t breathe, my chest got all tight.”
Perez did not initially know about Homan Square. Disoriented from a drive in the back of a police car, Perez thought, and indicated in earlier court filings, that he was at the nearby police station at Harrison and Kedzie, where he had been taken the day before his alleged sexual abuse. Only after Perez launched his lawsuit – and for a period served as his own attorney – did documentation and video evidence emerge indicating he was at Homan Square.
A spokesman for Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, Larry Merritt, told the Guardian that it had investigated Perez’s claims and deemed them “unfounded”. He would not elaborate and invited the Guardian to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more.
Perez said that while he “would love to see those cops in jail”, the long history of Chicago police abuse does not give him reason for optimism.
“At this point, I just want them to stop. I know they’re never going to go to jail. So I’m hoping maybe they’ll get fired if we expose enough of what they do. But really, I even doubt that’ll happen in this city,” he said.
For psychological reasons, Angel Perez does not call what happened to him rape. But he vividly recalls being taken to Homan Square, a warehouse used by the Chicago police for incommunicado detentions, where police inserted something into his rectum.
“I felt the coldness and the metallic aspect of it,” Perez, 33, told the Guardian.
It was 21 October 2012. The day before, Perez had been driving his Rav-4 on his restaurant delivery route when he says police accosted him, wanting him to contact a drug dealer who they believed Perez knew so they could arrange a sting. But Perez was less cooperative than they had hoped.
Now, Perez was handcuffed by his right wrist to a metal bar behind a bench in an interrogation room on the second floor of Homan Square. Behind him were two police officers that a lawsuit Perez recently re-filed identifies as Jorge Lopez and Edmund Zablocki. They had been threatening him with a stint at the infamously violent Cook County jail if he didn’t cooperate.
“They’re gonna think you’re a little sexy bitch in jail,” Perez recalled one of them saying. The lawsuit quotes Lopez: “I hear that a big black nigger dick feels like a gun up your ass.”
Perez claims he was bent over in front of the bench and a piece of detritus. He recalled smelling urine and seeing bloodstains in the room. The police officers pulled his shirt up and slowly moved a metallic object down his bare skin. Then they pulled his pants down.
“He’s talking all this sexual stuff, he’s really getting fucking weird about it, too,” Perez remembered. He began shaking, the beginnings of a panic attack.
“They get down to where they’re gonna insert it, this is where I feel that it’s something around my rear end, and he said some stupid comment and then he jammed it in there and I started jerking and going all crazy – I think I kicked him – and I just go into a full-blown panic attack … The damage it caused, it pretty much swole my rear end like a baboon’s butt.”
Whatever the object was, the police suggested it was the barrel of a handgun. After Perez involuntarily jerked from the penetration, Officer Edmund Zablocki is alleged to have told him: “I almost blew your brains out.”
Perez claims all of this occurred to persuade him to purchase $170 worth of heroin from the dealer.
‘After they did that, I would have done anything for them’
Perez is now the 13th person the Guardian has interviewed since February who has described being taken by police to a warehouse on Chicago’s west side; kept without a record of his whereabouts available to the public; and shackled for hours or even days without access to a lawyer. Most of them have been poor and black or Hispanic. Some allege physical abuse; all allege that they were in an inherently coercive environment. Few were charged with a crime, and police took those who were to actual police stations for booking after detention at Homan. Police and local media have dismissed their stories, focusing instead on the atmospherics of how secretive the facility is or the rhetoric used to describe it.
The abuse Perez alleges is reminiscent of an earlier era of police torture in Chicago, when Darrell Cannon had a shotgun barrel jammed into his mouth. Decades after Cannon’s abuse, Chicago established last week a reparations fund for police torture survivors. Perez is still seeking justice.
He initially filed a lawsuit against the police detailing his allegations of sexual abuse in 2013, which attracted attention from Courthouse News and Vice. But what he has since learned is that his ordeal took place at Homan Square, the off-the-books detention center considered by lawyers and activists to be the law enforcement analogue of a CIA black site. Weeks ago, four other people detained at Homan Square from 2006 to 2015 joined his lawsuit.
Videos Perez acquired through his legal proceedings, excerpts of which the Guardian is publishing, show him inside the warehouse complex and corroborate the dates and times of his detention there.
The effect of the sexual torture was similar to Cannon’s. Cannon falsely confessed to a murder. Perez told Lopez and Zablocki he would make the buy. He called “D”, whom court papers allege is a man named Dwayne, and arranged to purchase heroin with $170 the police gave him.
“After they did that, I would have done anything for them,” said Perez, who was not charged with any crime related to his Homan Square detention.
The Chicago police department has reacted with indignation and non-specific denials of the Guardian’s Homan Square reporting, and have taken particular umbrage at allegations of physical abuse.
“The allegation that physical violence is a part of interviews with suspects is unequivocally false, it is offensive, and it is not supported by any facts whatsoever,” the police said in a 1 March statement.
The police downplayed Homan’s detention operations, part of their media pushback, saying that like other police facilities around the city, it contains “several standard interview rooms”. Most people interviewed at Homan Square are “low-level arrests from the narcotics unit”.
Yet the videos show police leading Perez, hands confined behind his back, through a door inside Homan marked “prisoner entrance”, suggesting a more routinized detention function than the police have described. Perez was never formally arrested: he was neither booked nor permitted legal counsel nor charged.
“No inmates are supposed to be there. Certainly they’re not supposed to be held there,” said Perez’s attorney, Scott Kamin.
The other people who signed onto Perez’s lawsuit have also told their stories for the first time. Their further revelations, including confinement in fetid and humiliating conditions, now mark 17 first-hand accounts of detention at Homan Square since the Guardian began reporting on the warehouse in February. The most recent occurred fewer than three weeks before the initial report.
Jose Martinez is alleged to have been cuffed to a bench for nine hours before being booked at an actual police station in September 2011. He claims that he was shackled “without food, water or use of the restroom” in a “locked room that smelled like urine and feces”.
Two other individuals, Estephanie Martinez and Calvin Coffey, described relieving themselves while shackled in Homan Square interrogation rooms. Martinez, locked up in August 2006, was told by a guard that she did not have the key to Martinez’s handcuffs and could not take her to the bathroom. Coffey, taken to Homan Square on 6 February 2015 on suspicion of “narcotic activity”, defecated on the floor after two hours of fruitless requests for the bathroom. A police officer “made Calvin clean it up with his skull cap”, the lawsuit alleges.
Juanita Berry was with Coffey at the time of his detention and was taken with him to Homan Square. Handcuffed to a “ring or a bar on the wall” at Homan Square, the lawsuit alleges, officers told her to get them two handguns “or else they would charge her with aiding in the delivery of controlled substance”. After “several hours and many threats”, Berry agreed.
After Berry acquired a gun from an unspecified acquaintance, satisfied police allegedly drove her to a Dunkin’ Donuts and let her go without charge.
Berry’s account echoes that of a different Chicago man, not a party to the lawsuit, whom the Guardian has separately interviewed. The man, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as Young OG so as not to risk his further police harassment, said Homan Square police kept him detained for nearly an entire day before he agreed to get them guns.
Young OG, a black man in his 30s, was picked up by masked police, guns drawn, after he stopped at a gas station with a friend in late 2013 for cigarettes. It was mid-morning and Young OG was confused over whether he was getting robbed or stopped by police.
“It was a real-life kidnapping,” he said.
At Homan Square, police kept Young OG confined with a twist tie on his right wrist, “another twist tie through that twist tie to the bar”, he said. Young OG was kept, he said, in an office-like space – he saw a desk nearby – without furniture, causing him to sit on a dirty floor and lay on his hooded sweatshirt, his body aching. He was not fed, not booked, not permitted a lawyer and afforded one brief bathroom break.
“The man told me to take two minutes to cop a squat and drop a knot. I’ll never forget it,” he said.
Late that evening, police came to Young OG, woke him up, and said they wanted him to provide them with weapons. One officer had what looked like packets of heroin. “It’s gonna be yours before the night’s over if you don’t cooperate with us,” Young OG recalled a masked officer telling him.
“As soon as you help us, the sooner you’ll get out of here,” he recalled an officer saying. A white officer “went straight to guns”, saying that Young OG needed to get them for the police.
Young OG was allowed to call his friend, whom the Guardian has agreed to identify as “Head”. He told Head: “Police got us, bro, they’re trying to pin us on some bullshit.” With the knowledge of the police, Young OG instructed Head to place any gun he could find in a garbage can behind Young OG’s grandmother’s house.
Head did as his friend asked. He said he didn’t see any police cars near Young OG’s grandmother’s house in the pre-dawn hours, but did see an unmarked Crown Victoria. “By 2.30, they were picking the shit out from the garbage,” Head said.
Police let Young OG and his friend go later that morning without charge. Young OG never got his cellphone, his ID or his wallet back.
The Chicago police department did not respond to a list of questions sent to them for this story, as has been its typical practice with the Guardian’s Homan Square reporting.
Last month, the Guardian sued the Chicago police department after attempts at acquiring official police records about Homan Square under the Freedom of Information Act proved fruitless. The police are scheduled to file their first response on Friday. Among the records sought are a tally of how many people have been taken to Homan Square, as well as any video evidence of interrogations and detentions there – evidence that Angel Perez’s case has independently turned up.
Perez occasionally smoked marijuana, racking up a few cannabis possession arrests over the years, and purchased it from a man who he only knew as “D”, apparently the “Dwayne” who had come on the police’s radar. Police interpreted the half a Vicodin they found in his car as an indication of a deeper involvement in drugs. A self-described sci-fi writer and “nerdy guy”, he said he had little experience with aggression before Homan Square.
At Homan, he alleges, a large officer “sat on my chest while he’s yelling at me … I was freaking the fuck out … He pushes his palms up against my face, my eyeballs, just kind of pushing me down.”
It was also his first experience with severe anxiety: “I never had panic attacks before that point. At the time, I thought I was having a heart attack, because I couldn’t breathe, my chest got all tight.”
Perez did not initially know about Homan Square. Disoriented from a drive in the back of a police car, Perez thought, and indicated in earlier court filings, that he was at the nearby police station at Harrison and Kedzie, where he had been taken the day before his alleged sexual abuse. Only after Perez launched his lawsuit – and for a period served as his own attorney – did documentation and video evidence emerge indicating he was at Homan Square.
A spokesman for Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority, Larry Merritt, told the Guardian that it had investigated Perez’s claims and deemed them “unfounded”. He would not elaborate and invited the Guardian to file a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more.
Perez said that while he “would love to see those cops in jail”, the long history of Chicago police abuse does not give him reason for optimism.
“At this point, I just want them to stop. I know they’re never going to go to jail. So I’m hoping maybe they’ll get fired if we expose enough of what they do. But really, I even doubt that’ll happen in this city,” he said.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
Britain’s Politicians That Corrupt Democracy
Back in February this year, a debate about MP’s second jobs dominated Prime Minister’s Questions, after an undercover investigation involving former Foreign Ministers Jack Straw, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and a bogus Chinese company. David Cameron said having people with outside interests made for a “stronger Parliament”.
The former Foreign Secretaries were filmed discussing possible payments of up to £5,000 a day for using their contacts and experience to benefit a private company in a sting by Channel 4’s Dispatchesand the Telegraph in what was termed ‘cash for access’.
Both men reported themselves to the Parliamentary Standards Committee, with Straw saying he had fallen into a “very clever trap” and Rifkind acknowledging his comments had been “silly.”
However, it is not unusual for MP’s to find themselves in these kinds of circumstances nowadays. More than 100 MPs declare additional employment in the Register of Members’ Interests, without including things such as occasional TV appearances, book royalties and giving speeches. Of the 108 MPs counted using this methodology, 17 are Labour and 80 are Conservatives, according to BBC Analysis and Research.
Analysis of official data by Statista for The Independent shows that British MPs earned more than £7 million in total outside their parliamentary wages last year, with Tories accounting for the largest proportion.
MPs with the most lucrative earnings from jobs outside of politics contribute to fewer parliamentary debates, are absent for more votes and submit fewer written questions than other Members of Parliament, a report suggests.
The report reveals these high-earning politicians have participated in 22 percent fewer debates than their parliamentary peers since March 2014.
It indicated that Britain’s top-earning MPs tendered almost 40 percent fewer written questions than their colleagues who do not have second jobs. Additionally, the high-earning MPs failed to turn up for 373 votes on average – a significantly higher absentee rate than their parliamentary colleagues, the report said.
At this point, one can make assumptions or come to conclusions about how ethical second jobs for MP’s really are. You might come to the conclusion that the salary is not enough to entice the very best quality of individuals for such an important role, you might think they earn enough, or even, too much. From here though, there is a more sinister reason for peering into this opaque world of MP’s earnings and this is just one example.
In November last year, a ‘dossier of disgrace’ was published by Unite, Britain’s biggest union. It revealed that 71 MPs from the coalition government of 2010 to 2015 had links to private healthcare interests who voted to sell-off or privatise the National Health Service.
Len McCluskey, Unite general secretary said:
“The sheer scale of this conflict of interest is staggering, but it is the ongoing sell-off of our NHS that makes this the real scandal for our democracy”. He added; “In another attempt to ignore the view of the people of Britain David Cameron is still refusing to use his veto and exempt the NHS from a US EU trade deal called TTIP. What is our NHS doing in a trade deal with America? This again exposes the Government’s real plan for the NHS – complete and irreversible privatisation.”
The report uncovered 64 Tory and 7 Liberal Democrat MPs who had recent or current financial links to companies or individuals trying to profit from the sell-off of the NHS. All of them voted for the Health and Social Care Act, which created a legal mechanism to force commissioners to put NHS services up for sale. To say that this is a conflict of interest would be a very severe understatement of fact.
The report is damning and delves deeply into the commercial links these named MP’s have. For instance, we focus on just one from the report; Andrew Lansley – former health secretary and recently awarded a life peerage.
John Nash, the former chairman of Care UK, gave £21,000 to fund Andrew Lansley’s personal office in November 2009 when he was shadow health secretary and preparing the White paper that led to the health and Social care bill. Care UK confirmed that 96 per cent of Care UK’s business, which amounted to more than £400 million last year, came from the NHS. Hedge fund boss John Nash is a regular Conservative donor with close ties to the healthcare industry. John Nash and his wife Caroline gave £203,500 to the party over the past five years. He is also a founder of City firm Sovereign Capital, which runs a string of private healthcare firms. Andrew Lansley received a donation from Julian Schild used to support his office in his capacity as Shadow secretary for health. Julian Schild’s family made £184 million in 2006 by selling hospital bed-makers Huntleigh Technology.
Andrew Lansley’s wife, Sally Low, is founder and managing director of Low Associates. A Daily Telegraph report in February records that the Low Associates website lists pharmaceuticals companies SmithKline Beecham, Unilever and P&G among its clients. It also records Ms Low’s assertion that the company “does not work with any client who has interests in the health sector”. The website currently contains no reference to the drug firms listed above. In addition, Christina Lineen, a former Head of Communications at private health company Circle spent two years working for Lansley, when a shadow health secretary.
John Nash was eventually appointed education minister, then made a life peer, now Baron Nash and has already attracted controversy with some influential decisions upon public life.
Current health secretary Jeremy Hunt, also used to an investigation or two, received two donations to his constituency office from hedge fund boss Andrew Law. Law has donated over £600,000 to the Tories and his firm holds multi-million healthcare investments.
These examples demonstrate that politicians have little respect for the Ministerial Code which, is supposed to be a code of ethics and procedural guidance for ministers, introduced as a result of the first report by the committee on standards in public life in 1995, which is revised every parliament. It is based on the seven principles of public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership – almost universally rejected by today’s politicians.
Does it get any better in the European Union? No really, this from Corporate Observatory – “Conflicts of interest continue to plague the European Parliament one year after elections”, finds new research released today’.
The report from Friends of the Earth Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, focuses on just nine cases of MEPs who have other jobs while holding public office. All nine MEPs hold paid positions in companies or business associations that directly or indirectly lobby EU decision-makers on current legislative files. The cases include parliamentarians from Poland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Denmark and Austria – some of which had already given rise to concerns in the last parliamentary term.
Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe said: “It is not acceptable that MEPs work for companies that are at the same time lobbying the EU. This undermines public trust in law-making and the integrity of the European Parliament. MEPs should be their electorate’s representative, not industry’s representative.”
The report authors point out that the existing code of conduct for MEPs, introduced in 2012, is insufficiently enforced and riddled with loopholes so that problematic cases keep arising.
Olivier Hoedeman from Corporate Europe Observatory said: “Voters deserve better than a weak code of conduct that has done very little to end the problem of undue influence and potential conflicts of interest. Parliament’s President Martin Schulz should act on this now and show citizens that he’s serious about tackling this threat to democracy.”
Nina Katzemich from LobbyControl said:
“Three years after the code of conduct was adopted, there are still many MEPs with potential conflicts of interest and dubious declarations of financial interest. It is high time for an overhaul. We demand the parliament bans all side jobs in companies or associations that try to influence EU legislation.”
The aforementioned Mr Straw with his near-doubling of former MP’s pay with what he calls a “very fine, old established” commodity firm, for whom he has, (he explained to the undercover reporters) secured tweaks to sugar-refining regulations in the EU demonstrates just how insecure democracy is.
If politicians have an expectation that they can be hired or contracted out, it is inevitable that fraud and corruption will be ever-present in the end. This is now self evident with the continuing scale of scandals involving MP’s and MEP’s.
Paid-for politics has already got a grip. The private sector would have sacked employees with undisclosed conflicts of interest such as these. The principle should exist that MPs will not expect to be paid beyond their salary for intervening in public life. The problem is that the very people who could enforce this, the lawmakers, are themselves profiting in exactly these same ways.
Back in February this year, a debate about MP’s second jobs dominated Prime Minister’s Questions, after an undercover investigation involving former Foreign Ministers Jack Straw, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and a bogus Chinese company. David Cameron said having people with outside interests made for a “stronger Parliament”.
The former Foreign Secretaries were filmed discussing possible payments of up to £5,000 a day for using their contacts and experience to benefit a private company in a sting by Channel 4’s Dispatchesand the Telegraph in what was termed ‘cash for access’.
Both men reported themselves to the Parliamentary Standards Committee, with Straw saying he had fallen into a “very clever trap” and Rifkind acknowledging his comments had been “silly.”
However, it is not unusual for MP’s to find themselves in these kinds of circumstances nowadays. More than 100 MPs declare additional employment in the Register of Members’ Interests, without including things such as occasional TV appearances, book royalties and giving speeches. Of the 108 MPs counted using this methodology, 17 are Labour and 80 are Conservatives, according to BBC Analysis and Research.
