Rice Denies Book's Assertion She Brushed Off CIA Terror Warning

`Incomprehensible,' she says of the idea that she ignored Tenet's anxiety over a strike before 9/11.

By Paul Richter
LA Times Staff Writer
October 3, 2006

State Department officials acknowledged late Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was at a 2001 meeting where she was reportedly warned of the need to act on an impending terrorist threat to the United States.

They said she met with then-CIA Director George J. Tenet on or around July 10. A new book by Bob Woodward says she brushed off Tenet's warning at that session.

SNIP...

"The idea that I would have ignored that, I find incomprehensible," Rice told reporters late Sunday during the flight. "I am quite certain that it was not a meeting in which I was told that there was an impending attack, and refused to respond."

The State Department said Monday that a meeting around the time described by Woodward had in fact taken place, based on government records, but that no new information was given to Rice, who then was President Bush's national security advisor.

In his book, Woodward writes that Tenet and J. Cofer Black, then director of the CIA's counterterrorism center, decided on July 10, 2001, that they had to request a dramatic, "out-of-cycle" meeting with Rice to describe their anxiety over the chance of an attack against American interests, possibly within the United States.

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http://articles.latimes.com/2006/oct/03/nation/na-book3

Bain and the Salvadoran Death Squads

Romney’s Blood Money

by SANDY SMITH-NONINI
CounterPunch Weekend Edition, August 25-26, 2012

EXCERPT...

For me, it is grotesque to imagine that families deeply enmeshed in the operations of the “protection racket” behind Tita’s murder helped finance the rise to power of a candidate for the U.S. presidency. Far from denying the claims, Romney named and publicly thanked several Salvadoran investors for their help in a 2007 speech in Miami. U.S. officials and human rights inquiries had linked close relatives of the investors, belonging to the Poma, Duenas, de Sola and Salaverria families, to paramilitary violence by 1984 when they met with Romney. Some of their relatives were charged with directing violence personally, others with supporting it behind the scenes under cover of the extreme right wing ARENA party which orchestrated the death squads in those years.

The LA Times July 19 article cited Bain’s corporate filings in Massachusetts, as well as a 1994 expose by the Boston Globe, which calculated the Salvadorans’ investment in Bain at $6.5 million, based on writings by former Bain executive Harry Strachan who introduced Romney to the investors. The Globe quoted Romney saying Bain had checked backgrounds of individual investors (none of whom are accused of human rights crimes) but had not investigated their families. The Salon blog also reported on Romney’s recruitment of the Salvadoran investors in January.

Approximately 35,000 Salvadorans were killed, most in political murders from 1979-1984 when the violence reached genocidal levels, with dead and mutilated bodies routinely found in landfills or dumped by roadsides. In his 1992 book How Holocausts Happen Sociologist Douglas Porpora argued that, given the proportion of Salvadorans affected and the systematic nature of the violence in the early 1980s, it was justified to consider this period a Holocaust-like event.

The Reagan administration’s generous foreign aid to the military regime protected a small oligarchy of families whose wealth came from plantations dependent on cheap labor from a peasantry forcibly dispossessed of land. After the 1992 ceasefire a United Nations study blamed 85% of the civilian killings on government military and allied death squads. I documented the human toll from the Salvadoran land grabs and militarism in my 2010 book Healing the Body Politic (Rutgers University Press), which traced 25 years of resistance to the regime by rural community health organizers during and after the 12-year war.

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/24/romneys-blood-money/

Tax Forms Hold Key: Millionaire Mitt’s Gotta Admit If He’s a Tax Fraud or a Vulture Capitalist

by Dave Lindorff
08/23/2012 thiscantbehappening.net

GOP presumptive presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as noted in ThisCantBeHappening yesterday, is probably stonewalling demands that he release his 2009 and earlier IRS filings because they could expose to the public that he availed himself of a 2009 IRS amnesty for those who admitted to earlier felonious hiding of income in Swiss and other foreign tax havens. Some 30,000 wealthy taxpayers did just that after a whistleblower broke the news that thousands of clients of Swiss Bank UBS were illegally hiding income at the bank, and the IRS sued for the names, while also offering the get-out-of-jail amnesty pass option.

But a reader, Phil Birkhahn, points out in his own blog called Romney the Tax Cheat that the slippery Harvard Law grad Romney may also have fraudulently ducked paying taxes in later -- and earlier -- years. Either that or he has to man-up and accept managerial responsibility for the obnoxious anti-worker and anti-America policies of his Bain Capital company during the 1999-2002 years, and in later years, during times when he asserting that he played none any but a passive investor role in the venture capital firm.

SNIP...

Although Romney, whose whole basic argument to voters is that they should elect him because he is a great businessman who will run America "like a business," also bizarrely at the same time claims that on "Feb. 1999 I left Bain Capital and all management responsibility," and says "I had no ongoing activity or involvement," meaning he was a passive investor in the firm, which he still owned 100% from that date until 2002, He is also listed as late as 2002 as one of the two managing members of Bain Capital in its annual report, and the company's SEC filings list him as CEO, President and managing director as well as sole owner in 2000 and 2001. That would make him an active investor.

If Romney was in fact an active investor, he would have been able to deduct so many expenses and losses that as a shrewd tax lawyer he probably managed to get his taxes down substantially. But if he was really, as he claims on the stump and in interviews when pressed about Bain’s atrocities, like the exporting of jobs of companies it bought to China and elsewhere, then he was not entitled to those deductions he claimed.

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http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1293