Know your BFEE: CARLYLE Group 'bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits'

[Octafish]

Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience."

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Wouldn't it be great to live in a democracy, a republic built on equal justice for all? That way, traitors, warmongers and banksters would be in jail instead of printing money.

[wildbilln864]

1. k & r & thanks. n/t

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Ditto to the above & to Grasswire's addition below.

K&R. Thanks.

[Octafish]

8. Bush and Cheney

They would never use inside warmaking information to make a buck. They'd use it to make a whole lotta bucks.

Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

by Wiiliam D. Hartung

EXCERPT...

p27
The revolving door between the government and weapons contractors isn't new, but it has reached new heights (monetarily) and depths (ethically), in recent years.[Richard] Cheney's relationship with Halliburton is a perfect case study of all that is wrong with the relationship between our democratic form of government and the corporations that finance our elections and feed at the government trough on a daily basis.

p29
Halliburton's biggest "cash cow" during his [Cheney's] tenure was definitely in the area of military support services, and the company's ability to earn so much in this area was directly tied to a decision Cheney had made back when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. It was under Cheney's watch that the decision was made to privatize not only specific services in support of U.S. troops overseas-such as food services, or doing the laundry, or repairing vehicles-but to privatize the actual planning process that went into providing logistics for U.S. troops when they had to be sent into an inhospitable foreign hot spot on short notice.

In 1992, near the end of Cheney's tenure as defense secretary, Halliburton won a contract from the U.S. Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), which P.W. Singer has described as a deal to "work with the military in planning the logistical side of contingency operations." Singer notes that "it was the first time the U.S. military had ever contracted such global planning to a private organization." In a pattern that would mark both Halliburton's and Cheney's business paths, the firm got the LOGCAP contract after conducting a top secret $3.9 million report for the Pentagon on how private companies could essentially provide the bulk of the logistics involved in major U.S. contingency deployments, from transportation and base-building to cooking the food and doing the laundry. The initial study contract called for a plan for how a private company could bear the bulk of the logistical burden for deploying 20,000 troops to 5 separate bases overseas within a 1 80-day period. Later in the year, Halliburton got a $5 million follow-on study contract to outline how a private firm might supply logistics for a series of more specific contingencies. By the end of the year, Halliburton had been selected to receive a five-year contract to be the U.S. Army's "on call" private logistics arm.

The work started almost immediately. Halliburton was called upon to provide support services for U.S. forces deployed to Somalia as part of "Operation Restore Hope," an operation that began at the end of the Bush administration and carried over into the first Clinton term. As Singer notes, "Brown and Root employees arrived in Mogadishu just 24 hours after the first U.S. troops arrived and stayed until the final withdrawal in March 1995, when its employees left with the last U.S. marines." The company did everything from hiring local women to hand wash Army laundry to importing "a mortician to clean up the bodies of killed UN peacekeepers before shipping them out of the country." Singer notes that for a good portion of its time in country, Halliburton was "the largest employer in Somalia, with some 2,500 local employees."

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/CarlyleGroup_HMOWD%3F.html

I'm sure they regret the collateral damage, right.

[wildbilln864]

12. right.

not! those psychos?

[Enthusiast]

20. That's why LIHOP.

[grasswire]

2. this

For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country's chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.

BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,

Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. [Emphasis added.]

Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.

[Rex]

3. Clapper was a Booz Allen man? Reallly?

Should have figured Carlyle had their oily tentacles all over this.

[Octafish]

4. James Woolsey, too.

Last edited Mon Mar 17, 2014, 01:01 PM - Edit history (1)

Meet the War Profiteers

by Carlie Cray
Multinational Monitor

EXCERPT...

Former CIA director James Woolsey was an outspoken proponent of regime change in Iraq, even before 9/11. And since the Iraq war began, he and his wife Suzanne have done pretty well. Woolsey is a vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor called “the shadow intelligence community” by one former CIA deputy director.

In addition to serving on the board of Fluor, one of the largest Iraq reconstruction contractors, Suzanne Woolsey also works as a trustee at the Institute for Defense Analysis, a nonprofit corporation paid to do analytical and strategic research for top Pentagon officials.