Analysis of official data by Statista for The Independent shows that British MPs earned more than £7 million in total outside their parliamentary wages last year, with Tories accounting for the largest proportion.
MPs with the most lucrative earnings from jobs outside of politics contribute to fewer parliamentary debates, are absent for more votes and submit fewer written questions than other Members of Parliament, a report suggests.
The report reveals these high-earning politicians have participated in 22 percent fewer debates than their parliamentary peers since March 2014.
It indicated that Britain’s top-earning MPs tendered almost 40 percent fewer written questions than their colleagues who do not have second jobs. Additionally, the high-earning MPs failed to turn up for 373 votes on average – a significantly higher absentee rate than their parliamentary colleagues, the report said.
At this point, one can make assumptions or come to conclusions about how ethical second jobs for MP’s really are. You might come to the conclusion that the salary is not enough to entice the very best quality of individuals for such an important role, you might think they earn enough, or even, too much. From here though, there is a more sinister reason for peering into this opaque world of MP’s earnings and this is just one example.
In November last year, a ‘dossier of disgrace’ was published by Unite, Britain’s biggest union. It revealed that 71 MPs from the coalition government of 2010 to 2015 had links to private healthcare interests who voted to sell-off or privatise the National Health Service.
Len McCluskey, Unite general secretary said:
“The sheer scale of this conflict of interest is staggering, but it is the ongoing sell-off of our NHS that makes this the real scandal for our democracy”. He added; “In another attempt to ignore the view of the people of Britain David Cameron is still refusing to use his veto and exempt the NHS from a US EU trade deal called TTIP. What is our NHS doing in a trade deal with America? This again exposes the Government’s real plan for the NHS – complete and irreversible privatisation.”
The report uncovered 64 Tory and 7 Liberal Democrat MPs who had recent or current financial links to companies or individuals trying to profit from the sell-off of the NHS. All of them voted for the Health and Social Care Act, which created a legal mechanism to force commissioners to put NHS services up for sale. To say that this is a conflict of interest would be a very severe understatement of fact.
The report is damning and delves deeply into the commercial links these named MP’s have. For instance, we focus on just one from the report; Andrew Lansley – former health secretary and recently awarded a life peerage.
John Nash, the former chairman of Care UK, gave £21,000 to fund Andrew Lansley’s personal office in November 2009 when he was shadow health secretary and preparing the White paper that led to the health and Social care bill. Care UK confirmed that 96 per cent of Care UK’s business, which amounted to more than £400 million last year, came from the NHS. Hedge fund boss John Nash is a regular Conservative donor with close ties to the healthcare industry. John Nash and his wife Caroline gave £203,500 to the party over the past five years. He is also a founder of City firm Sovereign Capital, which runs a string of private healthcare firms. Andrew Lansley received a donation from Julian Schild used to support his office in his capacity as Shadow secretary for health. Julian Schild’s family made £184 million in 2006 by selling hospital bed-makers Huntleigh Technology.
Andrew Lansley’s wife, Sally Low, is founder and managing director of Low Associates. A Daily Telegraph report in February records that the Low Associates website lists pharmaceuticals companies SmithKline Beecham, Unilever and P&G among its clients. It also records Ms Low’s assertion that the company “does not work with any client who has interests in the health sector”. The website currently contains no reference to the drug firms listed above. In addition, Christina Lineen, a former Head of Communications at private health company Circle spent two years working for Lansley, when a shadow health secretary.
John Nash was eventually appointed education minister, then made a life peer, now Baron Nash and has already attracted controversy with some influential decisions upon public life.
Current health secretary Jeremy Hunt, also used to an investigation or two, received two donations to his constituency office from hedge fund boss Andrew Law. Law has donated over £600,000 to the Tories and his firm holds multi-million healthcare investments.
These examples demonstrate that politicians have little respect for the Ministerial Code which, is supposed to be a code of ethics and procedural guidance for ministers, introduced as a result of the first report by the committee on standards in public life in 1995, which is revised every parliament. It is based on the seven principles of public life: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership – almost universally rejected by today’s politicians.
Does it get any better in the European Union? No really, this from Corporate Observatory – “Conflicts of interest continue to plague the European Parliament one year after elections”, finds new research released today’.
The report from Friends of the Earth Europe, Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, focuses on just nine cases of MEPs who have other jobs while holding public office. All nine MEPs hold paid positions in companies or business associations that directly or indirectly lobby EU decision-makers on current legislative files. The cases include parliamentarians from Poland, Italy, Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, Denmark and Austria – some of which had already given rise to concerns in the last parliamentary term.
Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe said: “It is not acceptable that MEPs work for companies that are at the same time lobbying the EU. This undermines public trust in law-making and the integrity of the European Parliament. MEPs should be their electorate’s representative, not industry’s representative.”
The report authors point out that the existing code of conduct for MEPs, introduced in 2012, is insufficiently enforced and riddled with loopholes so that problematic cases keep arising.
Olivier Hoedeman from Corporate Europe Observatory said: “Voters deserve better than a weak code of conduct that has done very little to end the problem of undue influence and potential conflicts of interest. Parliament’s President Martin Schulz should act on this now and show citizens that he’s serious about tackling this threat to democracy.”
Nina Katzemich from LobbyControl said:
“Three years after the code of conduct was adopted, there are still many MEPs with potential conflicts of interest and dubious declarations of financial interest. It is high time for an overhaul. We demand the parliament bans all side jobs in companies or associations that try to influence EU legislation.”
The aforementioned Mr Straw with his near-doubling of former MP’s pay with what he calls a “very fine, old established” commodity firm, for whom he has, (he explained to the undercover reporters) secured tweaks to sugar-refining regulations in the EU demonstrates just how insecure democracy is.
If politicians have an expectation that they can be hired or contracted out, it is inevitable that fraud and corruption will be ever-present in the end. This is now self evident with the continuing scale of scandals involving MP’s and MEP’s.
Paid-for politics has already got a grip. The private sector would have sacked employees with undisclosed conflicts of interest such as these. The principle should exist that MPs will not expect to be paid beyond their salary for intervening in public life. The problem is that the very people who could enforce this, the lawmakers, are themselves profiting in exactly these same ways.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
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Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
'The death of Guevara carries these significant implications:
-- It marks the passing of another of the aggressive,romantic revolutionaries like Sukarno, Nkrumah, Ben Bella -- and reinforces this trend.
-- In the Latin American context, it will have a strong impact in discouraging would-be guerrillas.'
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
Man held at Guantánamo for 13 years a case of mistaken identity, say officials
A man who has spent 13 years in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested partly in a case of mistaken identity, US officials conceded on Tuesday.
Officials admitted that Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, 37, was a low-level Islamist foot soldier and not an al-Qaida courier and trainer as previously thought, during a Guantánamo hearing.
Wearing a beard and voluminous white T-shirt, and accompanied by a linguist and two personal representatives, the Yemeni appeared before a panel assessing whether he can be released.
A profile published by the Department of Defense maintains he fought in Afghanistan and mixed with members of al-Qaida. But officials concede that they wrongly believed he had a more significant role because he was confused with others who had a similar name.
“Mustafa Abd-al-Qawi Abd-al-Aziz al-Shamiri (YM-434) fought in several jihadist theaters and associated with al-Qaida members in Afghanistan,” the unclassified detainee profile said. “It was previously assessed that YM-434 also was an al-Qaida facilitator or courier, as well as a trainer, but we now judge that these activities were carried out by other known extremists with names or aliases similar to YM-434’s.”
The profile added that fragmentary reporting links al-Shamiri to fighting in Bosnia in 1995, and he told interrogators that he fought in Yemen’s civil war in 1996 and in Afghanistan for the Taliban from 2000 to 2001 – including against the Northern Alliance and US forces – before his capture near Mazar-e-Sharif. He has since been an indefinite detainee, considered too dangerous to release but without adequate evidence to bring to trial.
A statement from al-Shamiri’s personal representative described him as very cooperative, enthusiastic and supportive in the preparation for the board hearing. “From the onset, he has demonstrated a consistent positive attitude towards life after Gitmo,” he said. “He has a strong desire to obtain an education in order to provide for a future spouse that his family has already located for him.
“Mustafa will show you today that he is not a continuing significant threat to the United States of America. He is earnestly preparing for his life after Gitmo. During his time in detention, he has attended English and art classes, in addition to acquiring carpentry and cooking skills. During the last feast, Mustafa generously took the time to prepare over 30 plates of pastries for his fellow detainees. When I asked him why he would make pastries for his fellow detainees, he said it’s because it makes him feel like he can give back and share with people.”
The statement added: “Mustafa does have remorse for choosing the wrong path early in life. He has vocalized to us that while he cannot change the past, he would definitely have chosen a different path. He wants to make a life for himself. He is aware that Yemen is not an option and he is willing to go to any country that will accept him.”
The 17-minute opening of the hearing was broadcast via video link to journalists in Arlington, Virginia. They were then required to leave before classified details were discussed.
Al-Shamiri has been held as an enemy combatant without charge at Guantánamo since 2002. He is one of 107 prisoners at the controversial base, 48 of whom have been cleared for release. It is not certain when he will learn if he is to become number 49.
A man who has spent 13 years in the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested partly in a case of mistaken identity, US officials conceded on Tuesday.
Officials admitted that Mustafa al-Aziz al-Shamiri, 37, was a low-level Islamist foot soldier and not an al-Qaida courier and trainer as previously thought, during a Guantánamo hearing.
Wearing a beard and voluminous white T-shirt, and accompanied by a linguist and two personal representatives, the Yemeni appeared before a panel assessing whether he can be released.
A profile published by the Department of Defense maintains he fought in Afghanistan and mixed with members of al-Qaida. But officials concede that they wrongly believed he had a more significant role because he was confused with others who had a similar name.
“Mustafa Abd-al-Qawi Abd-al-Aziz al-Shamiri (YM-434) fought in several jihadist theaters and associated with al-Qaida members in Afghanistan,” the unclassified detainee profile said. “It was previously assessed that YM-434 also was an al-Qaida facilitator or courier, as well as a trainer, but we now judge that these activities were carried out by other known extremists with names or aliases similar to YM-434’s.”
The profile added that fragmentary reporting links al-Shamiri to fighting in Bosnia in 1995, and he told interrogators that he fought in Yemen’s civil war in 1996 and in Afghanistan for the Taliban from 2000 to 2001 – including against the Northern Alliance and US forces – before his capture near Mazar-e-Sharif. He has since been an indefinite detainee, considered too dangerous to release but without adequate evidence to bring to trial.
A statement from al-Shamiri’s personal representative described him as very cooperative, enthusiastic and supportive in the preparation for the board hearing. “From the onset, he has demonstrated a consistent positive attitude towards life after Gitmo,” he said. “He has a strong desire to obtain an education in order to provide for a future spouse that his family has already located for him.
“Mustafa will show you today that he is not a continuing significant threat to the United States of America. He is earnestly preparing for his life after Gitmo. During his time in detention, he has attended English and art classes, in addition to acquiring carpentry and cooking skills. During the last feast, Mustafa generously took the time to prepare over 30 plates of pastries for his fellow detainees. When I asked him why he would make pastries for his fellow detainees, he said it’s because it makes him feel like he can give back and share with people.”
The statement added: “Mustafa does have remorse for choosing the wrong path early in life. He has vocalized to us that while he cannot change the past, he would definitely have chosen a different path. He wants to make a life for himself. He is aware that Yemen is not an option and he is willing to go to any country that will accept him.”
The 17-minute opening of the hearing was broadcast via video link to journalists in Arlington, Virginia. They were then required to leave before classified details were discussed.
Al-Shamiri has been held as an enemy combatant without charge at Guantánamo since 2002. He is one of 107 prisoners at the controversial base, 48 of whom have been cleared for release. It is not certain when he will learn if he is to become number 49.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
WeAreChangeOklahoma - What did Sgt. Terrance Yeakey know?
WHO KILLED TERRY YEAKEY?
- by Pat Shannan
Most people today believe someone other than James Earl Ray shot Martin
Luther King. They have judged the facts, not the standard news media spin.
Someday the world opinion will do an about-face and swing in favor of
another unjustly convicted man, Tim McVeigh. If AP and the talking heads
would only report the truth about ANFO and its impotency, most of the
thinking public would have to conclude that Tim McVeigh could not be guilty
of murdering anyone. This is already a known fact, but the media are
suppressing it. Contrary to news reports, the persons found guilty could not
have been solely responsible. An Oklahoma City police sergeant became aware
of this before anyone else, apparently during the first hour of rescue. He
paid for that discovery with his life.
After numerous private investigators produced irrefutable evidence of
multiple explosions, unexploded bombs being hauled away after the fact, and
the complete and total incapability of an Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO)
bomb to cause the cause the kind of devastation seen in downtown Oklahoma
City, a giant government cover-up became obvious.
Only a couple of hours into the rescue, Sgt. Terrence Yeakey became
painfully aware of something disturbing. Did he somehow figure out that the
building had been blown from the inside and that the news reports were
baloney? Did he overhear a strange conversation from some of the many ATF
agents who were on the scene sooner than they should have been? Whatever it
was, Terry was upset. He called his wife that morning crying - and saying repeatedly,
"It's not true. It's not what they are saying. It didn't happen that way."
Terry Yeakey may have been the first to discover the sham.
He ran back and forth into that concrete mess of bricks and mortar all day
long and continued beyond exhaustion, far into the night. He scraped and
crawled and dug until his fingers bled and then kept digging some more. In a
cadre of heroes that day, Terry's performance was outstanding. On May 11th,
the following year he was scheduled to receive the Medal of Valor from the
Oklahoma City Police Department. He never got it. He was murdered on May 8,
1996, in the country - two and a half miles west of the El Reno
Penitentiary.
The official report said "Suicide," and anyone who believes an ANFO bomb
destroyed Murrah and the other surrounding buildings will believe this.
According to the report, Terry slashed himself eleven times on both forearms
before cutting his own throat twice near the jugular vein. Then, apparently
seeking even a more private place to die, he crawled another mile of rough
terrain away from his car and climbed a fence, before shooting himself in
the head with a small caliber revolver. What appeared to be rope burns on
his neck, handcuff bruises to his wrists, and muddy grass imbedded in his
slash wounds strongly indicated that he had some help in traversing this
final distance.
The bullet's entrance wound was in the right temple, above the eye. It went
through the policeman's head and exited in the area of the left cheek, near
the bottom of the ear lobe line. The trajectory was from a 40-45 degree
angle above his head. There were no powder burns. No weapon was ever
reported as found at the scene, but independent investigators speculated
that had Yeakey shot himself with standard police issue - a Glock 9mm or a
.357 Magnum - his head would have been far more destroyed than it apparently
was.
One of the last people Officer Yeakey talked to was a friend who knew he was
on a mission of private investigation. Terry had told him that he was on his
way to El Reno to check out something but first he had to shake the FBI
agents who were following him. He was traveling in his private automobile,
and witnesses said later that the inside looked like someone had "butchered
a hog" on the front seat.
While political assassinations within American borders have become more
prevalent in recent years, the ploy to place the blame on someone else -
even the victim himself - is nothing new. Neither is the gullibility of the
American public.
CONSIDER:
* June 12, 1963 -- Civil Rights and NAACP leader Medgar Evers is shot to
death in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In the ensuing
daylight hours, a high-powered rifle is discovered stashed in the brush near
where the killer had lain in wait for the ambush.
* November 22, 1963 - President Kennedy is shot to death in Dallas,
allegedly from the 6th floor window of the School Book Depository Building
at Dealy Plaza. A high-powered rifle is found stashed behind boxes across
the room on that 6th floor.
* April 4, 1968 - Dr. Martin Luther King is shot to death on the Lorraine
Motel balcony in Memphis, allegedly from the rear window of a run-down
flophouse across the street. A high-powered rifle is dumped two doors away
at the front of the flophouse and recovered only minutes later.
Political assassinations and their perpetrators were beginning to take on a
pattern of incredible stupidity, at least from the government's perspective
and news media spin.
In all three cases, the FBI took charge of the investigations.
In all three cases, the bullets could not be matched to the guns.
In all three cases, evidence was suppressed and mysteriously disappeared.
In all three cases, the FBI became highly suspect.
In all three cases, the crimes were declared "solved," but the facts never
meshed with the solutions, and grave doubt lingered about the guilt of the
three "lone nuts" blamed for the murders.
With the recent passing of former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, news
reports reminded us of the five bullet wounds suffered by him in the May 15,
1972 attack by Arthur Bremer. Some reports reduced it to four at the time,
while most avoided the issue entirely.
Here was the problem: Bremer emptied a five-shot, Model 36, Smith & Wesson
snub-nosed revolver. Whether Wallace took only four hits or all five, who
can explain the other three wounded people? A Wallace bodyguard and a Secret
Service agent were seriously wounded and a female campaign worker was hit in
the leg. Not even would Arlen Spector be foolish enough to try to create two
or three "magic bullets" in this case, and the silence at the time was
deafening.
Then those who subscribe to the university propaganda regarding the utter
folly of even suggesting a dreaded conspiracy say, "Yeah, well, now I guess
you're going to tell me that Sirhan Sirhan didn't kill Bobby Kennedy,
either."
No, we won't say such a politically incorrect thing if you can tell us
exactly how the powder burns got behind Senator Kennedy's right ear. Famed
Los Angeles coroner Thomas Naguchi stated that the gun barrel would have had
be within two inches to create the burns. Dozens of witnesses said Sirhan
was never closer than "three to four feet." The FBI explained this away by
claiming "Kennedy turned his head" following the initial shots, but all
ignored the inexplicable powder burns. Then there is the problem with the
eleven bullets (found in the walls and people) emerging from an 8-shot Iver
Johnson revolver.
Sometimes the perpetrators can fool even their own users. Yes, Sirhan
believes he killed Senator Kennedy just as Tim McVeigh apparently believes
he blew up the Murrah Building. But the facts show that either supposition
is totally impossible.
During the ensuing decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has fairly
earned the reputation of being more of a Government Protectorate than an
efficient investigative agency. One need only reference the cases in more
recent years of Gordon Kahl, KAL 007, Tupper Saussy, George Hansen, the
Weaver family, the mass murder of the Branch Davidians, the faked suicide of
Vince Foster, the Oklahoma City bombing(s), the farcical case against the
Montana Freemen, and the likely shoot-down of TWA Flight 800 for
confirmation of this on-going duplicity between government and news media.
Although the Yeakey incident occurred some thirty miles away in a different
jurisdiction, the investigation was quickly taken out of the hands of the El
Reno police and the Canadian County sheriff and turned over to the Oklahoma
City Police Department and the FBI. No homicide investigation was ever
conducted, and there was no autopsy.
