-Caveat Lector-
On September 10, 1993, the Houston Chronicle reprinted an article by William
Safire titled "No wonder Bush is quiet about Clinton."
WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times; Section A; Page 25; Column 5
September 9, 1993, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
George Bush privately assured Bill Clinton that he would not
criticize the new President during the first year of his term.
I cannot attribute that to any source, but trust me. And Mr. Bush
has kept his word.
In what may be an unspoken quid pro quo, the Clinton
Administration has moved to quash any revelations about Bush's
Iraqgate scandal.
You remember Iraqgate: the White House corruption of
Agriculture's loan guarantee program to slip foreign aid billions
through an Italian bank to Saddam Hussein, which he used to
finance his secret nuclear buildup. The Bush Justice Department
sought to contain the scandal by pretending the Italian bank knew
nothing of its Atlanta office's huge Iraqi dealings -- despite
suppressed C.I.A. evidence to the contrary.
During the '92 campaign, Al Gore accurately charged that
"the C.I.A. reported to Secretary of State James Baker ... that
Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons" while State was
urging more loan guarantees to appease the dictator. Candidate
Clinton, asked if he would favor a special Iraqgate prosecutor
under a new Independent Counsel Act, replied unequivocally: "Yes."
That was then. Last week, in Atlanta Federal court, Clinton
Justice arranged for the local Banca Lavoro manager to cop a plea
on three minor charges of what had been a 347-count indictment,
thereby blocking full disclosure of Rome's corrupt involvement --
with guilty knowledge of U.S. officials -- in a public trial.
John Hogan, Attorney General Janet Reno's longtime assistant
in Miami, is the prosecutor who insists that the bank in Rome
was innocent, over the plea bargainer's continued disputation.
Federal Judge Marvin Shoob, the Sirica in this case, rejects Mr.
Hogan's contention as "absurd ... never-never land." He sees a
"wider-ranging sophisticated conspiracy that involved B.N.L.-
Rome ... and the Governments of the U.S., England, Italy and
Iraq."
But Ms. Reno's man, who joined Justice on June 7, has
conducted what she falsely calls "a thorough independent
investigation," resulting in "no reason to change our opinion."
Thus Clinton appointees at Justice have closed ranks with
prosecutors and fixers desperate not to be brought before a grand
jury by a truly independent counsel. Bush Justice appointed the
lawyer for Saddam's main arms purchaser as U.S. Attorney in
Atlanta; Clinton Justice is appointing a lawyer from King &
Spalding, B.N.L.'s law firm, who previously worked on the case as
a prosecutor to be U.S. Attorney there now.
Reno is unconcerned at how her assertion of B.N.L.-Rome's
innocence bolsters the Italian bank's claim against the U.S. for
$380 million of the loans to Saddam that James Baker persuaded
Agriculture's Clayton Yeutter to guarantee. If the Criminal
Division holds that Rome was victimized, shouldn't the U.S. pay
up? "Apples and oranges," Hogan tells me; that's the Civil
Division's job.
Hogan is familiar with Italian suits, having once been
accused of receiving stolen clothing in a Miami "hot suit" case;
he earned a straight-arrow reputation by resigning as prosecutor
despite his innocence.
But now he uses "ongoing investigation" to duck questions,
despite St. Janet's claim of his work having already been
"thorough"; it is patently not "independent."
Did Hogan take testimony under oath from ex-Attorney General
Dick Thornburgh about a White House meeting with Italian
Ambassador Rinaldo Petrignani, directed by Rome to "raise the
case to a political level"? Or ask the Criminal Division why an
update on the B.N.L. investigation was prepared for the A.G. just
three days before that meeting?
Did he convene a grand jury to examine the Oct. 26, 1989,
memo to Secretary Baker, with attached talking points and Baker
notations, showing how commodity credits were abused for Saddam's
backdoor financing?
Is it not a blatant conflict of interest for him to close
out the Atlanta case while purporting to investigate the Atlanta
prosecutors on whose work he depended?
Reno's man sayeth not. No wonder we hear not a peep of
criticism about Clinton from Bush; the former President and his
men are being well protected. Congress should pass the
Independent Counsel Act and demand it be used in this case.