For Mr. Woolsey, the war was the ultimate pay-off for years of anti-Saddam advocacy. In addition to being a member of the neoconservative cabal known as the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), he was also appointed by Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld to the Bush administration’s Defense Policy Board, as well as advisory boards for the Navy and CIA.

Woolsey was also a member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a private group founded to build support for the war in 2002 by former Lockheed Martin vice president Robert Jackson, another PNAC member who also wrote the Republican Party foreign policy platform in 2000.

Woolsey and the CLI lobbied members of Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which allocated nearly $100 million to Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraq National Congress (INC), for whom Woolsey was a paid adviser. Right after 9/11, Woolsey went off to Europe, returning with an unnamed source’s dubious claim that he had observed a meeting between Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 skyjacker, and an Iraqi agent in Prague.

As soon as the occupation began, Woolsey turned his attention to helping businesses get in on the action, becoming a featured speaker at related contractor and investor gatherings.

In addition to working for Booz Allen, he is a principal in the Paladin Capital Group, a Carlyle-like investment strategies firm, and has connections to Global Options, a risk management consulting firm headed by Neil Livingstone, with whom Woolsey serves on the Defense Policy Board.

����������� Besides Woolsey and Livingstone, seven other members of the 30-member Defense Policy Board selected by Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld have stood to benefit financially from the war, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
Multinational Monitor Contributing Editor Charlie Cray is Director of the Center for Corporate Policy.

SOURCE: http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2006/112006/cray.html

[Rex]

30. Wow, these mega crooks are all so well connected.

But you know there are NO conspiracies EVA...

It is almost hard for me to grasp that REAL people exist that don't believe in conspiracies.

[Holly_Hobby]

6. KnR!

Important stuff

[Octafish]

10. Poppy Bush

War is a family business...

The ex-presidents' club

Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger
Wednesday 31 October 2001 11.31 EST

It is hard to imagine an address closer to the heart of American power. The offices of the Carlyle Group are on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, midway between the White House and the Capitol building, and within a stone's throw of the headquarters of the FBI and numerous government departments. The address reflects Carlyle's position at the very centre of the Washington establishment, but amid the frenetic politicking that has occupied the higher reaches of that world in recent weeks, few have paid it much attention. Elsewhere, few have even heard of it.

This is exactly the way Carlyle likes it. For 14 years now, with almost no publicity, the company has been signing up an impressive list of former politicians - including the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker; John Major; one-time World Bank treasurer Afsaneh Masheyekhi and several south-east Asian powerbrokers - and using their contacts and influence to promote the group. Among the companies Carlyle owns are those which make equipment, vehicles and munitions for the US military, and its celebrity employees have long served an ingenious dual purpose, helping encourage investments from the very wealthy while also smoothing the path for Carlyle's defence firms.

But since the start of the "war on terrorism", the firm - unofficially valued at $3.5bn - has taken on an added significance. Carlyle has become the thread which indirectly links American military policy in Afghanistan to the personal financial fortunes of its celebrity employees, not least the current president's father. And, until earlier this month, Carlyle provided another curious link to the Afghan crisis: among the firm's multi-million-dollar investors were members of the family of Osama bin Laden.

The closest the Carlyle Group has previously come to public attention was last May, when a Seoul-based employee called Peter Chung was forced to resign from his £100,000-a-year job after sending an email to friends - subsequently forwarded to thousands of others - boasting of his plans to "fuck every hot chick in Korea over the next two years". The more business-oriented activities of Carlyle's staff have been conducted much more quietly: since it was founded in 1987 by David Rubenstein, a policy assistant in Jimmy Carter's administration, and two lawyer friends, the firm has been dispatching an array of former world leaders on a series of strategic networking trips.

Last year, George Bush Sr and John Major travelled to Riyadh to talk with senior Saudi businessmen. In September 2000, Carlyle hired speakers including Colin Powell and AOL Time Warner chair Steve Case to address an extravagant party at Washington's Monarch Hotel. Months later, Major joined James Baker for a function at the Lanesborough Hotel in London, to explain the Florida election controversy to the wealthy attendees.

CONTINUED...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/31/september11.usa4

...Booz Allen's parent, in business 27 years now. No wonder there never was a Peace Dividend.

[hootinholler]

21. There was a peace dividend

It went to Wall St. and when it wasn't enough, Wall St arranged for more.