In an interview with Terry's widow, Tonia Yeakey revealed that her husband
had been very upset by something he had seen under the day care center on
April 19th. He had wanted to go back and photograph it, but the officials
would not let him onto the site again. The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation
Committee (OKBIC) speculates that what Terry saw may have coincided with the
possible evidence of another unreported bombing device uncovered by their
"science people."
Mrs. Yeakey also said that Terry was supposed to be decorated for his work
as a rescue person, but didn't want to be put in the limelight. Terry felt
the investigation was fraudulent and didn't like the fact that the OKPD was
honoring people who really weren't deserving of the honor.
Sgt. Yeakey had told friends that he was going out of town to hide or secure
"evidence of a cover-up of the bombing by federal agents." It was his day
off, and he was traveling in his private automobile. In his last known
conversation, Terry reportedly told a friend that he "was being followed by
the feds and had to shake them." Previously, his household had been
subjected to numerous threatening phone calls by persons unknown, threats
which have not ceased even with his death.
Tonia Yeakey has moved five times in three years since the Oklahoma City
tragedy. She continues to get intimidating letters and threatening phone
calls. Since her husband's death, her home has been broken into and personal
threats have been written on her living room walls. She remains in fear for
her life, constantly seeking asylum, with no place to turn.
Sgt. Terry Yeakey was murdered, and just as with the absurd conclusions in
the Vince Foster case, the closing of the case as a "suicide" is ludicrous.
Growing Body Count Of OKC Bombing Witnesses Who Knew Too Much
[url=http://www.okcbombing.net/News Articles/Editorials/mike_laudenslager.htm]www.okcbombing.net/News%20Articles/Editorials/mike_laudenslager.htm[/url]
MURDER IN THE HEARTLAND
www.patshannan.bizland.com/yeakey.html
Oklahoma City Bombing Articles
www.patshannan.bizland.com/murrahintro.html
Unresolved Deaths In Oklahoma
www.rense.com/general11/unresolved.htm
WHO KILLED TERRY YEAKEY?
- by Pat Shannan
Most people today believe someone other than James Earl Ray shot Martin
Luther King. They have judged the facts, not the standard news media spin.
Someday the world opinion will do an about-face and swing in favor of
another unjustly convicted man, Tim McVeigh. If AP and the talking heads
would only report the truth about ANFO and its impotency, most of the
thinking public would have to conclude that Tim McVeigh could not be guilty
of murdering anyone. This is already a known fact, but the media are
suppressing it. Contrary to news reports, the persons found guilty could not
have been solely responsible. An Oklahoma City police sergeant became aware
of this before anyone else, apparently during the first hour of rescue. He
paid for that discovery with his life.
After numerous private investigators produced irrefutable evidence of
multiple explosions, unexploded bombs being hauled away after the fact, and
the complete and total incapability of an Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil (ANFO)
bomb to cause the cause the kind of devastation seen in downtown Oklahoma
City, a giant government cover-up became obvious.
Only a couple of hours into the rescue, Sgt. Terrence Yeakey became
painfully aware of something disturbing. Did he somehow figure out that the
building had been blown from the inside and that the news reports were
baloney? Did he overhear a strange conversation from some of the many ATF
agents who were on the scene sooner than they should have been? Whatever it
was, Terry was upset. He called his wife that morning crying - and saying repeatedly,
"It's not true. It's not what they are saying. It didn't happen that way."
Terry Yeakey may have been the first to discover the sham.
He ran back and forth into that concrete mess of bricks and mortar all day
long and continued beyond exhaustion, far into the night. He scraped and
crawled and dug until his fingers bled and then kept digging some more. In a
cadre of heroes that day, Terry's performance was outstanding. On May 11th,
the following year he was scheduled to receive the Medal of Valor from the
Oklahoma City Police Department. He never got it. He was murdered on May 8,
1996, in the country - two and a half miles west of the El Reno
Penitentiary.
The official report said "Suicide," and anyone who believes an ANFO bomb
destroyed Murrah and the other surrounding buildings will believe this.
According to the report, Terry slashed himself eleven times on both forearms
before cutting his own throat twice near the jugular vein. Then, apparently
seeking even a more private place to die, he crawled another mile of rough
terrain away from his car and climbed a fence, before shooting himself in
the head with a small caliber revolver. What appeared to be rope burns on
his neck, handcuff bruises to his wrists, and muddy grass imbedded in his
slash wounds strongly indicated that he had some help in traversing this
final distance.
The bullet's entrance wound was in the right temple, above the eye. It went
through the policeman's head and exited in the area of the left cheek, near
the bottom of the ear lobe line. The trajectory was from a 40-45 degree
angle above his head. There were no powder burns. No weapon was ever
reported as found at the scene, but independent investigators speculated
that had Yeakey shot himself with standard police issue - a Glock 9mm or a
.357 Magnum - his head would have been far more destroyed than it apparently
was.
One of the last people Officer Yeakey talked to was a friend who knew he was
on a mission of private investigation. Terry had told him that he was on his
way to El Reno to check out something but first he had to shake the FBI
agents who were following him. He was traveling in his private automobile,
and witnesses said later that the inside looked like someone had "butchered
a hog" on the front seat.
While political assassinations within American borders have become more
prevalent in recent years, the ploy to place the blame on someone else -
even the victim himself - is nothing new. Neither is the gullibility of the
American public.
CONSIDER:
* June 12, 1963 -- Civil Rights and NAACP leader Medgar Evers is shot to
death in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In the ensuing
daylight hours, a high-powered rifle is discovered stashed in the brush near
where the killer had lain in wait for the ambush.
* November 22, 1963 - President Kennedy is shot to death in Dallas,
allegedly from the 6th floor window of the School Book Depository Building
at Dealy Plaza. A high-powered rifle is found stashed behind boxes across
the room on that 6th floor.
* April 4, 1968 - Dr. Martin Luther King is shot to death on the Lorraine
Motel balcony in Memphis, allegedly from the rear window of a run-down
flophouse across the street. A high-powered rifle is dumped two doors away
at the front of the flophouse and recovered only minutes later.
Political assassinations and their perpetrators were beginning to take on a
pattern of incredible stupidity, at least from the government's perspective
and news media spin.
In all three cases, the FBI took charge of the investigations.
In all three cases, the bullets could not be matched to the guns.
In all three cases, evidence was suppressed and mysteriously disappeared.
In all three cases, the FBI became highly suspect.
In all three cases, the crimes were declared "solved," but the facts never
meshed with the solutions, and grave doubt lingered about the guilt of the
three "lone nuts" blamed for the murders.
With the recent passing of former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, news
reports reminded us of the five bullet wounds suffered by him in the May 15,
1972 attack by Arthur Bremer. Some reports reduced it to four at the time,
while most avoided the issue entirely.
Here was the problem: Bremer emptied a five-shot, Model 36, Smith & Wesson
snub-nosed revolver. Whether Wallace took only four hits or all five, who
can explain the other three wounded people? A Wallace bodyguard and a Secret
Service agent were seriously wounded and a female campaign worker was hit in
the leg. Not even would Arlen Spector be foolish enough to try to create two
or three "magic bullets" in this case, and the silence at the time was
deafening.
Then those who subscribe to the university propaganda regarding the utter
folly of even suggesting a dreaded conspiracy say, "Yeah, well, now I guess
you're going to tell me that Sirhan Sirhan didn't kill Bobby Kennedy,
either."
No, we won't say such a politically incorrect thing if you can tell us
exactly how the powder burns got behind Senator Kennedy's right ear. Famed
Los Angeles coroner Thomas Naguchi stated that the gun barrel would have had
be within two inches to create the burns. Dozens of witnesses said Sirhan
was never closer than "three to four feet." The FBI explained this away by
claiming "Kennedy turned his head" following the initial shots, but all
ignored the inexplicable powder burns. Then there is the problem with the
eleven bullets (found in the walls and people) emerging from an 8-shot Iver
Johnson revolver.
Sometimes the perpetrators can fool even their own users. Yes, Sirhan
believes he killed Senator Kennedy just as Tim McVeigh apparently believes
he blew up the Murrah Building. But the facts show that either supposition
is totally impossible.
During the ensuing decades, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has fairly
earned the reputation of being more of a Government Protectorate than an
efficient investigative agency. One need only reference the cases in more
recent years of Gordon Kahl, KAL 007, Tupper Saussy, George Hansen, the
Weaver family, the mass murder of the Branch Davidians, the faked suicide of
Vince Foster, the Oklahoma City bombing(s), the farcical case against the
Montana Freemen, and the likely shoot-down of TWA Flight 800 for
confirmation of this on-going duplicity between government and news media.
Although the Yeakey incident occurred some thirty miles away in a different
jurisdiction, the investigation was quickly taken out of the hands of the El
Reno police and the Canadian County sheriff and turned over to the Oklahoma
City Police Department and the FBI. No homicide investigation was ever
conducted, and there was no autopsy.
In an interview with Terry's widow, Tonia Yeakey revealed that her husband
had been very upset by something he had seen under the day care center on
April 19th. He had wanted to go back and photograph it, but the officials
would not let him onto the site again. The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation
Committee (OKBIC) speculates that what Terry saw may have coincided with the
possible evidence of another unreported bombing device uncovered by their
"science people."
Mrs. Yeakey also said that Terry was supposed to be decorated for his work
as a rescue person, but didn't want to be put in the limelight. Terry felt
the investigation was fraudulent and didn't like the fact that the OKPD was
honoring people who really weren't deserving of the honor.
Sgt. Yeakey had told friends that he was going out of town to hide or secure
"evidence of a cover-up of the bombing by federal agents." It was his day
off, and he was traveling in his private automobile. In his last known
conversation, Terry reportedly told a friend that he "was being followed by
the feds and had to shake them." Previously, his household had been
subjected to numerous threatening phone calls by persons unknown, threats
which have not ceased even with his death.
Tonia Yeakey has moved five times in three years since the Oklahoma City
tragedy. She continues to get intimidating letters and threatening phone
calls. Since her husband's death, her home has been broken into and personal
threats have been written on her living room walls. She remains in fear for
her life, constantly seeking asylum, with no place to turn.
Sgt. Terry Yeakey was murdered, and just as with the absurd conclusions in
the Vince Foster case, the closing of the case as a "suicide" is ludicrous.
Growing Body Count Of OKC Bombing Witnesses Who Knew Too Much
[url=http://www.okcbombing.net/News Articles/Editorials/mike_laudenslager.htm]www.okcbombing.net/News%20Articles/Editorials/mike_laudenslager.htm[/url]
MURDER IN THE HEARTLAND
www.patshannan.bizland.com/yeakey.html
Oklahoma City Bombing Articles
www.patshannan.bizland.com/murrahintro.html
Unresolved Deaths In Oklahoma
www.rense.com/general11/unresolved.htm
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch on Dec 6, 2015 at 10:27pm
Defense Contractors Cite “Benefits” of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East
which DefenseNews called a “treat” for the industry
Our programs are well supported [in the budget],” said Lockheed’s Tanner at the conference. “We think we did fare very well
Filthy fucking murderous fucking scum
Dec 6, 2015 at 9:33pm scar said:
when all else fails start a war..
Defense Contractors Cite “Benefits” of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East
which DefenseNews called a “treat” for the industry
Our programs are well supported [in the budget],” said Lockheed’s Tanner at the conference. “We think we did fare very well
Filthy fucking murderous fucking scum
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Police sexual misconduct: Just how big of a problem is it?
Over the weekend the Associated Press published the results of a year-long investigation into sexual misconduct by law enforcement in the U.S. The investigation found that about 1,000 officers from 41 states across the country were booted from police forces due to sex-related conduct over a five-year period, from 2009 to 2014. That number comes from a total of about 9,000 records that the AP combed through.
The AP investigation's results were released just in time for the start of the trial of one of their subjects, Daniel Holtzclaw. His trial begins today in Oklahoma with jury selection. The former Oklahoma City police officer faces 36 counts of sexual assault and other crimes against 13 women.
The report is obviously troubling for a number of reasons. One—and only one—is that the total number of officers that engage in such behavior isn't truly known. Some states like New York and California, for example, do not remove officers who commit such crimes, nor do they keep track of "officer wrongdoing."
Another reason the report is so troubling is because it identifies what police chiefs themselves have said are the conditions of the job that lead to such violations: Cops are in a position of having power over people. Some of these people are vulnerable, and that vulnerability includes being seen as less credible than an officer of the law. Even patrolling at night was listed as being a perk for a predator with a badge.
Lastly, the report identifies some of the steps that police chiefs—the ones whose shoulders this issue falls on—have undertaken to remedy the issue, including more stringent hiring policies that thoroughly screen applicants' backgrounds and mental health status.
Good luck with that.
Over the weekend the Associated Press published the results of a year-long investigation into sexual misconduct by law enforcement in the U.S. The investigation found that about 1,000 officers from 41 states across the country were booted from police forces due to sex-related conduct over a five-year period, from 2009 to 2014. That number comes from a total of about 9,000 records that the AP combed through.
The AP investigation's results were released just in time for the start of the trial of one of their subjects, Daniel Holtzclaw. His trial begins today in Oklahoma with jury selection. The former Oklahoma City police officer faces 36 counts of sexual assault and other crimes against 13 women.
The report is obviously troubling for a number of reasons. One—and only one—is that the total number of officers that engage in such behavior isn't truly known. Some states like New York and California, for example, do not remove officers who commit such crimes, nor do they keep track of "officer wrongdoing."
Another reason the report is so troubling is because it identifies what police chiefs themselves have said are the conditions of the job that lead to such violations: Cops are in a position of having power over people. Some of these people are vulnerable, and that vulnerability includes being seen as less credible than an officer of the law. Even patrolling at night was listed as being a perk for a predator with a badge.
Lastly, the report identifies some of the steps that police chiefs—the ones whose shoulders this issue falls on—have undertaken to remedy the issue, including more stringent hiring policies that thoroughly screen applicants' backgrounds and mental health status.
Good luck with that.
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch on Dec 8, 2015 at 11:29pm
In October 2008 Iceland was hit with one of the biggest financial disasters any nation in the world had experienced. In response, citizens took to the streets creating what is now known as the “Pots and Pans Revolution”.
In response to widespread media silence and a growing global trend towards people-led movements, this documentary explores how and why the people of Iceland resisted the measures imposed by their government following the crisis of 2008 and how they forced their government to resign in an attempt to forge a new political path.
Filmed in Reykjavik between 2012 and 2014, the documentary meets the instigators of the revolution and follows the most important National Referendum in Iceland’s history. Giving the Icelandic people the opportunity to decide whether to support a constitution that had been created through a popular grassroots movement. Through this we explore the Icelanders' story of their nation and their revolution but also what lessons can be learned globally from their experiences.
In light of a growing international trend towards grassroots movements crossing over into mainstream politics. This documentary is a timely portrayal of one such movement and their struggle to change the face of democracy.
Iceland has jailed 26 bankers, why won't we?
This determination to hold people to account for actions that caused intense financial misery contrasts strongly with Britain
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iceland-has-jailed-26-bankers-why-wont-we-a6735411.html
In October 2008 Iceland was hit with one of the biggest financial disasters any nation in the world had experienced. In response, citizens took to the streets creating what is now known as the “Pots and Pans Revolution”.
In response to widespread media silence and a growing global trend towards people-led movements, this documentary explores how and why the people of Iceland resisted the measures imposed by their government following the crisis of 2008 and how they forced their government to resign in an attempt to forge a new political path.
Filmed in Reykjavik between 2012 and 2014, the documentary meets the instigators of the revolution and follows the most important National Referendum in Iceland’s history. Giving the Icelandic people the opportunity to decide whether to support a constitution that had been created through a popular grassroots movement. Through this we explore the Icelanders' story of their nation and their revolution but also what lessons can be learned globally from their experiences.
In light of a growing international trend towards grassroots movements crossing over into mainstream politics. This documentary is a timely portrayal of one such movement and their struggle to change the face of democracy.
Iceland has jailed 26 bankers, why won't we?
This determination to hold people to account for actions that caused intense financial misery contrasts strongly with Britain
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/iceland-has-jailed-26-bankers-why-wont-we-a6735411.html
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch
“Even if Trump is a prop-figure set up to sweep the other Republican candidates off the board and pave the way for Hillary to win the election, something else is going on. Something deeper and much weirder.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Donald Trump, a figure of authority? A folk-hero? A man who can say anything, get away with it, and become more popular? How did this happen? How was Trump sculpted, if you will, to become what he is now?
What is Donald Trump doing to media reality?
“Even if Trump is a prop-figure set up to sweep the other Republican candidates off the board and pave the way for Hillary to win the election, something else is going on. Something deeper and much weirder.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
Donald Trump, a figure of authority? A folk-hero? A man who can say anything, get away with it, and become more popular? How did this happen? How was Trump sculpted, if you will, to become what he is now?
What is Donald Trump doing to media reality?
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch
Ever tried cannabis? Prince asks MS sufferer
www.theguardian.com/uk/1998/dec/24/monarchy.ameliagentleman
The shrouded implication here is only a "potty" man would advocate an "illegal" substance proven to cure myriad complications most notably cancer.
The caring jug-earred face of Evil
Charles Windsor is portrayed by the media as a lovable albeit slightly potty man who genuinely cares for the people. The bizarre rantings of the man would be harmless enough were it not for his position as heir to the throne of Great Britain and the territories of the Crown. When one takes into account the lunatic Prince's position in the internationalist mafia, his rantings lose their humorous appeal.
The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King ‘for a purpose’ - to save the world.
Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: ‘I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose.
‘I don’t want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, “Why the hell didn’t you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was”. That is what motivates me.
‘I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.’
'Prince' Charles is pro-invasion, pro-Islam, pro-Jewish (of course). He is a land-owner of vast tracts across the UK, yet has the nerve to say that we must learn to live in smaller homes to save the planet. He supports the invasion of Europe which is destroying the countryside and infrastructure of our countries. He is a typical modern 'green' who espouses environmentalism in the same breath as arguing for an end to borders - failing to see that borders are needed to protect the environment. Charles married and bred with the Jewess, Diana, making her legitimate son - the heir to the throne after Charles has had his go at ruining the nation - a Jew. Charles' only legitimate son, William (Harry is a bastard fathered by Diana's butler), married the Jewess Kate, making the bloodline which has been partly kosher for some time, entirely kosher. Israel is always calling for Jews to make their way there - so the best thing to do with the whole rotten Windsor mafia, is honour that call, and deport them all. The Jews in Parliament, as servants of the Windsors, need likewise to go.
Ever tried cannabis? Prince asks MS sufferer
www.theguardian.com/uk/1998/dec/24/monarchy.ameliagentleman
The shrouded implication here is only a "potty" man would advocate an "illegal" substance proven to cure myriad complications most notably cancer.
