Octafish
Octafish's JournalJustice for Westhusing.
James Risen wrote about a death threat made by Blackwater's main man in Iraq upon an official from the State Department sent to investigate contractor corruption. Upon hearing that news, and before I could think of what that really meant or anything else, I thought of Col. Theodore S. Westhusing, United States Army.
Col. Westhusing was in charge of training the new Iraqi army and overseeing civilian contractors. He is remembered as a good man, a brilliant man who followed the Cadet Code: "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” As an instructor at West Point, the PhD colonel served as the Army's chief ethicist. So, as an honest officer in Iraq, he came to suspect something was very wrong with the conduct of some of the private military contractors in the employ of USIS. Unfortunately, before he revealed those suspicions, and just a few weeks before he was scheduled to return home to his loving wife and family, he became a suicide.
The subject was discussed on DU. One thread from 2007:
Know your BFEE: They kill good soldiers like Col. Ted Westhusing for profit...
Another from 2012, when Petraeus ran into some conduct unbecoming problems at CIA:
Is David Petraeus Dirty? Ted Westhusing Said So, and Then He Shot Himself.
Which brings me back to hearing the report of Blackwater's top manager in Iraq. Imagine the gall of the son of a bitch! To threaten the life of a U.S. citizen sent on official government business -- the People's business -- to see how our money was being spent, or in the case of the Iraq War, stolen. It seems some groups, such as the private military contractors, join their employers in Washington in thinking that they really are above the law. They certainly behave that way.
Could there be any connection between Blackwater and USIS, the once-public then privatized public employee background check organization now turned military contractor in Iraq? Of course, there are. Both are BFEE-connected for-profit outfits that are making enormous fortunes from the Iraq War.
Blackwater was owned and operated largely by one Erik Prince, darling of America's hard right and Michigan's right to inherit wealth beyond imagination class. His sister is a GOP kingmaker, including his brother in law, the once unsuccessful GOP candidate for Michigan governor. Petraeus and CIA were so enamored of the talents and abilities of Mr. Prince, CIA outsourced drone targeting to his firm.
At the time of Col. Westhusing's death, USIS was owned and operated largely by Carlyle Group, a private investment bank known for finding, buying, and flipping defense-related companies at a nice profit. They literally and figuratively are good friends and actual employers of George W Bush, his father, George H.W. Bush, Sec. of State James Baker, Sec. of Defense Frank Carlucci, Prime Minister John Major of the UK and other government insiders and players connected to the grand ol' oily chess board.
In short, both USIS and Blackwater are controlled by the "money trumps peace" crowd, the cronies and family of George W Bush. What Bartcop termed the BFEE for Bush Family Evil Empire, or what I call the War Party for short, follow the philosophy that the United States can be defended at a handsome profit and, if you apply enough media spin, quite patriotically.
As for Col. Westhusing: He, according to one officer under his command, at first very much believed in his mission. Why? Because the same BFEE liars who lied America into war also lied the good men and women at West Point and at the Pentagon into war. Until he got to Iraq and saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, he never thought "money would trump peace."
An Army psychologist concluded that Westhusing struggled with the idea that “monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war.” This, she said, was a flaw. -- Westhusing's Flaw
Of course, the only "flaw" was in being a highly ethical person, one who would NOT "go along to get along." In short, Col. Westhusing was a man of integrity. He was the kind who stand in the way of the warmongers and war profiteers. Until the politicians who lied him and America into war are brought to justice, we just won't know how much he became their victim.
The fact there is so little coverage about this demonstrates corrupt nature of news media.
At least Stein swings for the fences...
The Ghosts of Nugan Hand: A New Chapter in a Long-Running CIA Bank Mystery
BY JEFF STEIN
Newsweek 11/12/15 AT 3:00 PM
Ask Australian authorities about Michael Hand, and you get a big collective shrug. The fugitive former Green Beret and onetime CIA operative went missing 35 years ago after his mysterious, scandal-drenched bank went bust following the alleged suicide of his Australian business partner, Frank Nugan. A subsequent official commission “found evidence of money-laundering, illegal tax avoidance schemes and widespread violations of banking laws,” according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
But now he’s suddenly popped up under a new name in Idaho, insisting he did nothing wrong, and Australian authorities seem in no rush to get him back.