[OnyxCollie]

7. K&R. nt

[Octafish]

24. Is the NSA Blackmailing Its Overseers In Washington?

Posted on December 10, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Are the Intelligence Committees Being Blackmailed?

During the Vietnam war, the NSA spied on two prominent politicians – Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker – as well as critics of government policy Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, and a Washington Post humorist.

A recently declassified history written by the NSA itself called the effort “disreputable if not outright illegal.”

The main whistleblower who revealed the Vietnam-era spying was Christopher H. Pyle. Pyle told Rob Kall of OpEdNews:

They targeted Sen. Frank Church and Sen. Howard Baker. It could mean they were trying to get information or dirt on senators involved in the Church committee and Watergate committee investigations respectively — either to learn something about their investigations or to discredit them.

***

We still need more information about what happened then. But more critically, we need more information about what’s happening now. These revelations raise the obvious question: If the NSA was targeting people like Sen. Frank Church, who were in a position to oversee the NSA — is that happening now? That is, are people like intelligence committee chairs Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and other congressional leaders — who are supposed to be providing oversight themselves — compromised in some way by the NSA? If so, as seems quite certain from the recent Edward Snowden revelations, then how can they conduct genuine oversight of the NSA with their committees?”

***

If I were a member of congress, I would be terrified that NSA would do to them what J. Edgar Hoover did to members back during his time.

Sound paranoid?

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/nsa-blackmailing-overseers-washington.html

[UTUSN]

9. R#21 & K for my indefaiguable Oct, but whenever "Carlyle" is cited I remind that

RUBENSTEIN was a Jimmy CARTER staffer, along with Tweety and whassisname the pollster (Pat CADELL) who has been a Faux Propaganda Network employee for a decade or two, whassisname the "ROVE" of CARTER ...


On Edit: Jimmy CARTER had a nest of vipers at his breast.

[Octafish]

25. War Party is Buy Partisan

War Is Sell - Washington Elite Benefits from War

Christopher Bollyn
October 31, 2001

War has always been a profitable money machine for shrewd investors with foresight, but the extremely close connections of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private equity investment firm and major war profiteer, to the Bush and Bin Laden families raise unavoidable questions of waging war for profit.

Established in 1987 the Carlyle Group was founded by David Rubenstein, a former staff member in the Jimmy Carter White House, and his two partners, Dan D'Aniello and Bill Conway. Today there are 18 partners in the firm and one outside investor. The Washington Post has described Carlyle as a "merchant banking firm" set up "to serve corporations and wealthy families." From the beginning the founders of Carlyle have recruited former politicians as consultants: former President George H. W. Bush is among them, along with a host of other Bush family cronies.

The Bush connection to the Carlyle Group is nothing short of a scandal, according to Larry Klayman, a notable government watchdog best known for pursuing the scandals of former President Bill Clinton. Now that the United States is bombing Afghanistan and allocating huge sums of money for defense, including $40 billion for the "war on terrorism" and more than $200 billion for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the conflict of interest is "direct," Klayman says. "President Bush should not ask but demand that his father pull out of the Carlyle Group." Carlyle owns many of the companies that will share in the $200 billion JSF deal.

"Carlyle is as deeply wired into the current administration (Bush II) as they can possibly be," Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, said. "George Bush is getting money from private interests that have business before the government, while his son is president. And, in a really peculiar way, George W. Bush could, some day, benefit financially from his own administration's decisions, through his father's investments. The average American doesn't know that. To me, that's a jaw-dropper."

CONTINUED...

http://www.bollyn.com/war-is-sell-washington-elite-benefits-from-war

PS: Good memory, yours, UTUSN! We the People need it, to keep tabs on these warmongers, 27 years on, now.

[niyad]

11. k and r for depressing my evening further.

[Octafish]

28. The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld

By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, March 10, 2014
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 10, No. 5

EXCERPT...

The CIA, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Wall Street Overworld

The “revolving door” also circulates top-level intelligence officials and the chiefs of the cleared contractors referred to by Mike Lofgren as part of the deep state. Tim Shorrock revealed in 2007 that “about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on…intelligence” is outsourced to private intelligence contractors like Booz, Allen & Hamilton (now Booz Allen Hamilton) and SAIC.57 For example Mike McConnell “went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.” Intelligence officers in government write the non-competitive contracts for the private corporations that they may have worked for and may work for again.58 And over the years the “revolving door” has also exchanged personnel between Booz Allen and the international oil companies served by the firm.