The caring jug-earred face of Evil
Charles Windsor is portrayed by the media as a lovable albeit slightly potty man who genuinely cares for the people. The bizarre rantings of the man would be harmless enough were it not for his position as heir to the throne of Great Britain and the territories of the Crown. When one takes into account the lunatic Prince's position in the internationalist mafia, his rantings lose their humorous appeal.
The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King ‘for a purpose’ - to save the world.
Giving a fascinating insight into his view of his inherited wealth and influence, he said: ‘I can only somehow imagine that I find myself being born into this position for a purpose.
‘I don’t want my grandchildren or yours to come along and say to me, “Why the hell didn’t you come and do something about this? You knew what the problem was”. That is what motivates me.
‘I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity.’
'Prince' Charles is pro-invasion, pro-Islam, pro-Jewish (of course). He is a land-owner of vast tracts across the UK, yet has the nerve to say that we must learn to live in smaller homes to save the planet. He supports the invasion of Europe which is destroying the countryside and infrastructure of our countries. He is a typical modern 'green' who espouses environmentalism in the same breath as arguing for an end to borders - failing to see that borders are needed to protect the environment. Charles married and bred with the Jewess, Diana, making her legitimate son - the heir to the throne after Charles has had his go at ruining the nation - a Jew. Charles' only legitimate son, William (Harry is a bastard fathered by Diana's butler), married the Jewess Kate, making the bloodline which has been partly kosher for some time, entirely kosher. Israel is always calling for Jews to make their way there - so the best thing to do with the whole rotten Windsor mafia, is honour that call, and deport them all. The Jews in Parliament, as servants of the Windsors, need likewise to go.
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by thinkforyourself
The filthy pedofiles currently squatting in Buckingham Palace are not even the real Royal Family, they are merely illegitimate bastard spawn, 'rats in royal clothing' as it were.
The filthy pedofiles currently squatting in Buckingham Palace are not even the real Royal Family, they are merely illegitimate bastard spawn, 'rats in royal clothing' as it were.
Last edited by lizardking on Fri Feb 26, 2016 4:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Re: Corruption In Authority
The Real Drug Lords: A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade
1947 to 1951, FRANCE
According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party. The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks — ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille’s first heroin laboratones were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.
EARLY 1950s, SOUTHEAST ASIA
The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world’s largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the CIA’s principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia. (See Christopher Robbins, Air America, Avon Books, 1985, chapter 9)
1950s to early 1970s, INDOCHINA
During U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina, Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. Many Gl’s in Vietnam became addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market.
1973-80, AUSTRALIA
The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including fommer CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers. With branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and the U.S., Nugan Hand Bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealings. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt. (See Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA, W.W. Norton & Co., 1 987.)
1970s and 1980s, PANAMA
For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated ”guns-for-drugs” flights for the contras, providing protection and pilots, as well as safe havens for drug cartel officials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-CIA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellin Cartel patrons). The U.S. government only turned against Noriega, invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general once they discovered he was providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas. Ironically drug trafficking through Panama increased after the US invasion. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991; National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations.)
1980s, CENTRAL AMERICA
The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating:
“There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region…. U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua…. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter…. Senior U S policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.” (Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, 1989)
In Costa Rica, which served as the “Southern Front” for the contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several different CIA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation detailed by the Mercury News, and Noriega’s operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras. Hull and other CIA-connected contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders. In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial. Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Americans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the contras. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking They used contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shnmp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the U.S. Costa Rica was not the only route. Guatemala, whose military intelligence service — closely associated with the CIA — harbored many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.
Additionally, the Medellin Cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, testified that he funneled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies and banks) to these CIA-linked drug networks. At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received US government contracts to carry non-lethal supplies to the contras. Southern Air Transport, “formerly” CIA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well. Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other locations, including several military bases Designated as ‘Contra Craft,” these shipments were not to be inspected. When some authority wasn’t clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.
1980s to early 1990s, AFGHANISTAN
CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and leading heroin refiner. CIA supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
MlD-1980s to early 199Os, HAITI
While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA turned a blind eye to their clients’ drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN). SIN was purportedly created to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in the trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some of the Haitian military and political leaders.
1947 to 1951, FRANCE
According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party. The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks — ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille’s first heroin laboratones were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.
EARLY 1950s, SOUTHEAST ASIA
The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world’s largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the CIA’s principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia. (See Christopher Robbins, Air America, Avon Books, 1985, chapter 9)
1950s to early 1970s, INDOCHINA
During U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina, Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. Many Gl’s in Vietnam became addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world’s illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America’s booming heroin market.
1973-80, AUSTRALIA
The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including fommer CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers. With branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and the U.S., Nugan Hand Bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering and international arms dealings. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt. (See Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA, W.W. Norton & Co., 1 987.)
1970s and 1980s, PANAMA
For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated ”guns-for-drugs” flights for the contras, providing protection and pilots, as well as safe havens for drug cartel officials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-CIA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellin Cartel patrons). The U.S. government only turned against Noriega, invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general once they discovered he was providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas. Ironically drug trafficking through Panama increased after the US invasion. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991; National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations.)
1980s, CENTRAL AMERICA
The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating:
“There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region…. U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua…. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter…. Senior U S policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras’ funding problems.” (Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, 1989)
In Costa Rica, which served as the “Southern Front” for the contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several different CIA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation detailed by the Mercury News, and Noriega’s operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica’s border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras. Hull and other CIA-connected contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders. In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to Miami, via Haiti. The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial. Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Americans whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the contras. Many had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking They used contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shnmp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the U.S. Costa Rica was not the only route. Guatemala, whose military intelligence service — closely associated with the CIA — harbored many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.
Additionally, the Medellin Cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Milian Rodriguez, testified that he funneled nearly $10 million to Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador. The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies and banks) to these CIA-linked drug networks. At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received US government contracts to carry non-lethal supplies to the contras. Southern Air Transport, “formerly” CIA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well. Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other locations, including several military bases Designated as ‘Contra Craft,” these shipments were not to be inspected. When some authority wasn’t clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.
1980s to early 1990s, AFGHANISTAN
CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and leading heroin refiner. CIA supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
MlD-1980s to early 199Os, HAITI
While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA turned a blind eye to their clients’ drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN). SIN was purportedly created to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in the trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some of the Haitian military and political leaders.
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Re: Corruption In Authority
This World Rwanda's Untold Story BBC Documentary 2014
Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, This World reveals evidence that challenges the accepted story of one of the most horrifying events of the late 20th century. The current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has long been portrayed as the man who brought an end to the killing and rescued his country from oblivion. Now there are increasing questions about the role of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front forces in the dark days of 1994 and in the 20 years since.
The film investigates evidence of Kagame's role in the shooting down of the presidential plane that sparked the killings in 1994 and questions his claims to have ended the genocide. It also examines claims of war crimes committed by Kagame's forces and their allies in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and allegations of human rights abuses in today's Rwanda.
Former close associates from within Kagame's inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda's economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda's president.
Twenty years on from the Rwandan genocide, This World reveals evidence that challenges the accepted story of one of the most horrifying events of the late 20th century. The current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, has long been portrayed as the man who brought an end to the killing and rescued his country from oblivion. Now there are increasing questions about the role of Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front forces in the dark days of 1994 and in the 20 years since.
The film investigates evidence of Kagame's role in the shooting down of the presidential plane that sparked the killings in 1994 and questions his claims to have ended the genocide. It also examines claims of war crimes committed by Kagame's forces and their allies in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo and allegations of human rights abuses in today's Rwanda.
Former close associates from within Kagame's inner circle and government speak out from hiding abroad. They present a very different portrait of a man who is often hailed as presiding over a model African state. Rwanda's economic miracle and apparent ethnic harmony has led to the country being one of the biggest recipients of aid from the UK. Former prime minister Tony Blair is an unpaid adviser to Kagame, but some now question the closeness of Mr Blair and other western leaders to Rwanda's president.
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Who was Behind the 1994 Rwanda Genocide?
On the evening of April 6th 1994 a plane carrying the Hutu leaders of both Rwanda and Burundi was shot down as it approached Kanombe airport. The assassins had little trouble targeting the flight as only one of the two runways was open, the other having been closed two months earlier on the orders of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Simultaneous to the shootdown, that is on the eve of April 6th, a 30,000 RPF (Tutsi) army based in Uganda invaded from the north. At the same time, hundreds of covert armed RPF cells came to life in and around Kigali and began attacking Rwandan government forces (FAR). The population, roughly 85% Hutu, and encompassing at least a million refugees in and around Kigali displaced by previous RPF incursions from Uganda, began to panic. A genocide was about to begin.
But it was a genocide neither against, nor by, the actors cited in the ‘official’ narrative. Indeed, Rwanda circa 1994, is, in all likelihood, if not the, then certainly one of the greatest propaganda swindles of all time. This is the story of that swindle and of the scandalous truth that lies buried beneath it.
Historical Context
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Rwanda was a feudal kingdom ruled by a Tutsi minority over a Hutu majority. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885 Rwanda came under the suzerainty of Germany which was, itself, replaced as colonial overlord following WW1, by Belgium. Rwanda’s feudal order remained intact, however, until 1956 when the Belgians finally organized elections. Then, in November 1959, the Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. Many Tutsis fled, the majority ending up, significantly, in Uganda. It was from this perch in Uganda that the exiled Tutsi aristocracy launched, between 1960 and 1973, a series of violent attacks against the Rwandan regime. These were repulsed and for the next decade and a half Rwanda enjoyed a period of relative peace.
It is worth noting at this juncture that, though much of the Tutsi aristocracy fled in 1960, those Tutsis who remained were well integrated into Rwandan society and body politic. Thus, both the government and army contained significant numbers of Tutsi personnel even through the height of the crisis in April 1994. In fact, the Rwandan Army (FAR) continued as a multi-ethnic organization even as it was forced to retreat into the forests of the Congo in July of 1994; this after having run out of ammunition due to a Western embargo on arms supplies – an embargo not applied to the RPF.
Up until 1990 there was no further interference in Rwanda from Uganda. Nevertheless, by then the Tutsis exiles living there had become one of the main elements of the Ugandan Army. As such, when Museveni came to power – having been handpicked by the US and Britain to oust the socialist, Milton Obote – a third or more of his army consisted of Tutsis. Many of these held high office, including Paul Kagame. Kagame had been (and remains) an erstwhile client of Washington from well before he claimed to have ‘saved Rwanda from further genocide’ in 1994. Not only had he served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s, but he had also received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and had been the beneficiary of constant US material and diplomatic support from the moment he assumed control of the RPF. Upon the collapse of the USSR in 1989/90 the US and the UK began a general militarist expansion which included the targeting of Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Yugoslavia as it was the last real bastion of working socialism in Europe, and Rwanda as it was a working model of socialist development in Africa. In addition, the US had turned against Mobutu (of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as he was beginning to ally himself politically with China. The Rwandan president, Habyarimana, was subsequently approached by Washington to allow his country to be used as a staging ground for an attack on Zaire (to this day, a cornucopia of precious resources prized by the West). His refusal caused the US to look to other agents in furthering its strategic interests. They found the Tutsis in Uganda, ever thirsting for restoration of their hegemony in Rwanda. Furthermore, Museveni had begun to feel uneasy about the numbers of Tutsis in his ranks and was looking to be rid of them. The opportunity to satisfy these disparate desires soon came.
On October 1, 1990 the self-styled Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched a surprise attack from Uganda. Though calling themselves a force of ‘liberation’ the offensive was a thinly disguised invasion by Uganda itself. Initially, the justification for the invasion put out by the RPF was that of attaining the right of return of Tutsi refugees. This claim, however, was belied by the fact that Rwanda had, under UN auspices, already agreed a few weeks earlier to the return of all Tutsis who wished to do so. That accord required Tutsi representatives to travel to Kigali to determine both the logistics of that population movement and their subsequent accommodation within Rwanda. The delegation was expected at the end of September, 1990. They never arrived.
The attack killed tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians. These crimes, though well documented, have never been accounted for, nor did the UN or ‘international community’ ever seek to account for them. Indeed, there was not even a shred of condemnation of the Ugandan/RPF invasion, this despite the clamour raised only two months earlier with regard to the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. In point of fact, the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda and US Special Forces operated alongside the RPF from the beginning. This support notwithstanding, the small Rwandan army (with some help from a Congolese battalion) was eventually able to repel the invading forces.
Following this attempt using a proxy force to overthrow the state, the United States brought political and economic pressure to bear upon Rwanda’s one-party socialist state (MRND). The President, Juvenal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to alter the constitution and in 1991 Rwanda became a multi-party democracy. Though the Rwandan government effected this as an offer of peace, what followed was anything but peace. Thus, rather than work towards reconciliation, the RPF turned from the tactics of open warfare to those of guerrilla terrorism.
In 1992, and whilst RPF forces were busy planting mines, assassinating politicians and blaming it on the MRND, a coalition government was formed with the front parties of the RPF. These agents, with US backing, quickly seized control of key ministries and succeeded in appointing the Prime Minister. They also gained control of the intelligence services which they then began to dismantle. In essence, the ‘power sharing’ arrangement had largely given over control of the country to the very forces long bent on its destruction.
The RPF itself, meanwhile, engaged in a ‘talk and fight’ strategy; always agreeing to a ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on the civilian population. The most egregious of these assaults was their breaking of the ceasefire and the launching of a major offensive in February of 1993. Seizing the town of Ruhengeri, RPF forces murdered some 40,000, mostly Hutu, civilians. Once again, the ‘international community’ remained dutifully silent.
The Rwandan army, though hamstrung by the civilian ministries, managed to repulse the RPF attack. Finally, in August of 1993, the Arusha Accords were signed under pressure from the United States and its allies, and from which the RPF obtained major concessions. The Accords dictated the formation of a broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections. But for the RPF – as for the United States – there was a fatal fly in the electoral ointment. To wit, the RPF knew that they could not win such elections; this not only because they were unpopular with the majority (85%) Hutu population, but also because they had precious little support amongst many of Rwanda’s internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses they had destroyed. Rather than prepare for elections, the RPF prepared for something different.
UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming in from Uganda during this period. In fact, the UN force (UNAMIR) supposedly deployed to ensure a peaceful transition acted, instead, as a cover for the US and its allies, i.e. Britain, Belgium, Canada, to assist the illegal build-up. General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN force, hid this build-up not only from the Rwandan Army and the President, but also from his immediate superiors, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and UN Secretary General Boutros Ghali. These machinations were accompanied by death threats against Habyarimana, threats made all the more significant by the murder of the first Hutu president of neighbouring Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, by Tutsi officers in October 1993.
The result of the 1993 RPF offensive was the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Hutus from northern Rwanda towards Kigali so that by April, 1994 over a million refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds of thousands more in camps to the south. The RPF, meanwhile, did all it could to paralyze the functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial tensions, and to prepare for war.
Who Killed Habyarimana
The triggering event in the ‘Rwandan genocide’ of 1994 is generally agreed to be the shooting down, on April 6, 1994, of the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi. The official story has it that unidentified ‘Hutu rebels’ were the villains who targeted their own countrymen in some vague attempt to gain power. No evidence was ever adduced in support of this threadbare thesis, but in any case, even if so, the official villains failed spectacularly in their objectives as the country quickly fell to invading Tutsi forces leaving a small minority (Tutsi) population to rise like the Phoenix to its former position of national privilege and oligarchical control. No one in the Western mainstream media has ever commented on the exceeding peculiarity of this bizarre turn of events, never witnessed before, in which the supposed victims of a genocide end up as the victors of the conflict.
The paradox is soon resolved, however, if we countenance the much more likely scenario that the decapitation of the state leadership was the first stage in a final offensive of a war started four years earlier. That the assassination was part of an RPF coup d’etat is given further support by the fact that a 30,000 man RPF force was already marching against Kigali hours before the plane was destroyed, and that RPF forces inside Kigali were attacking government positions within hours of the shootdown. The Western audience, naturally, was, and has never since, been informed of these rather pertinent contextual facts surrounding the events of April 6, 1994. To boot, the official response to Habyarimana’s assassination was and has remained one of determined indifference; a strange thing given that it involved the highest official in the land. Even stranger given that, and according to virtually every independent expert on the subject, the ‘genocide of 1994’ simply would not have happened had Habyarimana not been assassinated. Nevertheless, though all the circumstantial evidence points towards the assassination being part and parcel of a US-backed RPF coup d’etat against the government of Rwanda, it would yet be helpful if there was direct evidence implicating RPF forces in the murder. There is.
As in one of those classic ‘B movie’ plot twists where the bad guys inadvertently hire a good guy who turns the table on his benefactors, so too did the lead official of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) hire an investigator into the crash who turned out to be an honest man. Reporting back to Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour in 1996/97, Australian lawyer, Michael Hourigan, found evidence directly linking the RPF (and the CIA) to the assassination. Far from pleasing Arbour, however, Hourigan’s diligence was rewarded with censure. According to Hourigan, Arbour became “aggressive” and “hostile” when informed of his findings. What Hourigan didn’t know at the time is that Arbour, after having launched the investigation, had been directed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who had handpicked her for the job) to quash the inquiry. And so she did. Arbour would later (again under the aegis of Albright) be promoted to Canadian Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Hourigan’s report, though suppressed at the time, would, nevertheless, surface many years later in the hands of one of the defense teams at the ICTR. The report would also have its findings later corroborated by numerous sources. Thus, the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, having been called in to investigate the deaths of three French nationals who were aboard Habyarimana’s doomed flight, launched an exhaustive eight-year investigation. He concluded that the plane had indeed been destroyed by the RPF and that the assassination was part and parcel of Kagame et al’s plan to take over Rwanda by force. Bruguiere went on to issue nine warrants for the arrest of high-ranking members of the RPF whilst also requesting that the ICTR take up Kagame’s prosecution.
What’s more, not only have other French – and Spanish – legal officials since confirmed Bruguiere’s findings, but many highly placed members of the RPF have stepped forward publicly to implicate Kagame and the RPF in the assassination. All have suffered the same fate of official international silence and suppression, and some of the latter have suffered assassination themselves.
This culture of suppression and official silence has also plagued the ICTR from its inception. In particular, it became the explicit policy of the ICTR to forcibly limit its mandate solely to the investigation of ‘genocidal intent’ by Hutu government figures, i.e. without any reference whatsoever either to the political context of the conflict or to the mounting evidence implicating the RPF as invaders and genocidaires. In short, the ICTR, much like its sister tribunal, the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), proved itself from the outset to be little more than a Washington-sponsored kangaroo court.