Officially headquartered in Hong Kong and chartered in the Cayman Islands during the Cold War, Nugan Hand had a roster of top ex-military officials and CIA figures that attracted suspicion that it was deeply involved in unsavory activities. “Over the years, the two words Nugan Hand became shorthand for drug-dealing, gun-running, organised crime and clandestine intelligence activities,” The Sydney Morning Herald wrote this week.
“Nugan Hand had enough generals, admirals, and spooks to run a small war,” the late Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny wrote in his definitive 1987 book about the bank, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA. Nugan Hand, he wrote, was “a giant theft machine” involved in CIA operations from Angola to Iran. In Saudi Arabia, where interest-charging banks are illegal, it acted as a cash depository for American expats.
In 1976, the attorney general of New South Wales, Frank Walker, launched an investigation into Nugan Hand, saying the bank had engaged in “serious crimes...and it wasn't just in Australia. It was all over the world where this bank was operating.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.newsweek.com/michael-hand-cia-heroin-nugan-hand-australia-393576
Like all good articles published in Corporate Owned News, though, the article fails to connect the dots for the reader. What matters most is the guy's a protected, made man of the BFEE. Like banksters and politicians who lie America into wars for profit, they never go to jail because they never are held to account for their crimes -- whether money laundering or arms dealing or child trafficking -- when committed under cover of "national security."
Banking CIA-Style : How the Money Moves Under The Table to Fund Covert Operations.
"What S&L crisis? Is that like the Wall Street bailout thing?"
Banking CIA-Style : How the Money Moves Under The Table to Fund Covert Operations.
August 04, 1991|Burton Hersh | Burton Hersh's new book, "The Old Boys," about the origins of the CIA, will be published next year by Scribner's
BRADFORD, N.H. — The worldwide dredging operation on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International has carried with it to the surface the Central Intelligence Agency. This is an old story by now. Sink any hook deep enough, haul on it hard enough and up comes the CIA, again.
Perhaps this is inevitable--the consequence of climbing into bed for almost half a century with talent that ranged from the Mafia (repeatedly) to drug lords of every odor from Canarsie, N.J., to the palaces of Bangkok, Thailand. The CIA has always promoted itself as an equal-opportunity employer.
Created by the National Security Act of 1947 to counter by any imaginable means--preferably foul--the postwar depredations of International Communism, the CIA was expected to immerse itself at society's tangled depths. What it was not to do was join the heavies.
SNIP...
Dulles had long served--with certain ill-disguised misgivings--as general counsel and board member of the New York affiliate of J. Henry Schroder. Almost as his dowry, Dulles laid before the U.S. intelligence community the international amenities of the Schroder group once he became involved with the agency in the late '40s. Schroder retained its long-standing ties throughout South and Central America, as well as durable associations with senior German industrial and intelligence personalities--including many former Nazis. It was this network that became the flywheel of innumerable CIA projects in Europe--especially after Dulles himself moved up to director in 1953.
Even then, the question arose who was using whom. By 1980, when the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia collapsed shortly after the apparent suicide of its founder, Frank Nugan, another incident of massive CIA involvement in a profoundly corrupt banking empire slowly reached public awareness. Like BCCI, the Nugan Hand Bank amounted to a global Ponzi scheme. After recruiting a reputable-appearing assortment of retired senior U.S. military and ex-CIA personnel, the Nugan Hand entrepreneurs scoured U.S. military installations worldwide for deposits. They pledged to pay double-digit interest--offshore and tax free. They used this stake to underwrite rogue enterprises throughout the planet.
The renegade ex-CIA arms merchant, Edwin Wilson, financed his catastrophic weaponry empire through Nugan Hand, including, by the end, the transfer of tons of plastique to Moammar Kadafi. According to a galvanizing 1982 series in the Wall Street Journal by Jonathan Kwitny, the bank not only financed, but arranged for the trans-shipment of, millions of dollars worth of heroin--often by the contract pilots who flew for Air America, the CIA's huge proprietary fleet. "Air America was a Vietnam War-era airline," Kwitny wrote, "with close connections with the CIA. U.S. drug enforcement officials now acknowledge that the airline also occasionally ran heroin out of Southeast Asia's famed 'Golden Triangle' poppy-growing areas." A Joint Task Force study by Australian officials confirmed the extensive use of the Nugan Hand Bank as a blind depository by CIA leaders. The fast-moving co-founder of the bank, ex-Green Beret Michael Hand, bragged regularly about his intimacy with CIA operatives before he disappeared. By then the bank itself had collapsed.