The original firm of Booz, Allen, & Hamilton split in 2008 into Booz Allen Hamilton, focused on USG business, and Booz & Company in New York, assuming the old company’s commercial and international portfolio. Booz Allen Hamilton is majority owned by the private equity firm the Carlyle Group, noted for its association with political figures like both presidents Bush.59

Lofgren points to the deep state importance of Booz Allen Hamilton, 99 percent of whose business dependent on the U.S. government.60 Booz Allen has been linked in the media to NSA ever since its employee Edward Snowden decamped with NSA records. But Booz Allen, one of the oldest and largest of the “cleared contractors,” has been intertwined with the CIA’s covert operations since Allen Dulles became CIA Director in 1953.61 In the same year, Booz Allen began “to take on several overseas assignments…: a land-registration system in the Philippines, a restructuring of Egypt’s customs operations and textile industries, and work for Iran’s national oil company.”62 All three assignments overlapped with CIA covert ops in 1953, including the Philippine land distribution program which Edward Lansdale promoted in order to fight a Huk insurrection, and the CIA’s operation TP/AJAX (with Britain’s MI6) to rescue the Anglo-Iranian oil company (later BP).63

Miles Copeland, Jr., ex-CIA, ex-Booz Allen @ Hamilton, ex-Khashoggi’s private CIA. Source.
But the most important CIA-Booz Allen cooperation may have been in Egypt. In March 1953 Miles Copeland, having resigned from the CIA to join Booz-Allen, “returned to Cairo under what was, for all practical purposes, a joint CIA-BA&H mission.”64 In addition to offering management advice to the Egyptian government in general, and to a private textile mill, Miles also gave Nasser advice on establishing his intelligence service (the Mukhabarat), and “soon became his closest Western advisor” (as well as his top channel to the USG, more important than either the local US ambassador or CIA chief)65

Copeland’s role with Nasser did not make him a shaper of U.S. policy; his pro-Nasser views were largely subordinated to the pro-British anti-Nasserism of the Dulles brothers. But they did establish a bond between Copeland and the Eisenhower White House. By 1967, when Nixon was preparing to run for president, Copeland had taken a leave of absence from Booz Allen to become a prestigious and well-paid consultant for oil companies.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843

PS: Please remember, niyad, as David Crosby said, it's always darkest before the dawn.

PPS: Once the sunlight hits, it's lights-out for the Vampire Class.

[rhett o rick]

13. I believe that The Carlyle Group/NSA/CIA are "The Powers To Be". nm

[ReRe]

15. Not "to Be", but...

"The Powers that be."

[rhett o rick]

16. I accept that correction.

[ReRe]

18. I meant it respectfully.

[rhett o rick]

19. And I took it that way.

[Octafish]

23. 'Big Secret' Behind CIA Spying on Congress: 'Rogue Government' Controlled by US Intelligence

By Washington's Blog
Washington's Blog, March 13, 2014

EXCERPT...

Not Just the CIA … And Not a New Problem

But it’s not just the CIA. And there has been a constitutional crisis for a long time.

For example, the FBI collected files on everyone. As the New York Times reports:

J. Edgar Hoover compiled secret dossiers on the sexual peccadillos and private misbehavior of those he labeled as enemies — really dangerous people like … President John F. Kennedy, for example.

The NSA has been spying on – and intimidating – its “overseers” in Washington. Indeed, the NSA spied on anti-war Congress members in the 1970s … including the chair of the Congressional Committee investigating illegal NSA spying.

One of the NSA whistleblower sources for the 2005 post on illegal spying – Russel Tice – says that the NSA illegally spied on General Petraeus and other generals, Supreme Court Justice Alito and all of the other supreme court justices, the White House spokesman, and many other top officials.

The Washington Times reported in 2006 that – when Tice offered to testify to Congress about this illegal spying – he was informed by the NSA that the Senate intelligence committee was not cleared to hear such information:

Renee Seymour, director of NSA special access programs stated in a Jan. 9 letter to Russ Tice that he should not testify about secret electronic intelligence programs because members and staff of the House and Senate intelligence committees do not have the proper security clearances for the secret intelligence.