This transparently politicized policy has continued apace throughout the trials. When, for instance, the more independently-minded Carla Del Ponte replaced the pliable Louise Arbour, she was quickly terminated as Chief Prosecutor after calling for a ‘Special Investigation’ into the actions of the RPF; this despite making a case for such an investigation with then UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan. Of course, Anan’s refusal to look into the crimes of the RPF should come as no surprise as it was he who, a) was head of the peacekeeping operations in 1994, and is thus implicated in the events, and b) was handpicked by the US to replace his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros-Ghali, it might be remembered, had come uncomfortably close to scuttling the entire US/RPF invasion scenario when, in May of 1994, he acceded to a request by the Rwandan government to send 5500 UN troops to Rwanda to reinforce the 2500 already stationed there; this so as to stabilize the country at a time when reports of growing ‘chaos’ were issuing forth daily in the world press. These efforts were, however, categorically thwarted by the Clinton regime which used its influence to remove the proposal from the UN agenda. Instead, the UN troops already stationed there, far from being reinforced, were withdrawn. Later, Boutros-Ghali, in conversation with Rwandan expert Robin Philpot, would expand on these matters declaring that, “The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the responsibility of the Americans!” Hardly any wonder, then, that in 1996 US Ambassador to the UN, the ubiquitous Madeleine Albright, would veto his re-election making Boutros-Ghali the only UN Secretary General in history not to be granted a second term in office.
Inconvenient Truths
On August 26, 2010 the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report detailing the most serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven year period (1993 – 2003). The report described how, following the RPF’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to carry out “systematic and widespread attacks” against Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring DRC. These attacks it stated, “could be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Save for it having been leaked to Le Monde, it is clear that the report was well on its way to being buried alive, its cover-up a near certainty. But this was hardly the first instance of a cover-up of a UN report vis a vis Rwanda. As early as October 11, 1994, Robert Gersony, an employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), then attached to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, made an oral presentation to the UN Commission of Experts on Rwanda. Gersony had been dispatched to survey the situation inside Rwanda to determine if conditions were right for return of the Hutu refugees who had fled the RPF. Instead, he found that the RPF had been committing massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994 through the date of his presentation. On page 4 of the UN record of Gersony’s presentation (a record which surfaced in the defense proceedings at the ICTR), we read,
“Significant areas…have been the scene of systematic and sustained [emphasis added] killing and persecution of the civilian Hutu population by the Rwandan Patriotic Front…..These actions were consistently reported to be conducted in areas where opposition forces of any kind – armed or unarmed, or resistance of any kind….were absent. Large scale indiscriminate killings of men, women and children, including the sick and elderly were consistently reported.”
Now, I remind the reader that the killings detailed here were being perpetrated not, as in the official narrative, i.e. by Rwandan government troops, but by the supposed saviours of the country, i.e. the RPF.
Though much evidence surfaced early on that the official genocide narrative was in sharp disagreement with reality, all later independent reports have continued to corroborate this finding. In a 2004 paper, for instance (and reinforced in a more recent 2009 report), US academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam concluded that, of the many hundreds of thousands of deaths (possibly as high as two million) that occurred in Rwanda from April through July of 1994, the “majority of victims [at least two thirds] were likely Hutu and not Tutsi”. Noteworthy is the fact that Davenport and Stam were initially sponsored by the ICTR – that is until their findings contradicted the official narrative whence they were sent packing.
Still, Davenport and Stam have refrained from taking the implication of their own research to its logical conclusion, i.e. that Kagame’s forces were the only agents responsible for committing “systematic” killings in the areas they overran, or that such systemic violence was part of a pre-existing plan by the US-backed RPF to invade and overthrow the legitimate government, the latter in order to install a formerly privileged minority – and Western comprador elite – to power within Rwanda.
If the academics have been content to sit on the fence, not so one of the more famous lay figures of the Rwandan debacle. It is ironic in the extreme that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda – a film unashamedly promoting the official narrative – has himself, in numerous interviews, completely gainsaid that narrative. He has, thus, repeatedly denounced the RPF as the real genocidaires, and has called a Kagame a “war criminal” and “dictator” who is responsible for mass killings not only during the takeover of Rwanda in July 1994, but ever since both in Rwanda and in his US-backed incursions into the Congo. Indeed, so fervent have the denunciations been that Rusesabagina is now officially listed as a ‘terrorist’ and ‘genocide denier’ (a prisonable offence in Rwanda) by the Kagame regime.
No matter, the movie continues to circulate, sans critique; Rusesabagina’s views and denunciations, do not.
Whose Genocide(s)?
It is something of an embarrassment to the US architects of the ICTR that the tribunal, though explicitly tasked with indicting only members of the Hutu government, have failed singularly in successfully prosecuting any of them. Not only have the most senior members of the Rwandan government – through the spirited efforts of the various defense teams – been acquitted, but the mass of evidence so assembled has stood the entire official narrative on its head, and has implicated, au contraire, the RPF – and its foreign accomplices – in the genocide.
There was, however, one highly publicized piece of evidence proffered at the tribunal by prosecutors as they sought to prove a ‘planned genocide’ by the Rwandan government. This was the so-called ‘genocide fax’ allegedly sent to the New York UN headquarters on the night of January 10th, 1994. That this was the only piece of documentary evidence claiming direct planning of a genocide put forward in the trial is, itself, telling. Had there actually been such a plan, the logistics would have left a paper and/or electronic trail a mile wide. Instead, there are no orders, minutes of meetings, notes, cables, faxes, radio intercepts or any other type of documentation indicating that such a plan ever existed. And then, of course, there are the actual events on the ground which, as we have seen (and shall see further), suggest nothing of the sort. Nonetheless, there is the lone sepulchre of the ‘genocide fax’. What to make of it?
To make a long story short, the fax is a forgery. There was a fax sent to the UN headquarters on January 10th, 1994 (a copy of a cable sent by Romeo Dallaire to another Canadian, General Baril), but this was not the fax that was entered into evidence in the Military II trial (ICTR vs Ndindiliyimana) in October, 2005. Ndindiliyimana’s defense counsel was able to definitively establish that the original fax dealt only with ‘weapons caches and seeking protection for an informant’, whereas the fax subsequently entered as evidence, having first had time stamps, dates and paragraphs altered, had mysteriously sprouted an addendum about government plans to kill Tutsis and Belgian soldiers. Conflicting testimony both between Dallaire’s earlier and later statements, and between statements made by Dallaire and Lt. Col. Claeys (a Belgian officer who claims to be one of the authors of the original cable), further proved the document’s inauthenticity. Such was only reinforced when Dallaire’s immediate superior, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, stated that he had never seen nor heard of the fax or any of its alleged inflammatory contents. Eventually, the ‘genocide fax’ was simply withdrawn as evidence by the court. Puff! One might wonder, then, why tens of thousands of MRND personnel are today still in prison, this whilst not one RPF figure has even been indicted. But so it is.
If documents supporting a pre-meditated plan by the Rwandan government have failed to materialize, not so it turns out when it comes to the RPF. In the same trial that saw the outing of the fraudulent ‘genocide fax’, evidence was presented suggesting nothing other than a master plan by Kagame and “our Belgian, British and American collaborators” for the taking not only of Rwanda, but of Zaire. In a letter from Kagame to fellow Tutsi, Jean-Baptiste Bagaza of Burundi, dated August 10, 1994, Kagame thanks Bagaza for his help in “taking Kigali”. He then relates his communications with “our big brother Yoweri Museveni” and talks of “some modifications of the plan” noting that:
“We have found that the presence of large numbers of Rwandan refugees at Goma, and the international community, can cause our plan for Zaire [emphasis added] to fail. We cannot occupy ourselves with Zaire until after the return of these Hutus….In any case, our external intelligence services continue to crisscross the east of Zaire, and our Belgian, British and American collaborators [emphasis added] the rest of Zaire. The action reports are expected in the next few days.”
Now, what this letter seems to indicate is that the attack on Rwanda (from 1990 onward) was not the prime objective of Kagame and crew after all, but was, rather, merely the gateway to an attack on Zaire/Congo. The significance of the latter became apparent when, on November 1, 1996, the aforementioned Goma was, in fact, attacked and taken by the RPA (the re-named RPF) along with Burundian and Ugandan forces. This assault was heavily backed by the United States and eyewitness accounts tell of large American cargo planes filled with arms landing in Kigali in the last two weeks of October, 1996. The taking of Goma was, it is pertinent to note, the prelude to the ensuing genocidal carnage that has overtaken the Democratic Republic of the Congo ever since. To properly understand this last statement we need to backtrack a bit to April 6, 1994, and look at the events that unfolded immediately following the assassination of Habyarimana.
* * *
Once the plane had been shot down, an RPF army, as noted earlier, invaded from the north whilst armed RPF cells began attacks inside Kigali itself. These cells represented some 15,000 or so troops that the RPF had illegally secreted into Kigali under Dallaire’s watch [As the UNAMIR force commander he was charged with the responsibility of allowing, under the Arusha Accords, no more than 600 RPF into the city]. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera the RPF killed everyone on the night of the 6th and 7th, wiped out the gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami and launched major attacks against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali, and the main gendarme camp at Kacyriu.
The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire that same night and the next day. The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government then asked for UN help to control the situation. Instead, the US arranged that the main UN force be pulled out whilst flying in men and supplies to the RPF using C130 Hercules aircraft. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain the RPF advances offered an unconditional surrender on April 12th. The RPF rejected this offer and began shelling the Nyacyonga refugee camp, where the one million Hutu refugees were located, so provoking their flight into the capital.
The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment caused mayhem and panic. To make matters worse, the RPF used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind FAR lines. This heightened to fever pitch the panic amongst the Hutu population who then began killing anyone they did not recognize. The late Dr. Alison Des Forges (a noted expert on Rwanda), in her testimony before the Military II trial at the ICTR in 2006 stated that the RPF claim that they attacked to stop a ‘genocide’ was a myth; just propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms. She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute genocide. This accords with the (early) testimony of Romeo Dallaire who confirmed the same thing. In addition, the deputy head of Belgian Army intelligence, Col. Vincent, similarly testified that the idea of a government-backed genocide was a complete fantasy.
The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers – confirming testimony made by FAR and RPF officers before the ICTR – state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour around the clock whilst the Rwandan.
Army ran out of grenades in the first few days and were reduced to fighting with hand-made explosives. Nevertheless, the siege of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of all ammunition and thence ordered a general retreat into the forests of the Congo.
RPF officers testifying before the ICTR have stated that the RPF killed up to two million Hutus in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akager River, the length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of Hutu victims massacred on its banks. It is here that Robert Gersony’s report, filed as an exhibit before the ICTR, lends support to this testimony and to the fact of a systematic and planned RPF massacre of the Hutu population.
As the Rwandan Army (including its Tutsi officers) retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu population, in fear for their lives, fled with them in their millions. Meanwhile, in local villages, Hutu neighbours attacked Tutsis either in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. Tutsis also attacked Hutus. It was total war, though a war clearly fuelled and instigated by the US-backed RPF invasion.
The RPF later pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest and, between 1996 and 1998, killed hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. All the while the RPF was assisted by the United States. Thus, the US cynically thwarted plans (in November 1996) devised by the French and the European Union to send a 10,000 man UN force to assist and guarantee the safe return of the refugees; a plan which if it had been effected would likely have forestalled the ensuing multi-million death toll in the Congo. Moreover, the UN Rwanda Emergency office in Nairobi was, in fact, manned by US Army officers and acted as the operational headquarters of the RPF. Finally, not only did US Special Forces fight alongside the RPF during this period, but intercepted radio messages from Kagame to his forces in the field suggest that both Belgian and Canadian forces were involved as well.
Operating, then, under the Orwellian pretext of ‘hunting for genocidaires’, Kagame & Co. conducted a decade long invasion/occupation of Zaire/Congo. The overall strategic thrust of this assault was threefold. First, it was an attack on French interests in Africa, interests that were immediately taken over by the United States. Second, the assault was part and parcel of the overthrow of Mobutu (toppled in May of 1997). Ultimately, however, the capture of the Congo was about booty. As such, this single treasure chest contains not only large deposits of diamonds, gold, copper, uranium and tantalum (used in computers and cell phones), but also much of the world’s reserves of chrome, platinum and cobalt.
To the question then, ‘Whose genocides were they?’, the answer yet resounds through the din of propaganda, ‘They were ours’.
Shaking Hands With The Devil
In assessing responsibility for the tragedy of Rwanda – and the ensuing events in Zaire/Congo – we must not stop at those already indicted in this essay. For none of this could have happened without the overt complicity of numerous ‘humanitarian’ NGOs including especially, Human Rights Watch, which, in the early days prior to the RPF’s final solution, headed up a totally bogus, unsubstantiated report (issued March 6, 1993) condemning (and so de-legitimizing in advance) the Rwandan government for a ‘genocide’ that, in fact, had yet to take place – and which would, in the event, be committed by the very agents it conspired to defend, i.e. the RPF. And, naturally, none of this could have happened without the willing complicity of the Western mass media who swallowed hook, line and sinker every piece of propaganda issued by the Clinton Administration.
As Canadians we are more than ordinarily complicit as it was the Canadian government (under Jean Chretien) that worked hand-in-glove with the Americans throughout this period. In particular, of course, three Canadians, Louise Arbour, General Maurice Baril and General Romeo Dallaire played leading roles in the ‘affair’. For services rendered they were, all three, handsomely rewarded: Arbour, as already mentioned, with promotion as Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Baril with promotion to Chief of Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces (in Sept. 1997), and Dallaire with appointment as Canadian Senator for life.
Of the three, however, Dallaire’s role is particularly noteworthy, for it is he who has, ever since, been portrayed, and portrayed himself, as a hero in the Rwandan tragedy; and who has, as such, been pre-eminently involved in spreading and maintaining the Big Lie with respect to it. Dallaire’s 2003 epic, Shake Hands With the Devil, an ironically named Faustian tract, fails spectacularly to elucidate the author’s otherwise well documented actions during the events.
It is well established, for instance, that Dallaire knew of – and, effectively, facilitated – the build-up of RPF forces inside Kigali prior to Habyarimana’s assassination. It is well established that Dallaire, rather than reporting to and receiving orders from the UN, as was his mandate, was, instead, reporting and receiving instructions from American military commanders. It is also a fact that Dallaire, only two months prior to the assassination of Habyarimana, closed down one of the only two runways into Kigali airport – upon request of the RPF. It is also the case that Dallaire covered up the massacre by the RPF of MRND people elected in by-elections in the north of Rwanda in November, 1993. Evidence presented at the ICTR further implicates Dallaire in supplying intelligence to Kagame and the RPF forces throughout the period leading up to April 6, 1994.
Whenever Dallaire has faced formal questioning regarding his actions in Rwanda his testimony has been strictly managed and censored. Attempts by independent journalists and investigators to interview and question him have met with refusal and/or silence. And those questions are many and serious. Apart from the items already listed, they include:
How did the lady prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, come to be murdered at the UN development compound (the morning after Habyarimana had been assassinated) just a short time after he, Dallaire, arrived there? Why did he do nothing to save the lives of the Belgian UN soldiers – suspected of being the team that shot down Habyarimana’s plane – who were subsequently killed at Camp Kigali?
Why, and under whose command, did Belgian army units in certain strategic positions in Kigali abandon them and all their weapons to the RPF?
Why did UN army units attack FAR army units, but never the RPF? Why did he fail to report that US forces, using Hercules C-130 aircraft, were supplying men and weapons to the RPF?
Why, when Dallaire had his headquarters at Amahoro stadium in Kigali after April 6 through the rest of the month, did he allow RPF forces to enter and subsequently murder Hutu refugees who had fled there for safety? And, of course, why did he lie about the ‘genocide fax’ of January 11, 1994?
Still, all in all, Dallaire was merely a bit player in a much larger drama, a drama written and produced in Washington, D.C.
Of Credibility and Credulity
In the two decades that have elapsed since the overthrow of the Rwandan government – and the subsequent killing of millions of it’s peoples, and those millions more killed in the Congo – the Big Lie has flourished virtually unabated. Though the likes of Robin Philpot (‘Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa’), and Ed Herman and David Peters (‘The Politics of Genocide’) have, of late, lent this revised narrative a slightly higher profile, more generally – and notably amongst the Left – the ‘official’ narrative of Rwanda circa 1994 continues to hold sway. So much so that Rwanda has become, in Philpot’s resonant phrasing, “a useful imperial fiction”, i.e. a shining example of the ‘need for intervention’ that is deployed whenever and wherever ‘humanitarian imperialism’ seeks to invade and destroy nations opposed to it.
It need not be so. At the very least amongst the Left, it should never have been so. In the early days of the Rwandan debacle, one anomalous event stands out like the proverbial sore thumb transparently pointing the way to what was really ‘going down’ in the beleaguered nation. That event was the majority withdrawal in May of 1994 of the UN troops stationed in Rwanda, i.e. essentially clearing the way for the unobstructed overthrow of the government. This one item alone, irrespective of the fact that the corporate media habitually lies about virtually all matters of significant political import, should have tipped off observers of the Great Game to the idea that something rotten was taking place in the state of Rwanda. But it didn’t. And that, given what subsequently transpired in Yugoslavia and later Libya – where again, significant sectors of the Left bought into the official narrative – and given what is today transpiring in Syria and Ukraine, is problematic.
If there is one lesson, then, that we can take from the tragic events adumbrated herein – and, though hardly new, is a notion that bears vigorously reinforcing – it is that whatever information is fed us by the state and by the corporate mass media with regard to fundamental global strategic happenings, the only historically consistent and logical stance to take is to assume that the truth lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction. This should be our default position, until proof is rendered otherwise, in every instance.
In the meantime, to bear witness to the truth of what really happened in Rwanda falls to you. As Noam Chomsky once wrote with regard to an earlier suite of imperial crimes, ‘For yours is an historic mission, and one you should not soon forget.’
On the evening of April 6th 1994 a plane carrying the Hutu leaders of both Rwanda and Burundi was shot down as it approached Kanombe airport. The assassins had little trouble targeting the flight as only one of the two runways was open, the other having been closed two months earlier on the orders of Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Simultaneous to the shootdown, that is on the eve of April 6th, a 30,000 RPF (Tutsi) army based in Uganda invaded from the north. At the same time, hundreds of covert armed RPF cells came to life in and around Kigali and began attacking Rwandan government forces (FAR). The population, roughly 85% Hutu, and encompassing at least a million refugees in and around Kigali displaced by previous RPF incursions from Uganda, began to panic. A genocide was about to begin.
But it was a genocide neither against, nor by, the actors cited in the ‘official’ narrative. Indeed, Rwanda circa 1994, is, in all likelihood, if not the, then certainly one of the greatest propaganda swindles of all time. This is the story of that swindle and of the scandalous truth that lies buried beneath it.