With Nugan Hand down, the rise of the BCCI was more than providential. Had not a coalition of Pakistani and Saudi sharpshooters set it up, the agency would probably have contrived to reinvent it. U.S. diplomacy of recent decades has depended more on whom we can pay off quietly than whom we can talk around. It remains much cheaper to bribe than invade, as our intelligence mentors, the British, always insisted. Yet still they object, because BCCI payments went out at CIA request to winkle out the unpublished details of English arm sales and overseas contracts.
CONTINUED...
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-04/opinion/op-453_1_nugan-hand-bank
Corporate Funding
It is to laugh.
What a small world. Koch Brothers funded PBS big time and until recently enjoyed a pass on it.
Speaking of FARC:
When it comes to making money, Columbia is wicked awesome!
Ask Richard Grasso (left, photo below), then-head of the New York Stock Exchange, as he gives a nice warm hug to Raul Reyes, (photo, right) then-living FARC #2.
The Real Deal: The Ultimate New Business Cold Call
NYSE's Richard Grasso and the Ultimate New Business "Cold Call"
Monday, 18 February 2002, 10:13 am
Column: Catherine Austin Fitts
Lest you think that my comment about the New York Stock Exchange is too strong, let's look at one event that occurred before our "war on drugs" went into high gear through Plan Colombia, banging heads over narco dollar market share in Latin America.
In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.
The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.
Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.
To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Sam and Dave estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive BIG PERCENT back to SLIM PERCENT and what that means to Wall Street and Washington's cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions.
It was only a few days after Grasso's trip that BBC News reported a General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress as saying: "Colombia's cocaine and heroin production is set to rise by as much as 50 percent as the U.S. backed drug war flounders, due largely to the growing strength of Marxist rebels"
CONTINUED...
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00069.htm
Har har. Secret government.
PS: Thank you for the heads-up on Kwitny, MinM. Remember the Federal Witness Removal Program.
Gnarly! Nugan Hand goes with BCCI in more than the annals of high class corruption.
The secret government and bankster types have a history of working together, not only to fight godless communism, but to make big bucks without anyone really being held to scrutiny, let alone account.
Zum beispiehl:
Bankers to the New World Scum Class :
BCCI and its ilk flourish because they serve the needs of spies, tyrants and crooks.
ALEXANDER COCKBURN | Alexander Cockburn writes for the Nation and other publications
The Los Angeles Times, August 01, 1991
To do their dirty business, spy agencies like the CIA need dirty money and the services of dirty banks, which is why we find the Central Intelligence Agency using the same institution as did Abu Nidal, Manuel Noriega, the Contras and the Medellin cartel.
One day they'll probably make a soap opera out of the daily business life of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose sordid affairs are slowly coming to light and many of whose officers have just been indicted in New York. The soap opera could use such authentic scenes as:
-- The CIA depositing millions to the account of the Contras, in straightforward defiance of U. S. law;
-- Agents of Abu Nidal making withdrawals and deposits in a BCCI London branch, where the manager has said that British intelligence monitored the account, whose balance usually stood between $50 million and $70 million;
-- Mrs. Manuel Noriega depositing millions in London on behalf of her husband in BCCI's Sloan Street branch, whose manager, Amjad Awan (son of a former head of Pakistani intelligence) will be the U.S. government's main witness against Noriega;
-- The South African government making secret deposits in the BCCI account of the Zulu Inkatha movement.