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-big-secret-behind-the-cia-spying-on-the-congress-americas-rogue-government-controlled-by-us-intelligence/5373359

[ReRe]

14. K&R

This gives me a headache. Thanks for the OP. Didn't know the Multinational Monitor was still around. I used to subscribe to that umpteen years ago. Great informative periodical.

[Octafish]

29. The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCI

From...

The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld

By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, March 10, 2014
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 10, No. 5

EXCERPT...

The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCI

The usual account of this super-agency’s origin is that it was

the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mustachioed chief of France’s CIA. The SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage)…. Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postcolonial Africa, and by America’s post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turki’s father, King Faisal, with a proposition…. [By 1979] Somali president Siad Barre had been bribed out of Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for… by Saudi Arabia)….95

Joseph Trento adds that “The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations,… With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed… the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine.”.96

Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who were then forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by perhaps the most controversial of them all: Theodore Shackley.

Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Club—operating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehran—would be ineffective. … Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced.97

Kevin Phillips has suggested that Bush on leaving the CIA had dealings with the bank most closely allied with Safari Club operations: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In Phillips’ words,

After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book ‘False Profits’ [p. 345], Bush ‘traveled on the bank’s behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions.’98

Joseph Trento adds that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, “Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations”99

It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggi’s before them, were marked by the ability to deal behind the scenes with both the Arab countries and also Israel.100

It is clear that for years the American deep state in Washington was both involved with and protected BCCI. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr acknowledged to a Senate Committee “that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations.”101

Later, a congressional inquiry showed that for more than ten years preceding the BCCI collapse in the summer of 1991, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the Customs Service, and the Department of Justice all failed to act on hundreds of tips about the illegalities of BCCI’s international activities.102

Far less clear is the attitude taken by Wall Street banks towards the miscreant BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI charged however that the Bank of England “had withheld information about BCCI’s frauds from public knowledge for 15 months before closing the bank.”103

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843

PS: Great reads, the Multinational Monitor. Thanks for the heads-up, ReRe!

[ReRe]

32. Let me see if my memory serves me...

... (and it doesn't more and more lately ).. the name Robert Altman comes to mind. And I can't remember the other fellow who was more or less blamed for the BCCI scandal... can't remember his name. Old congenial fellow, seems like he served in the Carter administration, long dead now? That right there was a foretelling of our future, wasn't it? BCCI, I mean. Talk about a ponzie scheme!

[Octafish]

34. Clark Clifford

He was a player from the days of FDR, helped Truman set up CIA, helped the Brothers Dulles, served JFK and LBJ in peace and war, and made a mint off the law and his connections, then went on to camouflage the foreign ownership of BCCI.

Follow the Money

How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank.

By David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
Washington Monthly

EXCERPT...

BCCI, meanwhile, had its own connections. Prominent figures with ties to the bank included former president Jimmy Carter's budget director, Bert Lance, and a bevy of powerful Washington lobbyists with close ties to President George H.W. Bush, a web of influence that may have helped the bank evade previous investigations. In 1985 and 1986, for instance, the Reagan administration launched no investigation even after the CIA had sent reports to the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments bluntly describing the bank's role in drug-money laundering and other illegal activities.

In the spring of 1989, Kerry hit another obstacle. Foreign Relations Committee chairman Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), under pressure from both parties, formally asked Kerry to end his probe. Worried the information he had collected would languish, Kerry quickly dispatched investigator Jack Blum to present the information his committee had found about BCCI's money-laundering operations to the Justice Department. But according to Blum, the Justice Department failed to follow up.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

At his trial, he pled innocence through ignorance and then the infirmities of age.

Altman's a great guy, too. Married the real Wonder Woman. Got away with fraud on a historic scale.

[ReRe]

35. That's him...

I was thinking "Conrad?" Got the "C" right. Clark Clifford. I always hated Allen and John Foster Dulles.

[rhett o rick]

17. As always, thank you for the OP. nm

[Octafish]

31. Not even Ian Fleming dared dream S.P.E.C.T.R.E. would hijack the US Government

Yet, that is exactly what has happened, through the confluence of secret agencies, secret agents, secret agendas, the Klan, NAZIs, the Mafia, Wall Street, and the Military Industrial Complex. And while Original Blofeld Number One may be a committee, it's obvious who benefits most from wars without end, a top-down surveillance state, and welfare for banksters.