Historical Context
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Rwanda was a feudal kingdom ruled by a Tutsi minority over a Hutu majority. Following the Berlin Conference of 1885 Rwanda came under the suzerainty of Germany which was, itself, replaced as colonial overlord following WW1, by Belgium. Rwanda’s feudal order remained intact, however, until 1956 when the Belgians finally organized elections. Then, in November 1959, the Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi monarchy. Many Tutsis fled, the majority ending up, significantly, in Uganda. It was from this perch in Uganda that the exiled Tutsi aristocracy launched, between 1960 and 1973, a series of violent attacks against the Rwandan regime. These were repulsed and for the next decade and a half Rwanda enjoyed a period of relative peace.
It is worth noting at this juncture that, though much of the Tutsi aristocracy fled in 1960, those Tutsis who remained were well integrated into Rwandan society and body politic. Thus, both the government and army contained significant numbers of Tutsi personnel even through the height of the crisis in April 1994. In fact, the Rwandan Army (FAR) continued as a multi-ethnic organization even as it was forced to retreat into the forests of the Congo in July of 1994; this after having run out of ammunition due to a Western embargo on arms supplies – an embargo not applied to the RPF.
Up until 1990 there was no further interference in Rwanda from Uganda. Nevertheless, by then the Tutsis exiles living there had become one of the main elements of the Ugandan Army. As such, when Museveni came to power – having been handpicked by the US and Britain to oust the socialist, Milton Obote – a third or more of his army consisted of Tutsis. Many of these held high office, including Paul Kagame. Kagame had been (and remains) an erstwhile client of Washington from well before he claimed to have ‘saved Rwanda from further genocide’ in 1994. Not only had he served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s, but he had also received training at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and had been the beneficiary of constant US material and diplomatic support from the moment he assumed control of the RPF. Upon the collapse of the USSR in 1989/90 the US and the UK began a general militarist expansion which included the targeting of Yugoslavia and Rwanda; Yugoslavia as it was the last real bastion of working socialism in Europe, and Rwanda as it was a working model of socialist development in Africa. In addition, the US had turned against Mobutu (of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) as he was beginning to ally himself politically with China. The Rwandan president, Habyarimana, was subsequently approached by Washington to allow his country to be used as a staging ground for an attack on Zaire (to this day, a cornucopia of precious resources prized by the West). His refusal caused the US to look to other agents in furthering its strategic interests. They found the Tutsis in Uganda, ever thirsting for restoration of their hegemony in Rwanda. Furthermore, Museveni had begun to feel uneasy about the numbers of Tutsis in his ranks and was looking to be rid of them. The opportunity to satisfy these disparate desires soon came.
On October 1, 1990 the self-styled Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched a surprise attack from Uganda. Though calling themselves a force of ‘liberation’ the offensive was a thinly disguised invasion by Uganda itself. Initially, the justification for the invasion put out by the RPF was that of attaining the right of return of Tutsi refugees. This claim, however, was belied by the fact that Rwanda had, under UN auspices, already agreed a few weeks earlier to the return of all Tutsis who wished to do so. That accord required Tutsi representatives to travel to Kigali to determine both the logistics of that population movement and their subsequent accommodation within Rwanda. The delegation was expected at the end of September, 1990. They never arrived.
The attack killed tens of thousands of Rwandan civilians. These crimes, though well documented, have never been accounted for, nor did the UN or ‘international community’ ever seek to account for them. Indeed, there was not even a shred of condemnation of the Ugandan/RPF invasion, this despite the clamour raised only two months earlier with regard to the advance of Iraqi forces into Kuwait. In point of fact, the US and its allies supported the aggression against Rwanda and US Special Forces operated alongside the RPF from the beginning. This support notwithstanding, the small Rwandan army (with some help from a Congolese battalion) was eventually able to repel the invading forces.
Following this attempt using a proxy force to overthrow the state, the United States brought political and economic pressure to bear upon Rwanda’s one-party socialist state (MRND). The President, Juvenal Habyarimana, instead of resisting, agreed to alter the constitution and in 1991 Rwanda became a multi-party democracy. Though the Rwandan government effected this as an offer of peace, what followed was anything but peace. Thus, rather than work towards reconciliation, the RPF turned from the tactics of open warfare to those of guerrilla terrorism.
In 1992, and whilst RPF forces were busy planting mines, assassinating politicians and blaming it on the MRND, a coalition government was formed with the front parties of the RPF. These agents, with US backing, quickly seized control of key ministries and succeeded in appointing the Prime Minister. They also gained control of the intelligence services which they then began to dismantle. In essence, the ‘power sharing’ arrangement had largely given over control of the country to the very forces long bent on its destruction.
The RPF itself, meanwhile, engaged in a ‘talk and fight’ strategy; always agreeing to a ceasefire, pressing for more power, then launching new attacks on the civilian population. The most egregious of these assaults was their breaking of the ceasefire and the launching of a major offensive in February of 1993. Seizing the town of Ruhengeri, RPF forces murdered some 40,000, mostly Hutu, civilians. Once again, the ‘international community’ remained dutifully silent.
The Rwandan army, though hamstrung by the civilian ministries, managed to repulse the RPF attack. Finally, in August of 1993, the Arusha Accords were signed under pressure from the United States and its allies, and from which the RPF obtained major concessions. The Accords dictated the formation of a broad-based transition government to be followed by general elections. But for the RPF – as for the United States – there was a fatal fly in the electoral ointment. To wit, the RPF knew that they could not win such elections; this not only because they were unpopular with the majority (85%) Hutu population, but also because they had precious little support amongst many of Rwanda’s internal Tutsis whose lives and businesses they had destroyed. Rather than prepare for elections, the RPF prepared for something different.
UN reports document the massive build-up of men and weapons coming in from Uganda during this period. In fact, the UN force (UNAMIR) supposedly deployed to ensure a peaceful transition acted, instead, as a cover for the US and its allies, i.e. Britain, Belgium, Canada, to assist the illegal build-up. General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general in charge of the UN force, hid this build-up not only from the Rwandan Army and the President, but also from his immediate superiors, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh and UN Secretary General Boutros Ghali. These machinations were accompanied by death threats against Habyarimana, threats made all the more significant by the murder of the first Hutu president of neighbouring Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, by Tutsi officers in October 1993.
The result of the 1993 RPF offensive was the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of Hutus from northern Rwanda towards Kigali so that by April, 1994 over a million refugees were encamped close to the capital and hundreds of thousands more in camps to the south. The RPF, meanwhile, did all it could to paralyze the functioning of the government, to exacerbate racial tensions, and to prepare for war.
Who Killed Habyarimana
The triggering event in the ‘Rwandan genocide’ of 1994 is generally agreed to be the shooting down, on April 6, 1994, of the plane carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda, and Cyprien Ntaryamira, the Hutu president of Burundi. The official story has it that unidentified ‘Hutu rebels’ were the villains who targeted their own countrymen in some vague attempt to gain power. No evidence was ever adduced in support of this threadbare thesis, but in any case, even if so, the official villains failed spectacularly in their objectives as the country quickly fell to invading Tutsi forces leaving a small minority (Tutsi) population to rise like the Phoenix to its former position of national privilege and oligarchical control. No one in the Western mainstream media has ever commented on the exceeding peculiarity of this bizarre turn of events, never witnessed before, in which the supposed victims of a genocide end up as the victors of the conflict.
The paradox is soon resolved, however, if we countenance the much more likely scenario that the decapitation of the state leadership was the first stage in a final offensive of a war started four years earlier. That the assassination was part of an RPF coup d’etat is given further support by the fact that a 30,000 man RPF force was already marching against Kigali hours before the plane was destroyed, and that RPF forces inside Kigali were attacking government positions within hours of the shootdown. The Western audience, naturally, was, and has never since, been informed of these rather pertinent contextual facts surrounding the events of April 6, 1994. To boot, the official response to Habyarimana’s assassination was and has remained one of determined indifference; a strange thing given that it involved the highest official in the land. Even stranger given that, and according to virtually every independent expert on the subject, the ‘genocide of 1994’ simply would not have happened had Habyarimana not been assassinated. Nevertheless, though all the circumstantial evidence points towards the assassination being part and parcel of a US-backed RPF coup d’etat against the government of Rwanda, it would yet be helpful if there was direct evidence implicating RPF forces in the murder. There is.
As in one of those classic ‘B movie’ plot twists where the bad guys inadvertently hire a good guy who turns the table on his benefactors, so too did the lead official of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) hire an investigator into the crash who turned out to be an honest man. Reporting back to Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour in 1996/97, Australian lawyer, Michael Hourigan, found evidence directly linking the RPF (and the CIA) to the assassination. Far from pleasing Arbour, however, Hourigan’s diligence was rewarded with censure. According to Hourigan, Arbour became “aggressive” and “hostile” when informed of his findings. What Hourigan didn’t know at the time is that Arbour, after having launched the investigation, had been directed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (who had handpicked her for the job) to quash the inquiry. And so she did. Arbour would later (again under the aegis of Albright) be promoted to Canadian Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Hourigan’s report, though suppressed at the time, would, nevertheless, surface many years later in the hands of one of the defense teams at the ICTR. The report would also have its findings later corroborated by numerous sources. Thus, the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, having been called in to investigate the deaths of three French nationals who were aboard Habyarimana’s doomed flight, launched an exhaustive eight-year investigation. He concluded that the plane had indeed been destroyed by the RPF and that the assassination was part and parcel of Kagame et al’s plan to take over Rwanda by force. Bruguiere went on to issue nine warrants for the arrest of high-ranking members of the RPF whilst also requesting that the ICTR take up Kagame’s prosecution.
What’s more, not only have other French – and Spanish – legal officials since confirmed Bruguiere’s findings, but many highly placed members of the RPF have stepped forward publicly to implicate Kagame and the RPF in the assassination. All have suffered the same fate of official international silence and suppression, and some of the latter have suffered assassination themselves.
This culture of suppression and official silence has also plagued the ICTR from its inception. In particular, it became the explicit policy of the ICTR to forcibly limit its mandate solely to the investigation of ‘genocidal intent’ by Hutu government figures, i.e. without any reference whatsoever either to the political context of the conflict or to the mounting evidence implicating the RPF as invaders and genocidaires. In short, the ICTR, much like its sister tribunal, the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), proved itself from the outset to be little more than a Washington-sponsored kangaroo court.
This transparently politicized policy has continued apace throughout the trials. When, for instance, the more independently-minded Carla Del Ponte replaced the pliable Louise Arbour, she was quickly terminated as Chief Prosecutor after calling for a ‘Special Investigation’ into the actions of the RPF; this despite making a case for such an investigation with then UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan. Of course, Anan’s refusal to look into the crimes of the RPF should come as no surprise as it was he who, a) was head of the peacekeeping operations in 1994, and is thus implicated in the events, and b) was handpicked by the US to replace his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali.
Boutros-Ghali, it might be remembered, had come uncomfortably close to scuttling the entire US/RPF invasion scenario when, in May of 1994, he acceded to a request by the Rwandan government to send 5500 UN troops to Rwanda to reinforce the 2500 already stationed there; this so as to stabilize the country at a time when reports of growing ‘chaos’ were issuing forth daily in the world press. These efforts were, however, categorically thwarted by the Clinton regime which used its influence to remove the proposal from the UN agenda. Instead, the UN troops already stationed there, far from being reinforced, were withdrawn. Later, Boutros-Ghali, in conversation with Rwandan expert Robin Philpot, would expand on these matters declaring that, “The genocide in Rwanda was 100% the responsibility of the Americans!” Hardly any wonder, then, that in 1996 US Ambassador to the UN, the ubiquitous Madeleine Albright, would veto his re-election making Boutros-Ghali the only UN Secretary General in history not to be granted a second term in office.
Inconvenient Truths
On August 26, 2010 the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report detailing the most serious human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven year period (1993 – 2003). The report described how, following the RPF’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to carry out “systematic and widespread attacks” against Hutu refugees who had fled to neighbouring DRC. These attacks it stated, “could be classified as crimes of genocide.”
Save for it having been leaked to Le Monde, it is clear that the report was well on its way to being buried alive, its cover-up a near certainty. But this was hardly the first instance of a cover-up of a UN report vis a vis Rwanda. As early as October 11, 1994, Robert Gersony, an employee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), then attached to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, made an oral presentation to the UN Commission of Experts on Rwanda. Gersony had been dispatched to survey the situation inside Rwanda to determine if conditions were right for return of the Hutu refugees who had fled the RPF. Instead, he found that the RPF had been committing massacres of the Hutu population in Rwanda starting in April 1994 through the date of his presentation. On page 4 of the UN record of Gersony’s presentation (a record which surfaced in the defense proceedings at the ICTR), we read,
“Significant areas…have been the scene of systematic and sustained [emphasis added] killing and persecution of the civilian Hutu population by the Rwandan Patriotic Front…..These actions were consistently reported to be conducted in areas where opposition forces of any kind – armed or unarmed, or resistance of any kind….were absent. Large scale indiscriminate killings of men, women and children, including the sick and elderly were consistently reported.”
Now, I remind the reader that the killings detailed here were being perpetrated not, as in the official narrative, i.e. by Rwandan government troops, but by the supposed saviours of the country, i.e. the RPF.
Though much evidence surfaced early on that the official genocide narrative was in sharp disagreement with reality, all later independent reports have continued to corroborate this finding. In a 2004 paper, for instance (and reinforced in a more recent 2009 report), US academics Christian Davenport and Allan Stam concluded that, of the many hundreds of thousands of deaths (possibly as high as two million) that occurred in Rwanda from April through July of 1994, the “majority of victims [at least two thirds] were likely Hutu and not Tutsi”. Noteworthy is the fact that Davenport and Stam were initially sponsored by the ICTR – that is until their findings contradicted the official narrative whence they were sent packing.
Still, Davenport and Stam have refrained from taking the implication of their own research to its logical conclusion, i.e. that Kagame’s forces were the only agents responsible for committing “systematic” killings in the areas they overran, or that such systemic violence was part of a pre-existing plan by the US-backed RPF to invade and overthrow the legitimate government, the latter in order to install a formerly privileged minority – and Western comprador elite – to power within Rwanda.
If the academics have been content to sit on the fence, not so one of the more famous lay figures of the Rwandan debacle. It is ironic in the extreme that Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of the movie Hotel Rwanda – a film unashamedly promoting the official narrative – has himself, in numerous interviews, completely gainsaid that narrative. He has, thus, repeatedly denounced the RPF as the real genocidaires, and has called a Kagame a “war criminal” and “dictator” who is responsible for mass killings not only during the takeover of Rwanda in July 1994, but ever since both in Rwanda and in his US-backed incursions into the Congo. Indeed, so fervent have the denunciations been that Rusesabagina is now officially listed as a ‘terrorist’ and ‘genocide denier’ (a prisonable offence in Rwanda) by the Kagame regime.
No matter, the movie continues to circulate, sans critique; Rusesabagina’s views and denunciations, do not.
Whose Genocide(s)?
It is something of an embarrassment to the US architects of the ICTR that the tribunal, though explicitly tasked with indicting only members of the Hutu government, have failed singularly in successfully prosecuting any of them. Not only have the most senior members of the Rwandan government – through the spirited efforts of the various defense teams – been acquitted, but the mass of evidence so assembled has stood the entire official narrative on its head, and has implicated, au contraire, the RPF – and its foreign accomplices – in the genocide.
There was, however, one highly publicized piece of evidence proffered at the tribunal by prosecutors as they sought to prove a ‘planned genocide’ by the Rwandan government. This was the so-called ‘genocide fax’ allegedly sent to the New York UN headquarters on the night of January 10th, 1994. That this was the only piece of documentary evidence claiming direct planning of a genocide put forward in the trial is, itself, telling. Had there actually been such a plan, the logistics would have left a paper and/or electronic trail a mile wide. Instead, there are no orders, minutes of meetings, notes, cables, faxes, radio intercepts or any other type of documentation indicating that such a plan ever existed. And then, of course, there are the actual events on the ground which, as we have seen (and shall see further), suggest nothing of the sort. Nonetheless, there is the lone sepulchre of the ‘genocide fax’. What to make of it?
To make a long story short, the fax is a forgery. There was a fax sent to the UN headquarters on January 10th, 1994 (a copy of a cable sent by Romeo Dallaire to another Canadian, General Baril), but this was not the fax that was entered into evidence in the Military II trial (ICTR vs Ndindiliyimana) in October, 2005. Ndindiliyimana’s defense counsel was able to definitively establish that the original fax dealt only with ‘weapons caches and seeking protection for an informant’, whereas the fax subsequently entered as evidence, having first had time stamps, dates and paragraphs altered, had mysteriously sprouted an addendum about government plans to kill Tutsis and Belgian soldiers. Conflicting testimony both between Dallaire’s earlier and later statements, and between statements made by Dallaire and Lt. Col. Claeys (a Belgian officer who claims to be one of the authors of the original cable), further proved the document’s inauthenticity. Such was only reinforced when Dallaire’s immediate superior, Jacques Roger Booh-Booh, stated that he had never seen nor heard of the fax or any of its alleged inflammatory contents. Eventually, the ‘genocide fax’ was simply withdrawn as evidence by the court. Puff! One might wonder, then, why tens of thousands of MRND personnel are today still in prison, this whilst not one RPF figure has even been indicted. But so it is.
If documents supporting a pre-meditated plan by the Rwandan government have failed to materialize, not so it turns out when it comes to the RPF. In the same trial that saw the outing of the fraudulent ‘genocide fax’, evidence was presented suggesting nothing other than a master plan by Kagame and “our Belgian, British and American collaborators” for the taking not only of Rwanda, but of Zaire. In a letter from Kagame to fellow Tutsi, Jean-Baptiste Bagaza of Burundi, dated August 10, 1994, Kagame thanks Bagaza for his help in “taking Kigali”. He then relates his communications with “our big brother Yoweri Museveni” and talks of “some modifications of the plan” noting that:
“We have found that the presence of large numbers of Rwandan refugees at Goma, and the international community, can cause our plan for Zaire [emphasis added] to fail. We cannot occupy ourselves with Zaire until after the return of these Hutus….In any case, our external intelligence services continue to crisscross the east of Zaire, and our Belgian, British and American collaborators [emphasis added] the rest of Zaire. The action reports are expected in the next few days.”
Now, what this letter seems to indicate is that the attack on Rwanda (from 1990 onward) was not the prime objective of Kagame and crew after all, but was, rather, merely the gateway to an attack on Zaire/Congo. The significance of the latter became apparent when, on November 1, 1996, the aforementioned Goma was, in fact, attacked and taken by the RPA (the re-named RPF) along with Burundian and Ugandan forces. This assault was heavily backed by the United States and eyewitness accounts tell of large American cargo planes filled with arms landing in Kigali in the last two weeks of October, 1996. The taking of Goma was, it is pertinent to note, the prelude to the ensuing genocidal carnage that has overtaken the Democratic Republic of the Congo ever since. To properly understand this last statement we need to backtrack a bit to April 6, 1994, and look at the events that unfolded immediately following the assassination of Habyarimana.