_____________________________
WHITEWATER CURRENTS
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/t1000208.htm
"The Octopus:
Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro"
by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith,
Copyright (C) 1996
Rounded edges of the Octopus tentacles arose briefly from
under the relatively calm waters of a new administration's first
year in office. Danny Casolaro was two years gone and the key
players in the investigation he began ostensibly had left power
after the 1993 election. Casolaro's work was left unfinished,
however, and his metaphorical sea monster still swam in the sea
of current events.
Columnist William Safire reported that Bill Clinton and
George Bush struck a secret deal after Clinton's election that
the former president would withhold criticism of the new
administration for one year in exchange for Clinton's
soft-pedaling of the Iran-contra investigations. A month before
the end of that deal, a month before the former Arkansas
governor's first anniversary as president, the Clinton
administration re-opened the Inslaw investigation. In December
1993, the FBI began again to interview Casolaro's close
associates and friends with an eye toward resolving the question
of his death--was it a suicide or murder?
Under the new administration, the FBI was not satisfied with
the determination of Judge Bua's report. It was still concerned
with "Danny's state of mind at the time of his death", Casolaro
girlfriend Wendy Weaver told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They
said they were going to interview all these people and then bring
the findings back to their experts to determine if he was
suicidal... I told them I thought it was murder." Press reports
were silent as to why the case was being reopened at this time,
indeed few papers other than the Chronicle reported upon it at
all. Only the dim political purpose of the coming end to Bush's
year of silence even suggested an answer. Did the new
administration take interest in this high profle case, touching
as it does on the intelligence backgrounds of prominent
Republican personalities, as protection against Clinton-bashing
from the Bush camp? Or was there more to it?
The review of the case had been ordered by Associate
Attorney General Webster "Webb" Hubbell, then the third-ranking
official at the Justice Department (seen by some as the
Department's de facto head), a Clinton family friend. In noting
that Hubbell had been assigned to review the Inslaw case,
long-time Washington watcher Sarah McClendon also noted that
Casolaro had maintained that additional details about the Inslaw
relationship with the Justice Department could be had from
employees in the office of Senator Robert Byrd. According to
McLendon, Casolaro had scheduled an interview with these
employees for the Friday preceding his death. Senator Byrd's
chief of staff was the wife of Peter Videnicks, contracting
officer at the Justice Department during the Inslaw period.
McClendon quoted Bill Turner as saying that Casolaro told him
that he planned to meet with two members of Robert Byrd's staff.
McClendon also noted the Hamilton's complaints that Hubbell and
FBI investigator Scott Erskine had plans to release a report
without having talked to important Casolaro associates or
investigating curious incidents, including a threat against
Casolaro made by a friend of Videnieks, Joseph Cuellar, who
apparently was also trailing the writer.
Hubbell himself had already been connected to the Inslaw case
through the confessions of Danger Man. In April 1992 Michael
Riconosciuto told Village Voice's Frank Snepp of the link between
guns-and-drugs operations at an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas--a
story that already loomed as a major Clinton-era scandal because
of Clinton's failure to investigate the situation as
governor--and Park-On-Meter (POM), a parking meter manufacturer
in Russellville, Arkansas, that figured prominently in making
Webb Hubbell one of the early victims of another Clinton debacle,
the Whitewater affair. Riconosciuto claimed to have worked with
Terry Reed, the Mena pilot whose revelations first brought the
Oliver North-styled smuggling operation to national attention.
Riconosciuto also told Mark Swaney, the head of a University of
Arkansas student group responsible for a petition drive to
investigate Mena, that he had been involved in developing
chemical and biological weapons in a project connected to
POM--apparently never explicit that this was also connected to
the work he did on Cabazon tribal lands--and that the company
also manufactured external fuel tanks for C-130 transport planes.
Riconosciuto had already confided to Alexander Cockburn that
he had supervised high-tech equipment transfers and developed
software to help launder money at Mena and explained that POM, in
conjunction with the infamous Wackenhut and Stormont Labs in
Woodland, California, began production of the delivery system for
the new chemical and biowarfare weaponry for use in the Contra
war in 1983. Long-range transport missions require the use of
external fuel tanks.. Riconosciuto told Cockburn that POM made
the tanks for unconventional guerilla warfare against the
contras. POM was to receive chemical agents from the 354th
Chemical Company of the Army Reserve, located on property across
from the corrugated barn housing the POM facilities, for use in
small explosive devices made with the same equipment POM used to
produce parking meters.