MEET THE CARLYLE GROUP

A vast interlocking global network.

—Carlyle marketing material, circa 2001

EXCERPT...

Some critics charge that the company practices nothing more than “access capitalism,” trotting out big names that bring in big money. Some call it “The Ex-Presidents Club.” Some worry that it is influencing domestic and foreign policy. And some, including former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, even implied that President Bush allowed the events of September 11 to take place to enable him to dictate policy that would benefit the Carlyle Group. But no matter how deep your suspicions run, the Carlyle Group warrants close examination. That a company like the Carlyle Group even exists is testament to the irresistible temptation for expoliticians to cash in on their time as public servants, in ways that to some seem less than scrupulous.

The Carlyle Group has established a number of firsts in America, including:

• It is the first time a former president has toiled on behalf of a defense contractor.

• It is the first time that a former president advised his son, while holding office, on foreign policy decisions that directly impacted both of their financial fortunes.

• It is the first private-equity firm of its kind to be based in Washington, DC, rather than the traditional haunts of New York, or even Chicago.

• It is the first company to assemble a cast of characters that even X-Fileswriters couldn’t have dreamed up. Besides the impressive domestic roster of political heavyweights, Fidel Ramos, former president of the Philippines is a senior advisor. Park Tae-joon, former prime minister of South Korea was also a senior advisor. Former Thai Premier Anan Panyarachun also worked for the company.

CONTINUED...

http://www.fahrenheit911.com/library/book/carlyle/

Ah. Cynthia McKinney. One of the few, from any party in Congress, to hold Donald Rumsfeld accountable.

Also important: You are most welcome, rhett o rick.

[RandiFan1290]

22. Weren't the Carlyle Group holding an investors meeting on 9/11?

That must have been one hell of a sales pitch! Open the windows to show the Pentagon on fire and the TV shows the WTC in flames... What a coincidence!

[Democracyinkind]

26. With Bushes and Bin Ladens in attendance, none the less. nt

[Octafish]

36. They most certainly were.

The Carlyle Group

excerpted from the book

The Exception to the Rulers

by Amy Goodman

The feeding frenzy began the morning of 9/11. As my neighbors and coworkers were choking on the debris of the World Trade Center, a windfall awaited a powerful group gathered at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. The secretive Carlyle Group was holding its annual investors' conference. The private investment company, named for the swank Manhattan hotel where the group was formed in 1987, has tentacles in both the Washington power elite and the Saudi ruling class. In town for the meetings was former President George H. W. Bush, then a senior adviser to Carlyle. He was joined by a cast of characters who have been fixtures in Bush regimes over the years.

There was Reagan's former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, then head of the Carlyle Group. James Baker III, secretary of state under Bush Sr. - better known as the choreographer of Bush Jr.'s theft of the 2000 election - was also there in his capacity as Carlyle's senior counsel. But it wasn't just Bush's inner circle gathering that day. They were joined by a man by the name of Shafiq bin Laden, brother of Osama bin Laden. It wasn't the first time a bin Laden had worked with Washington's power elite, and this particular bin Laden was a longtime friend and benefactor of the Bush clan. Bush Sr. left the meetings early, but the rest of the men were just finishing breakfast when Shafiq's brother's plot culminated in airplanes slamming into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

A bizarre coincidence? No, the meeting was just business as usual for the Bushes, whose family fortunes have been greased by Saudi oil money for decades. That helps explain why, when the United States grounded all aircraft on that terrible day, one exception was made: Top White House officials authorized planes to pick up 140 Saudis, including two dozen members of the bin Laden family, from ten cities and spirit them back to Saudi Arabia. Dale Watson, the former head of counterterrorism at the FBI, conceded in Vanity Fair that the departing Saudis "were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations. "

Tom Kinton, director of aviation at Boston's Logan Airport, was incredulous, according to Vanity Fair. With the airport still closed and reeling from the 9/11 attacks, Kinton received the order to allow the bin Ladens to fly. "We were in the midst of the worst terrorist act in history and here we were seeing an evacuation of the bin Ladens!" he exclaimed...