* * *
Once the plane had been shot down, an RPF army, as noted earlier, invaded from the north whilst armed RPF cells began attacks inside Kigali itself. These cells represented some 15,000 or so troops that the RPF had illegally secreted into Kigali under Dallaire’s watch [As the UNAMIR force commander he was charged with the responsibility of allowing, under the Arusha Accords, no more than 600 RPF into the city]. In the sector of Kigali known as Remera the RPF killed everyone on the night of the 6th and 7th, wiped out the gendarme camp there, wiped out the military police camp at Kami and launched major attacks against Camp Kanombe, Camp Kigali, and the main gendarme camp at Kacyriu.
The Rwandan government and army called for a ceasefire that same night and the next day. The RPF rejected the call. The Rwandan government then asked for UN help to control the situation. Instead, the US arranged that the main UN force be pulled out whilst flying in men and supplies to the RPF using C130 Hercules aircraft. The Rwandan Army, short of ammunition and unable to contain the RPF advances offered an unconditional surrender on April 12th. The RPF rejected this offer and began shelling the Nyacyonga refugee camp, where the one million Hutu refugees were located, so provoking their flight into the capital.
The effect of one million people flooding into a small city that itself was under bombardment caused mayhem and panic. To make matters worse, the RPF used this flood of people to infiltrate its men behind FAR lines. This heightened to fever pitch the panic amongst the Hutu population who then began killing anyone they did not recognize. The late Dr. Alison Des Forges (a noted expert on Rwanda), in her testimony before the Military II trial at the ICTR in 2006 stated that the RPF claim that they attacked to stop a ‘genocide’ was a myth; just propaganda to justify their attempt to seize power by force of arms. She also testified that the Rwandan government did not plan and execute genocide. This accords with the (early) testimony of Romeo Dallaire who confirmed the same thing. In addition, the deputy head of Belgian Army intelligence, Col. Vincent, similarly testified that the idea of a government-backed genocide was a complete fantasy.
The fighting in Kigali was intense. UN officers – confirming testimony made by FAR and RPF officers before the ICTR – state that the RPF was launching hundreds of Katyusha rockets every hour around the clock whilst the Rwandan.
Army ran out of grenades in the first few days and were reduced to fighting with hand-made explosives. Nevertheless, the siege of Kigali lasted three months and only ended when the Rwandan Army literally ran out of all ammunition and thence ordered a general retreat into the forests of the Congo.
RPF officers testifying before the ICTR have stated that the RPF killed up to two million Hutus in those 12 weeks in a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Hutu population. The Akager River, the length of which was under RPF control throughout, ran red with the blood of Hutu victims massacred on its banks. It is here that Robert Gersony’s report, filed as an exhibit before the ICTR, lends support to this testimony and to the fact of a systematic and planned RPF massacre of the Hutu population.
As the Rwandan Army (including its Tutsi officers) retreated into the Congo forest, the Hutu population, in fear for their lives, fled with them in their millions. Meanwhile, in local villages, Hutu neighbours attacked Tutsis either in revenge for the murder of Hutus or fearing death at their hands. Tutsis also attacked Hutus. It was total war, though a war clearly fuelled and instigated by the US-backed RPF invasion.
The RPF later pursued the Hutus through the Congo forest and, between 1996 and 1998, killed hundreds of thousands and possibly millions. All the while the RPF was assisted by the United States. Thus, the US cynically thwarted plans (in November 1996) devised by the French and the European Union to send a 10,000 man UN force to assist and guarantee the safe return of the refugees; a plan which if it had been effected would likely have forestalled the ensuing multi-million death toll in the Congo. Moreover, the UN Rwanda Emergency office in Nairobi was, in fact, manned by US Army officers and acted as the operational headquarters of the RPF. Finally, not only did US Special Forces fight alongside the RPF during this period, but intercepted radio messages from Kagame to his forces in the field suggest that both Belgian and Canadian forces were involved as well.
Operating, then, under the Orwellian pretext of ‘hunting for genocidaires’, Kagame & Co. conducted a decade long invasion/occupation of Zaire/Congo. The overall strategic thrust of this assault was threefold. First, it was an attack on French interests in Africa, interests that were immediately taken over by the United States. Second, the assault was part and parcel of the overthrow of Mobutu (toppled in May of 1997). Ultimately, however, the capture of the Congo was about booty. As such, this single treasure chest contains not only large deposits of diamonds, gold, copper, uranium and tantalum (used in computers and cell phones), but also much of the world’s reserves of chrome, platinum and cobalt.
To the question then, ‘Whose genocides were they?’, the answer yet resounds through the din of propaganda, ‘They were ours’.
Shaking Hands With The Devil
In assessing responsibility for the tragedy of Rwanda – and the ensuing events in Zaire/Congo – we must not stop at those already indicted in this essay. For none of this could have happened without the overt complicity of numerous ‘humanitarian’ NGOs including especially, Human Rights Watch, which, in the early days prior to the RPF’s final solution, headed up a totally bogus, unsubstantiated report (issued March 6, 1993) condemning (and so de-legitimizing in advance) the Rwandan government for a ‘genocide’ that, in fact, had yet to take place – and which would, in the event, be committed by the very agents it conspired to defend, i.e. the RPF. And, naturally, none of this could have happened without the willing complicity of the Western mass media who swallowed hook, line and sinker every piece of propaganda issued by the Clinton Administration.
As Canadians we are more than ordinarily complicit as it was the Canadian government (under Jean Chretien) that worked hand-in-glove with the Americans throughout this period. In particular, of course, three Canadians, Louise Arbour, General Maurice Baril and General Romeo Dallaire played leading roles in the ‘affair’. For services rendered they were, all three, handsomely rewarded: Arbour, as already mentioned, with promotion as Supreme Court Justice and thence as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; Baril with promotion to Chief of Staff of the Canadian Armed Forces (in Sept. 1997), and Dallaire with appointment as Canadian Senator for life.
Of the three, however, Dallaire’s role is particularly noteworthy, for it is he who has, ever since, been portrayed, and portrayed himself, as a hero in the Rwandan tragedy; and who has, as such, been pre-eminently involved in spreading and maintaining the Big Lie with respect to it. Dallaire’s 2003 epic, Shake Hands With the Devil, an ironically named Faustian tract, fails spectacularly to elucidate the author’s otherwise well documented actions during the events.
It is well established, for instance, that Dallaire knew of – and, effectively, facilitated – the build-up of RPF forces inside Kigali prior to Habyarimana’s assassination. It is well established that Dallaire, rather than reporting to and receiving orders from the UN, as was his mandate, was, instead, reporting and receiving instructions from American military commanders. It is also a fact that Dallaire, only two months prior to the assassination of Habyarimana, closed down one of the only two runways into Kigali airport – upon request of the RPF. It is also the case that Dallaire covered up the massacre by the RPF of MRND people elected in by-elections in the north of Rwanda in November, 1993. Evidence presented at the ICTR further implicates Dallaire in supplying intelligence to Kagame and the RPF forces throughout the period leading up to April 6, 1994.
Whenever Dallaire has faced formal questioning regarding his actions in Rwanda his testimony has been strictly managed and censored. Attempts by independent journalists and investigators to interview and question him have met with refusal and/or silence. And those questions are many and serious. Apart from the items already listed, they include:
How did the lady prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, come to be murdered at the UN development compound (the morning after Habyarimana had been assassinated) just a short time after he, Dallaire, arrived there? Why did he do nothing to save the lives of the Belgian UN soldiers – suspected of being the team that shot down Habyarimana’s plane – who were subsequently killed at Camp Kigali?
Why, and under whose command, did Belgian army units in certain strategic positions in Kigali abandon them and all their weapons to the RPF?
Why did UN army units attack FAR army units, but never the RPF? Why did he fail to report that US forces, using Hercules C-130 aircraft, were supplying men and weapons to the RPF?
Why, when Dallaire had his headquarters at Amahoro stadium in Kigali after April 6 through the rest of the month, did he allow RPF forces to enter and subsequently murder Hutu refugees who had fled there for safety? And, of course, why did he lie about the ‘genocide fax’ of January 11, 1994?
Still, all in all, Dallaire was merely a bit player in a much larger drama, a drama written and produced in Washington, D.C.
Of Credibility and Credulity
In the two decades that have elapsed since the overthrow of the Rwandan government – and the subsequent killing of millions of it’s peoples, and those millions more killed in the Congo – the Big Lie has flourished virtually unabated. Though the likes of Robin Philpot (‘Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa’), and Ed Herman and David Peters (‘The Politics of Genocide’) have, of late, lent this revised narrative a slightly higher profile, more generally – and notably amongst the Left – the ‘official’ narrative of Rwanda circa 1994 continues to hold sway. So much so that Rwanda has become, in Philpot’s resonant phrasing, “a useful imperial fiction”, i.e. a shining example of the ‘need for intervention’ that is deployed whenever and wherever ‘humanitarian imperialism’ seeks to invade and destroy nations opposed to it.
It need not be so. At the very least amongst the Left, it should never have been so. In the early days of the Rwandan debacle, one anomalous event stands out like the proverbial sore thumb transparently pointing the way to what was really ‘going down’ in the beleaguered nation. That event was the majority withdrawal in May of 1994 of the UN troops stationed in Rwanda, i.e. essentially clearing the way for the unobstructed overthrow of the government. This one item alone, irrespective of the fact that the corporate media habitually lies about virtually all matters of significant political import, should have tipped off observers of the Great Game to the idea that something rotten was taking place in the state of Rwanda. But it didn’t. And that, given what subsequently transpired in Yugoslavia and later Libya – where again, significant sectors of the Left bought into the official narrative – and given what is today transpiring in Syria and Ukraine, is problematic.
If there is one lesson, then, that we can take from the tragic events adumbrated herein – and, though hardly new, is a notion that bears vigorously reinforcing – it is that whatever information is fed us by the state and by the corporate mass media with regard to fundamental global strategic happenings, the only historically consistent and logical stance to take is to assume that the truth lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction. This should be our default position, until proof is rendered otherwise, in every instance.
In the meantime, to bear witness to the truth of what really happened in Rwanda falls to you. As Noam Chomsky once wrote with regard to an earlier suite of imperial crimes, ‘For yours is an historic mission, and one you should not soon forget.’
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch
Exactly who is Noam Chomsky?
It is Chomsky's stated opinion 9/11 was perpetrated exactly as officially documented by the government and that conspiracy research into 9/11 brings nothing but ridicule upon the "left"
Chomsky's connection in the overall criminality and corruption is
on the lower left of the chart:
Rethinking Noam Chomsky
"A study of Chomsky's stands on particularly dreadful actions such as JFK's assassination, 9/11, and with regard to the roles of the CIA and FBI, shows Chomsky to be a de facto defender of the status quo's most egregious outrages and their covert agency engines. He conducts his de facto defence of the Empire he appears to oppose through applying the very propaganda methods against which he has warned, including use of the derogatory phrase "conspiracy theorist," which in one context he has characterized as "something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on."
His recommendation that people practice "intellectual self-defence" is well taken. But how many could dream the person warning you is one of the most perilous against whom you'll need to defend yourself? That he is the fire marshal who wires your house to burn down, the lifeguard who drowns you, the doctor with the disarming bedside manner who administers a fatal injection? If Noam Chomsky did not exist, the diaboligarchy would have to invent him. To the New World Order he is worth 50 armoured divisions. ".....Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception
I'm undecided as to how genuine James Corbett actually is but he's certainly on the money as regards Chomsky's corrupt nature here:
Exactly who is Noam Chomsky?
It is Chomsky's stated opinion 9/11 was perpetrated exactly as officially documented by the government and that conspiracy research into 9/11 brings nothing but ridicule upon the "left"
Chomsky's connection in the overall criminality and corruption is
on the lower left of the chart:
Rethinking Noam Chomsky
"A study of Chomsky's stands on particularly dreadful actions such as JFK's assassination, 9/11, and with regard to the roles of the CIA and FBI, shows Chomsky to be a de facto defender of the status quo's most egregious outrages and their covert agency engines. He conducts his de facto defence of the Empire he appears to oppose through applying the very propaganda methods against which he has warned, including use of the derogatory phrase "conspiracy theorist," which in one context he has characterized as "something people say when they don't want you to think about what's really going on."
His recommendation that people practice "intellectual self-defence" is well taken. But how many could dream the person warning you is one of the most perilous against whom you'll need to defend yourself? That he is the fire marshal who wires your house to burn down, the lifeguard who drowns you, the doctor with the disarming bedside manner who administers a fatal injection? If Noam Chomsky did not exist, the diaboligarchy would have to invent him. To the New World Order he is worth 50 armoured divisions. ".....Barrie Zwicker, Towers of Deception
I'm undecided as to how genuine James Corbett actually is but he's certainly on the money as regards Chomsky's corrupt nature here:
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Here is another disgusting example of corruption in authority; an 18 year old British female soldier was raped on the orders of senior officers 20 years ago, as part of an incident involving the suspicious deaths of four people, all of which has been covered up until now. Even the mainstream press are reporting on it, although I imagine that this is simply gatekeeping:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3414842/Did-girl-soldier-die-raped-orders-Army-officers-Four-mysterious-deaths-barracks-20-year-cover-devastating-claims-finally-blow-case-wide-open.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3414842/Did-girl-soldier-die-raped-orders-Army-officers-Four-mysterious-deaths-barracks-20-year-cover-devastating-claims-finally-blow-case-wide-open.html
_________________
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Re: Corruption In Authority
Post by mitch
Watch Politicians Snap When Alternative Media Journalist Asks them One Short Question
Jan Helfeld is a political journalist who has been traveling around and asking politicians some of the same awkward questions that work to expose the illegitimacy of their authority. His questions were extremely simple and many times ridiculed as “stupid” by the politicians that he interviewed, because he was attempting to establish moral principles using the Socratic method.[/size]
One of the best and most crucial questions that Helfeld has asked over the years is simple enough: “can you delegate a right that you don’t have to someone else?”
This simple question has caused dozens of politicians to either become aggressive, run away, or both because it points out that they do not have the right to do the things that they do in the name of government.
To use an example, if an average citizen does not have the right to steal from his neighbor, then he can not go ahead and vote for one of his friends to do it. Furthermore, if a particular group, even a group with a majority in a certain area decided to vote for themselves or one another, to steal from innocent people, they would not be justified in doing so. In this situation, these people would essentially be granting a privilege to another person that they themselves did not have, which is obviously a ridiculous idea.
However, this is exactly how democracy and representative government works. The power of the politicians is supposedly granted by the people. However, average people don’t have the right to do things that politicians and agents of the state do on a regular basis. Therefore, the people living in a democracy never had the authority that they allegedly gave their government to begin with, which means that this authority does not exist and that the government does not have a right to use it.
Helfeld would lead the people he interviewed to this conclusion, which resulted in an incredibly entertaining encounter nearly ever time.
In the following video, Helfeld interviewed Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and walked him down the same path of logic that was laid out in this article. He asked Inouye first whether or not people had the right to steal from one another, and then if they had the right to delegate that authority to the government, then finally he asked, “can a person delegate a right that they do not have.” Inouye sat frozen like a deer in headlights realizing that he had just been backed into a corner, and that’s when the interview gets really interesting.
Inouye is not alone either, many other politicians and news pundits had similar reactions when faced with the same questions. Check out some of the most interesting below, including an encounter with Bernie Sanders where he gets angry, demands to know by whom Helfeld is funded, and runs out of the room.
In the video below, Helfeld explains his style of interviewing, and how he used the Socratic method to point out contradictions in people’s reasoning.
Watch Politicians Snap When Alternative Media Journalist Asks them One Short Question
Jan Helfeld is a political journalist who has been traveling around and asking politicians some of the same awkward questions that work to expose the illegitimacy of their authority. His questions were extremely simple and many times ridiculed as “stupid” by the politicians that he interviewed, because he was attempting to establish moral principles using the Socratic method.[/size]
One of the best and most crucial questions that Helfeld has asked over the years is simple enough: “can you delegate a right that you don’t have to someone else?”
This simple question has caused dozens of politicians to either become aggressive, run away, or both because it points out that they do not have the right to do the things that they do in the name of government.
To use an example, if an average citizen does not have the right to steal from his neighbor, then he can not go ahead and vote for one of his friends to do it. Furthermore, if a particular group, even a group with a majority in a certain area decided to vote for themselves or one another, to steal from innocent people, they would not be justified in doing so. In this situation, these people would essentially be granting a privilege to another person that they themselves did not have, which is obviously a ridiculous idea.
However, this is exactly how democracy and representative government works. The power of the politicians is supposedly granted by the people. However, average people don’t have the right to do things that politicians and agents of the state do on a regular basis. Therefore, the people living in a democracy never had the authority that they allegedly gave their government to begin with, which means that this authority does not exist and that the government does not have a right to use it.
Helfeld would lead the people he interviewed to this conclusion, which resulted in an incredibly entertaining encounter nearly ever time.
In the following video, Helfeld interviewed Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and walked him down the same path of logic that was laid out in this article. He asked Inouye first whether or not people had the right to steal from one another, and then if they had the right to delegate that authority to the government, then finally he asked, “can a person delegate a right that they do not have.” Inouye sat frozen like a deer in headlights realizing that he had just been backed into a corner, and that’s when the interview gets really interesting.
Inouye is not alone either, many other politicians and news pundits had similar reactions when faced with the same questions. Check out some of the most interesting below, including an encounter with Bernie Sanders where he gets angry, demands to know by whom Helfeld is funded, and runs out of the room.
In the video below, Helfeld explains his style of interviewing, and how he used the Socratic method to point out contradictions in people’s reasoning.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
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Re: Corruption In Authority
23 Aug 2008
Watch Congressman Pete Stark blow up when Jan Helfeld asks him why Stark believes, "the more we owe, the wealthier we are." I asked if we should borrow 2 or 3 trillion more so we could become wealthier and he would not answer; instead he kicked us out saying "Get fuck out of here or I'll throw you out the window"
At the end of the interview he pulled the plug on the camera and the Congressman got in my face and said: give me that tape or I'm going to punch your lights out. I said, take it easy I only ask you a few questions. He said give me that God damn tape. I implemented my old basketball skills, fake to the left and run to the right as the director handed me the tape, like a baton in a race.
world "debt" is now at an exponential 60 trillion:
http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/
To whom is this unpayable"debt" payable ?