Stormont Labs acknowledged only discussions with Wackenhut
regarding biological weapons and Wackenhut denied working with
POM. POM president, Seth "Skeeter" Ward II, also Webster
Hubbell's brother-in-law, admitted that the company had some
Pentagon contracts, but only for "re-entry nose cones for the
nuclear warheads on the MX missile and nozzes for rocket
engines", not chemical or biological weapons delivery systems,
although he confessed to not knowing what kind of aircraft parts
POM made for one of its contracts with McDonnell Douglas.
Ward also denied another central charge made by Danger Man:
that POM received the first industrial development loan made by
the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), a
controversial state authority co-written by Webster Hubbell in
1985. Bill Clinton appointed every member of the ADFA's
governing board and was required to approve its every bond issue,
apparently with no other legislative means of guaranteeing that
the money would be spent as intended.
The ADFA primarily served two masters: the Stephens, Inc.,
investment bank that received 78 percent of ADFA's underwriting
fees and sales of housing and industrial bonds (Clinton had
appointed two Stephens associates to the ADFA board); and Clinton
crony Dan Lasater, whose Lasater and Company firm underwrote $664
million in municipal bond issues after the creation of the ADFA.
Lasater was a party animal renown for cocaine soirees at his
Arkansas mansion, who claimed to have paid off drug debts of the
President's brother Roger. Even after a police investigation of
Lasater in 1985 for drugs, Clinton approved a $30.2 million bond
issue to overhaul the state police radio system. In 1986 Lasater
was sentenced to 30 months in prison for the distribution of
cocaine (Roger Clinton was an unindicted co-conspirator) and was
pardoned for it by Clinton. He remains connected to the White
House through the person of White House official Patsy Thomasson,
manager of Lasater and Company while Lasater was in jail.
In this murky financial atmosphere, and despite Ward's
denials, it is probable that the ADFA did issue one of its first
bond issues to POM--with Clinton's required approval. For critics
who complained about Clinton's passivity in investigating the
Mena airstrip, a less passive reason for his inaction emerged,
with a tentacle pointing tothe Inslaw affair.
Mena did not provide the only evidence that the Octopus swam
in Whitewater currents, however. It's tentacles also stretched
toward the most infamous developing scandal of the Clinton era:
the Vince Foster death.
POM's admitted jobs for the Pentagon and the funny finances
of the ADFA remained obscure for the most part in the media as
Webster Hubbell's representation of POM became the official
reason for his resignation from Clinton's Justice Department, one
month after his re-opening of the Inslaw investigation. The Rose
Law Firm declared that Hubbell had failed to provide
documentation for expenses he had charged to the firm and that
POM lost $1 million in litigation expenses when Hubbell
unsuccessfully pursued a patent infringement case he took on a
contingency basis for his brother-in-law "Skeeter" Ward.
"Unfortunately, because of public speculation about me and my
former law firm," Hubbell said in his resignation letter, "I
will have to spend a significant amount of time on an internal
matter with my former partners."
In addition to bringing POM out of the Washington spotlight,
the resignation shielded Hubbell from other accusations regarding
the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate investments.
Specifically, Hubbell served on the Resolution Trust Corporation
during its takeover of the Madison Savings and Loan, owned by
Whitewater partner James McDougal and previously represented by
Hubbell. Hubbell failed to inform the RTC of the potential
conflict. Unofficially, Hubbell was the second victim of
Whitewater, following White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum's
forced resignation for questionable meetings with federal
regulators looking into the Whitewater Development Corporation
real estate investments.
Nussbaum had been responsible for removing Whitewater files
and a diary from the office of White House aide Vincent Foster
less than three hours after Foster's death from a gunshot wound.
He was accompanied on that visit by Patsy Thomasson.