BCCI is not the first and will not be the last bank to stand at the crossroads of international knavery. In January, 1980, the body of Frank Nugan was found in a car on a back road in New South Wales, Australia. Nugan was half-owner and chairman of the Nugan Hand Bank, whose specialty was, like BCCI's, the no-questions-asked acceptance and transfer of large sums of cash from one country to another. In the wallet of the deceased Nugan were found the business cards of William Colby, former director of Central Intelligence and subsequently a legal adviser to Nugan Hand Bank, and of Bob Wilson, at that time ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, and guest at a dinner Nugan had recently held.
Nugan Hand, which started its existence in Sydney, Australia, in 1973, operated in 26 countries including the United States. It shunted drug money from one haven to another; smuggled money out of the Philippines for the Marcos family account; financed such CIA schemes as the sale of a spy ship to Iran in the 1970s and the funneling of money to the UNITA rebels in Angola. Eventually the bank, its payroll resplendent with retired U.S. generals and admirals, collapsed just like BCCI in scandal and ruin.
The reason drug moguls and CIA agents stood shoulder to shoulder in line at Nugan Hand or BCCI branches was that their interests often ran in tandem, whether in Central America, the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia or in Pakistan, home of Agha Hasan Abedi, founder of BCCI.
CONTINUED...
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-08-01/local/me-71_1_nugan-hand-bank
FAIR reports Cockburn's LA Times essays are the only places where US media mentioned the BCCI-Nugan Hand connection.
FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker (Nugan-Hand partner)
Holy smokes.
IN PLAIN SIGHT
FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker
How Michael Jon Hand, who founded an Australian bank with ties to American military and intelligence officials that defrauded depositors and investors, was tracked to Idaho.
By Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica, 11.10.151:00 AM ET
EXCERPT...
Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.
Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.
If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.
Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”
SNIP...
Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/10/found-after-35-years-cia-s-fugitive-banker.html
"Hand told colleagues that it was his ambition that the bank 'become a banker for the CIA.'"
To ensure torture is never repeated, why not prosecute those responsible?
We know their names and addresses.
"Why don't we send Officer Friendly out to serve them a warrant, Unka Dick?"
Dementia
Could a Change in Sense of Humor Signal Dementia?http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20151111/change-humor-dementia
Almost feel sorry for him.
Cheney Considered Nuking Iraq
Important news Corporate McPravda ignores:
George Herbert Walker Bush Reveals Cheney Considered Using Nuclear Weapons Against Iraq
George Bush Sr book reveals a more dangerous Dick Cheney than anyone knew
Destiny and Power shows a VP with more authority than almost all his predecessors, making plain Bush Jr’s administration could have been even worse
Julian Borger, Diplomatic editor
The Guardian, Thursday 5 November 2015
EXCERPT...
This unilateralist inclination was clearly the younger Bush’s choice. It was how he intended from the outset to make his foreign policy distinctive from his father’s. And it was this characteristic that made for such a dangerously volatile and over-reaching US response when the 9/11 attacks came.
There is no doubt that Cheney and Rumsfeld were given more licence and authority than almost all their predecessors once the “war on terror” began. Cheney was certainly the most powerful vice-president of modern times, with a large and assertive staff, something that Bush Sr draws particular attention to.
Cheney and Rumsfeld used their enhanced power to poison the flow of information to the president’s desk about Iraq and its supposed weapons of mass destruction. The vice-president even made repeated trips to CIA headquarters in Langley to bully analysts into producing more hawkish reports, while Rumsfeld’s Pentagon sucked up highly dubious “evidence” from Iraqi exiles and ideological freelancers. But, as even as the ever-forgiving father admits in Meacham’s book, it was President Bush who allowed Cheney to grow his own empire.
SNIP...
Perhaps the most alarming revelation to emerge from the new Bush biography is the elder man’s recollection that while Cheney had been his defence secretary, he had commissioned a study on how many tactical nuclear weapons would be needed to eliminate a division of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.
Apparently the answer was 17, though a more profound conclusion is that Cheney was a more dangerous figure than anyone knew. It adds weight to reporting by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker that Cheney also contemplated the use of low-yield nuclear bunker-busters against Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities. The more we hear about the George W Bush administration, the clearer it becomes that the global damage it wrought could have been even worse.
SOURCE: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/05/george-bush-sr-book-reveals-a-more-dangerous-dick-cheney-than-anyone-knew
And people wonder why I'm angry that these traitors walk free.
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