Watch Congressman Pete Stark blow up when Jan Helfeld asks him why Stark believes, "the more we owe, the wealthier we are." I asked if we should borrow 2 or 3 trillion more so we could become wealthier and he would not answer; instead he kicked us out saying "Get fuck out of here or I'll throw you out the window"
At the end of the interview he pulled the plug on the camera and the Congressman got in my face and said: give me that tape or I'm going to punch your lights out. I said, take it easy I only ask you a few questions. He said give me that God damn tape. I implemented my old basketball skills, fake to the left and run to the right as the director handed me the tape, like a baton in a race.
world "debt" is now at an exponential 60 trillion:
http://www.nationaldebtclocks.org/
To whom is this unpayable"debt" payable ?
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Re: Corruption In Authority
The Rape of East Timor
Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.
Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then prime minister, Paul Keating — who regarded Suharto as a father figure — and a gang that ran Australia’s foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.
Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun”. Another wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”
The documents, says Sarah Niner, are “vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the Department of Foreign Affairs. “The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”
This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.” Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia”.
The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish. One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ”It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were “atrocities on all sides”.
As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,” says the UN.
Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia’s capital city press. Murdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” in East Timor were “impressive”, as was Jakarta’s “generous” development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures”.
Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as “RTP”, or “Responsibility to Protect”. As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Centre”, he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries where “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time”. The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.
Secret documents found in the Australian National Archives provide a glimpse of how one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century was executed and covered up. They also help us understand how and for whom the world is run.
The documents refer to East Timor, now known as Timor-Leste, and were written by diplomats in the Australian embassy in Jakarta. The date was November 1976, less than a year after the Indonesian dictator General Suharto seized the then Portuguese colony on the island of Timor.
The terror that followed has few parallels; not even Pol Pot succeeded in killing, proportionally, as many Cambodians as Suharto and his fellow generals killed in East Timor. Out of a population of almost a million, up to a third were extinguished.
This was the second holocaust for which Suharto was responsible. A decade earlier, in 1965, Suharto wrested power in Indonesia in a bloodbath that took more than a million lives. The CIA reported: “In terms of numbers killed, the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”
This was greeted in the Western press as “a gleam of light in Asia” (Time).The BBC’s correspondent in South East Asia, Roland Challis, later described the cover-up of the massacres as a triumph of media complicity and silence; the “official line” was that Suharto had “saved” Indonesia from a communist takeover.
“Of course my British sources knew what the American plan was,” he told me. “There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabaya, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned that the American embassy was supplying [Suharto with] names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the [US-dominated] International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were part of it. That was the deal.”
I have interviewed many of the survivors of 1965, including the acclaimed Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who bore witness to an epic of suffering “forgotten” in the West because Suharto was “our man”. A second holocaust in resource-rich East Timor, an undefended colony, was almost inevitable.
In 1994, I filmed clandestinely in occupied East Timor; I found a land of crosses and unforgettable grief. In my film, Death of a Nation, there is a sequence shot on board an Australian aircraft flying over the Timor Sea. A party is in progress. Two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. “This is a uniquely historical moment,” babbles one of them, “that is truly, uniquely historical.”
This is Australia’s foreign minister, Gareth Evans. The other man is Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of Suharto. It is 1989 and they are making a symbolic flight to celebrate a piratical deal they called a “treaty”. This allowed Australia, the Suharto dictatorship and the international oil companies to divide the spoils of East Timor’s oil and gas resources.
Thanks to Evans, Australia’s then prime minister, Paul Keating — who regarded Suharto as a father figure — and a gang that ran Australia’s foreign policy establishment, Australia distinguished itself as the only western country formally to recognise Suharto’s genocidal conquest. The prize, said Evans, was “zillions” of dollars.
Members of this gang reappeared the other day in documents found in the National Archives by two researchers from Monash University in Melbourne, Sara Niner and Kim McGrath. In their own handwriting, senior officials of the Department of Foreign Affairs mock reports of the rape, torture and execution of East Timorese by Indonesian troops. In scribbled annotations on a memorandum that refers to atrocities in a concentration camp, one diplomat wrote: “sounds like fun”. Another wrote: “sounds like the population are in raptures.”
Referring to a report by the Indonesian resistance, Fretilin, that describes Indonesia as an “impotent” invader, another diplomat sneered: “If ‘the enemy was impotent’, as stated, how come they are daily raping the captured population? Or is the former a result of the latter?”
The documents, says Sarah Niner, are “vivid evidence of the lack of empathy and concern for human rights abuses in East Timor” in the Department of Foreign Affairs. “The archives reveal that this culture of cover-up is closely tied to the DFA’s need to recognise Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor so as to commence negotiations over the petroleum in the East Timor Sea.”
This was a conspiracy to steal East Timor’s oil and gas. In leaked diplomatic cables in August 1975, the Australian Ambassador to Jakarta, Richard Woolcott, wrote to Canberra: “It would seem to me that the Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia … than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor.” Woolcott revealed that he had been briefed on Indonesia’s secret plans for an invasion. He cabled Canberra that the government should “assist public understanding in Australia” to counter “criticism of Indonesia”.
In 1993, I interviewed C. Philip Liechty, a former senior CIA operations officer in the Jakarta embassy during the invasion of East Timor. He told me: “Suharto was given the green light [by the US] to do what he did. We supplied them with everything they needed [from] M16 rifles [to] US military logistical support … maybe 200,000 people, almost all of them non-combatants died. When the atrocities began to appear in the CIA reporting, the way they dealt with these was to cover them up as long as possible; and when they couldn’t be covered up any longer, they were reported in a watered-down, very generalised way, so that even our own sourcing was sabotaged.”
I asked Liechty what would have happened had someone spoken out. “Your career would end,” he replied. He said his interview with me was one way of making amends for “how badly I feel”.
The gang in the Australian embassy in Jakarta appear to suffer no such anguish. One of the scribblers on the documents, Cavan Hogue, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ”It does look like my handwriting. If I made a comment like that, being the cynical bugger that I am, it would certainly have been in the spirit of irony and sarcasm. It’s about the [Fretilin] press release, not the Timorese.” Hogue said there were “atrocities on all sides”.
As one who reported and filmed the evidence of genocide, I find this last remark especially profane. The Fretilin “propaganda” he derides was accurate. The subsequent report of the United Nations on East Timor describes thousands of cases of summary execution and violence against women by Suharto’s Kopassus special forces, many of whom were trained in Australia. “Rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence were tools used as part of the campaign designed to inflict a deep experience of terror, powerlessness and hopelessness upon pro-independence supporters,” says the UN.
Cavan Hogue, the joker and “cynical bugger”, was promoted to senior ambassador and eventually retired on a generous pension. Richard Woolcott was made head of the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra and, in retirement, has lectured widely as a “respected diplomatic intellectual”.
Journalists watered at the Australian embassy in Jakarta, notably those employed by Rupert Murdoch, who controls almost 70 per cent of Australia’s capital city press. Murdoch’s correspondent in Indonesia was Patrick Walters, who reported that Jakarta’s “economic achievements” in East Timor were “impressive”, as was Jakarta’s “generous” development of the blood-soaked territory. As for the East Timorese resistance, it was “leaderless” and beaten. In any case, “no one was now arrested without proper legal procedures”.
In December 1993, one of Murdoch’s veteran retainers, Paul Kelly, then editor-in-chief of The Australian, was appointed by Foreign Minister Evans to the Australia-Indonesia Institute, a body funded by the Australian government to promote the “common interests” of Canberra and the Suharto dictatorship. Kelly led a group of Australian newspaper editors to Jakarta for an audience with the mass murderer. There is a photograph of one of them bowing.
East Timor won its independence in 1999 with the blood and courage of its ordinary people. The tiny, fragile democracy was immediately subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying by the Australian government which sought to manoeuvre it out of its legal ownership of the sea bed’s oil and gas revenue. To get its way, Australia refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the Law of the Sea and unilaterally changed the maritime boundary in its own favour.
In 2006, a deal was finally signed, Mafia-style, largely on Australia’s terms. Soon afterwards, Prime Minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist who had stood up to Canberra, was effectively deposed in what he called an “attempted coup” by “outsiders”. The Australian military, which had “peace-keeping” troops in East Timor, had trained his opponents.
In the 17 years since East Timor won its independence, the Australian government has taken nearly $5 billion in oil and gas revenue — money that belongs to its impoverished neighbour.
Australia has been called America’s “deputy sheriff” in the South Pacific. One man with the badge is Gareth Evans, the foreign minister filmed lifting his champagne glass to toast the theft of East Timor’s natural resources. Today, Evans is a lectern-trotting zealot promoting a brand of war-mongering known as “RTP”, or “Responsibility to Protect”. As co-chair of a New York-based “Global Centre”, he runs a US-backed lobby group that urges the “international community” to attack countries where “the Security Council rejects a proposal or fails to deal with it in a reasonable time”. The man for the job, as the East Timorese might say.
lizardking- Posts : 1673
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Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
Re: Corruption In Authority
“Missing” government documents throughout the years"
Hillary Clinton has been embroiled in document scandals for nearly 30 years. But she’s not the only politician, and Democrats aren’t the only party, surrounded by an air of mystery when it comes to turning over potentially damaging documents that should be in the public domain.
Missing: Hillary Clinton S&L Records. In 1988, according to congressional investigators, Hillary Clinton “ordered the destruction of records relating to her [legal] representation of [Jim] McDougal’s Madison S&L” when federal regulators were investigating the insolvency of the Arkansas savings and loan. Bill Clinton was Arkansas governor at the time.
The Clintons and McDougal were business partners in the failed Whitewater real estate venture. McDougal later was convicted of fraud for attempting to use S&L funds to cover Whitewater losses. His wife, Susan, served prison time for refusing to answer grand jury questions about whether Bill Clinton lied in his testimony during her Whitewater trial.
Missing: Clinton Counsel’s Foster Records. In 1993, according to a Secret Service official, first lady Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, removed records from the office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster the night of his suicide.
Other Clinton officials, including White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, later testified that they conducted an improper search of Foster’s office. At least one file was marked “Whitewater” and another was marked “taxes.”
Another White House counsel, Bob Barnett, later picked up a box of Foster’s documents. Associate counsel Clifford Sloan’s contemporaneous notes cite the Clintons’ initials: “get Maggie—go through office—get HRC, WJC stuff.”
Missing: Clinton Counsel’s Foster Suicide Note. Also in 1993, the White House released an official statement incorrectly saying that no Foster suicide note had been found. However, more than 24 hours after a note had been found, White House counsel Nussbaum turned it over to Attorney General Janet Reno.
Missing: Hillary Clinton Law Firm Records. In 1996, after nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House reported it found copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm that described her work for Madison S&L in the 1980s. The White House previously said it did not have the records. The originals have not turned up.
Missing: Bush Administration Energy Emails. In 2002, the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch said more than 25,000 documents were missing from records released regarding deliberations between Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force and industry executives, possibly including documents related to the Enron scandal.
Missing: Clinton Terrorism Documents. In 2003, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger smuggled classified documents related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks from the National Archives. Berger said he removed handwritten notes by hiding them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also inadvertently took copies of classified documents.
Missing: Bush Administration ‘Torture’ Documents. In 2004, critics of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” for suspected terrorists, which they regarded as torture, said key documents were missing from newly declassified White House materials regarding torture and other mistreatment of prisoners. These included memos to and from the FBI and CIA, and documents dated after April 2003.
Missing: Millions of Bush Administration Emails. In 2005, the White House discovered some emails were not properly archived. It later was revealed that missing emails from Jan. 3, 2003 to July 28, 2005 might total 5 million.
Lost and Found: Katrina Conference Call Transcript. Also in 2005, Bush administration officials told Congress that they could not locate a transcript of an Aug. 29 videoconference call about Hurricane Katrina. Officials produced a transcript in 2006.
Missing: Bush Administration’s Abramoff Emails. In 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald found that missing emails from the 2003 period could be relevant to the criminal probe into influence peddling by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who later was convicted of bribery and corruption.
Missing: Bush Administration Political Emails. In 2007, it was revealed that 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts — but that the RNC preserved no emails for 51 of the officials.
Missing: Bush Administration Interrogation Video. Also in 2007, it was discovered that the Pentagon had lost a crucial recording of an al-Qaeda operative being interrogated in a U.S. military brig.
Withheld: Obama Administration ‘Fast and Furious’ Documents. In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder withheld emails regarding the “Fast and Furious “scandal. President Obama invoked executive privilege to prevent some emails from being turned over to Congress under subpoena.
Missing: Obama State Department Records. In 2014, it was revealed that the State Department may have lost some $6 billion because of incomplete or missing contract records over six years, mainly during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
Missing: Obama Administration IRS Emails. Also in 2014, the Internal Revenue Service said it had lost key emails of Lois Lerner and other officials regarding improper IRS targeting of conservative nonprofit groups.
Missing: Obama HealthCare.gov Records. Also in 2014, the Obama administration revealed that records Congress is seeks in its investigation of the Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, are missing.
Missing: Obama EPA Records. Also in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency told Congress it was having trouble finding emails relevant to a probe into the environmental impact of a proposed gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska. In a separate case, a federal judge found that the EPA willfully failed to keep emails and other records relevant to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the delay of unpopular regulations until after the 2012 election.
Missing?: Hillary Clinton Benghazi Documents. Also in 2014, former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell said he witnessed a Benghazi document-sorting session in October 2012 in the State Department basement. He said then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and her deputy, Jake Sullivan, were present.
Missing: Obama EPA Text Messages. Also in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency said it didn’t save text messages at issue in a Freedom of Information case seeking records about the agency’s plans to crack down on coal power plants. An EPA spokesman contends that federal law doesn’t require the messages to be retained.[/size]
Hillary Clinton has been embroiled in document scandals for nearly 30 years. But she’s not the only politician, and Democrats aren’t the only party, surrounded by an air of mystery when it comes to turning over potentially damaging documents that should be in the public domain.
Missing: Hillary Clinton S&L Records. In 1988, according to congressional investigators, Hillary Clinton “ordered the destruction of records relating to her [legal] representation of [Jim] McDougal’s Madison S&L” when federal regulators were investigating the insolvency of the Arkansas savings and loan. Bill Clinton was Arkansas governor at the time.
The Clintons and McDougal were business partners in the failed Whitewater real estate venture. McDougal later was convicted of fraud for attempting to use S&L funds to cover Whitewater losses. His wife, Susan, served prison time for refusing to answer grand jury questions about whether Bill Clinton lied in his testimony during her Whitewater trial.
Missing: Clinton Counsel’s Foster Records. In 1993, according to a Secret Service official, first lady Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, removed records from the office of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster the night of his suicide.
Other Clinton officials, including White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum, later testified that they conducted an improper search of Foster’s office. At least one file was marked “Whitewater” and another was marked “taxes.”
Another White House counsel, Bob Barnett, later picked up a box of Foster’s documents. Associate counsel Clifford Sloan’s contemporaneous notes cite the Clintons’ initials: “get Maggie—go through office—get HRC, WJC stuff.”
Missing: Clinton Counsel’s Foster Suicide Note. Also in 1993, the White House released an official statement incorrectly saying that no Foster suicide note had been found. However, more than 24 hours after a note had been found, White House counsel Nussbaum turned it over to Attorney General Janet Reno.
Missing: Hillary Clinton Law Firm Records. In 1996, after nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House reported it found copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm that described her work for Madison S&L in the 1980s. The White House previously said it did not have the records. The originals have not turned up.
Missing: Bush Administration Energy Emails. In 2002, the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch said more than 25,000 documents were missing from records released regarding deliberations between Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force and industry executives, possibly including documents related to the Enron scandal.
Missing: Clinton Terrorism Documents. In 2003, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger smuggled classified documents related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks from the National Archives. Berger said he removed handwritten notes by hiding them in his jacket, pants and socks, and also inadvertently took copies of classified documents.
Missing: Bush Administration ‘Torture’ Documents. In 2004, critics of the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” for suspected terrorists, which they regarded as torture, said key documents were missing from newly declassified White House materials regarding torture and other mistreatment of prisoners. These included memos to and from the FBI and CIA, and documents dated after April 2003.
Missing: Millions of Bush Administration Emails. In 2005, the White House discovered some emails were not properly archived. It later was revealed that missing emails from Jan. 3, 2003 to July 28, 2005 might total 5 million.
Lost and Found: Katrina Conference Call Transcript. Also in 2005, Bush administration officials told Congress that they could not locate a transcript of an Aug. 29 videoconference call about Hurricane Katrina. Officials produced a transcript in 2006.
Missing: Bush Administration’s Abramoff Emails. In 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald found that missing emails from the 2003 period could be relevant to the criminal probe into influence peddling by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who later was convicted of bribery and corruption.
Missing: Bush Administration Political Emails. In 2007, it was revealed that 88 White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts — but that the RNC preserved no emails for 51 of the officials.
Missing: Bush Administration Interrogation Video. Also in 2007, it was discovered that the Pentagon had lost a crucial recording of an al-Qaeda operative being interrogated in a U.S. military brig.
Withheld: Obama Administration ‘Fast and Furious’ Documents. In 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder withheld emails regarding the “Fast and Furious “scandal. President Obama invoked executive privilege to prevent some emails from being turned over to Congress under subpoena.
Missing: Obama State Department Records. In 2014, it was revealed that the State Department may have lost some $6 billion because of incomplete or missing contract records over six years, mainly during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
Missing: Obama Administration IRS Emails. Also in 2014, the Internal Revenue Service said it had lost key emails of Lois Lerner and other officials regarding improper IRS targeting of conservative nonprofit groups.
Missing: Obama HealthCare.gov Records. Also in 2014, the Obama administration revealed that records Congress is seeks in its investigation of the Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, are missing.
Missing: Obama EPA Records. Also in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency told Congress it was having trouble finding emails relevant to a probe into the environmental impact of a proposed gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay watershed in Alaska. In a separate case, a federal judge found that the EPA willfully failed to keep emails and other records relevant to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding the delay of unpopular regulations until after the 2012 election.
Missing?: Hillary Clinton Benghazi Documents. Also in 2014, former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell said he witnessed a Benghazi document-sorting session in October 2012 in the State Department basement. He said then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, and her deputy, Jake Sullivan, were present.
Missing: Obama EPA Text Messages. Also in 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency said it didn’t save text messages at issue in a Freedom of Information case seeking records about the agency’s plans to crack down on coal power plants. An EPA spokesman contends that federal law doesn’t require the messages to be retained.[/size]
lizardking- Posts : 1673
Points : 7609
Reputation : 2604
Join date : 2015-12-30
Age : 31
Location : United Kingdom
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IFERS - Exposing the 'Global' Conspiracy From Atlantis to Zion :: Other Conspiracies, Hoaxes, Myths and Lies
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