Foster's last weekend had been spent in the company of Webster
Hubbell, his wife and another couple, White House counsel Michael
Cardozo and his wife. Hubbell joined the group in Maryland after
leaving the meeting that informed William Sessions of his
dismissal as FBI Director. After returning from a Hawaiian
vacation, Bill Clinton spent that weekend in Arkansas dining with
David Edwards, a former Stephens Inc. employee and conduit for
$23 million from the king of Saudi Arabia for the Middle Eastern
studies program at the University of Arkansas. Clinton had one
last twenty minute conversation with Foster the Monday night
before his death. Oddly, one of Foster's last phone conversations
on the morning of his death was with Brantley Buck, the Rose Law
Firm partner assigned to investigate Webster Hubbell and POM.
In 1995, new suspicions arose concerning the use of PROMIS in
the world banking system. One post on the internet charged (or,
rather, sarcastically reported the "false" charge) that
Systematics, a subsidiary of Alltech Corporation comprised of
Systematics Financial Services Inc., Systematics Information
Services Inc. of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Systematics
Telecommunications Services Inc. of Dallas, Pennsylvania, had
modified the PROMIS software for sale to private banks, with the
attendant back doors to allow the NSA to spy on banking
operations. The post went on to charge that Webster Hubbell had
"helped work out strategies to use Systematics software to spy on
commercial and central banks." The anonymous source encouraged
Internet readers to verify the charge (or, "the utter falsehood
of these malicious lies"), and attached a long list of bank and
financial service addresses, executive names and capsule
histories of their conversion to Systematics software, replete
with citations in American Banker.
The Systematics information and Vince Foster's last weekend
with Webster Hubbell and Michael Cordozacame together to float
the last odd rumors about the PROMIS program. Instead of the
recreational affair it was described as during the Congressional
Whitewater hearings, the source of this new speculation suggested
that the Clinton cronies met to plot damage control over a
burgeoning scandal involving PROMIS.
Nearly $3 billion had been emptied out of Swiss bank
accounts belonging to dozens of high-powered political
types--both Democrats and Republicans--by a CIA faction known
during this period as "the Fifth Column", but obvious Octopus
clones.
The Fifth Columnists served as expert hackers, collecting
routine foreign intelligence data presumably through the PROMIS
back door, when they encountered Vince Foster's name in the
Mossad system. From there, they tracked Foster's bank trail to
the Banca Della Svizzera Italiana, a small Italian border bank,
where the Israelis deposited $2.73 million. The rumors only
speculated about what Foster gave the Israelis: high level
intelligence information; encryption codes; data on black
operations subcontractors--he was dead before it could be figured
out. Whatever it was, the Fifth Column tipped its hand to Foster
that he was under investigation by removing the money, although
according to the story his was not the only account raided.
Making another in apparently regular one-day trips to Geneva,
Foster discovered the missing money, and later perhaps someone
mentioned to him that he was under investigation for espionage,
and thereafter he became "suicidal."
THE DEAD (PROMIS/Octopus related)
Danny Casolaro
Frank Nugan
Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend and friend
Paul Morasca
Mary Quick
Larry Guerrin
Abbie Hoffman
Jonathan Moyle
Alan Standorf
Dennis Eisman
Anson Ng
Ian Spiro, His wife, and three daughters
Robert Maxwell
Paul Wilcher
Pete Sandvigen
Alan Michael May
Jonathan Myle
JohnCrawford
Vali Delahanty
Barry Kusnick
Sherman Skolnick, a long-time chairman of Chicago's
Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, charged that nearly
forty witnesses in the Inslaw case had been murdered and
complained that a federal judge appointed to review the case
failed to show concern over the safety of other witnesses.
The body of Alfred Alvarez, shot in the head with a .38
caliber bullet, burned in the desert heat for a day. It sat in a
wooden chair behind Alvarez's house in a yard on Bob Hope Drive
in Rancho Mirage, located in Riverside County. Police discovered
the body along with those of two others, friends of Alvarez. Six
months later, police broke open a door to a condo on Kearny
street and discovered the dead body of Paul Morasca, hog-tied by
a telephone cord strangled slowly as his legs uncurled. Three
days later, Mary Quick, a 63 year old school-teacher and head of
the Women's Auxiliary of American Legion Post 509 in Fresno, was
killed by a shot to the head as she approached the Legion Hall.
Investigators came to believe that all three murders were
connected.
"In the middle of the journey of life, I found myself in a
dark wood, having lost the straight path." - Quote from Dante's
Inferno - written in Danny Casolaro's notebook.
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