A month after the terror attacks, the Carlyle Group took its subsidiary, United Defense, public. It noted in its financial filings that "the Bush administration's recently published Quadrennial Defense Review calls for ... increasing investment ... to enable U.S. military forces to more effectively counter emerging threats."

Translation: We just got check-writing privileges at the U.S. Treasury.

Carlyle netted profits of $237 million in that one day, making three times as much on paper. The old adage has never been truer: It pays to have friends in high places.

*

The Bush family has had a long and mutually profitable connection with the corrupt Saudi oil dictatorship. Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the United States, has been an honored guest both at the Bush I summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and at Bush 11's getaway in Crawford, Texas (hence his nickname, "Bandar Bush&quot . Bandar expressed his gratitude to Bush I by donating $1 million to the Bush Presidential Library in Texas. And Bandar's prodding prompted Saudi King Fahd to send another $1 million to Barbara Bush's campaign against illiteracy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Bush_Gang/CarlyleGroup_TETTR.html

[raouldukelives]

27. "A rich man makes a bonny traitor." - Paine nt

[Octafish]

37. Paine thought ''regimes become corrupt when the propertied rich manipulate the laws.''

Last edited Wed Mar 19, 2014, 10:30 AM - Edit history (1)

Guy certainly would understand today's Wall Street on the Potomac.

From Tom Paine: A Political Life by John Keane:

If, as Paine thought, regimes become corrupt when the propertied rich manipulate the laws to grind down the poor, then a young republic like America could easily suffer the same fate, especially if its citizens fell under the influence of self-interested men of property. "A rich man makes a bonny traitor," he told his friend Joseph Reed, quoting James I. If that was so, then republican principles must be extended to the sphere of economic life. Men of wealth must be tamed by public ethics. Property and its corresponding "liberal" values must be subject to the universal "civic humanist" rule of civil and political rights. That would not fully eliminate disparities of wealth. But the availability of rights to all adult, male citizens, not just to property owners, would ensure ongoing controversies about how to divide that which is divisible. Such controversies would ensure that existing patterns of wealth and inequality would never be seen as natural, as reflecting the will of God, or as a brutal fact of economic life.

SOURCE:

http://goo.gl/IUHrKR

One thing I know, were Thomas Paine with us today, he'd side with William K. Black.

[Jesus Malverde]

33. One thing to keep in mind is the access granted snowden

Belongs to his bosses as well. We should never entrust secrets with profiteers and then be surprised when they profit off it.

[Octafish]

38. It's why the rich get richer and richer.

The "Deep State" - How Much Does It Explain?

Everyone knows about the military-industrial complex, which, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower warned had the potential to “endanger our liberties or democratic process” but have you heard of the “Deep State?”

Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional staff member with the powerful House and Senate Budget Committees, joins Bill to talk about what he calls the Deep State, a hybrid of corporate America and the national security state, which is “out of control” and “unconstrained.” In it, Lofgren says, elected and unelected figures collude to protect and serve powerful vested interests. “It is … the red thread that runs through the history of the last three decades. It is how we had deregulation, financialization of the economy, the Wall Street bust, the erosion or our civil liberties and perpetual war,” Lofgren tells Bill.

Lofgren says the Deep State’s heart lies in Washington, DC, but its tentacles reach out to Wall Street, which Lofgren describes as “the ultimate backstop to the whole operation,” Silicon Valley and over 400,000 contractors, private citizens who have top-secret security clearances. Like any other bureaucracy, it’s groupthink that drives the Deep State.

In conjunction with this week’s show, Mike Lofgren has written the following essay.

The Anatomy of the Deep State

By Mike Lofgren, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed
Wednesday, 26 February 2014 09:28

EXCERPT...

The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “live upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” “Living upon its principal,” in this case, means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.

We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.

But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin. (7)

Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal — if only rhetorically — from their knee-jerk defense of the agency. As more people begin to waken from the fearful and suggestible state that 9/11 created in their minds, it is possible that the Deep State’s decade-old tactic of crying “terrorism!” every time it faces resistance is no longer eliciting the same Pavlovian response of meek obedience. And the American people, possibly even their legislators, are growing tired of endless quagmires in the Middle East.

But there is another more structural reason the Deep State may have peaked in the extent of its dominance. While it seems to float above the constitutional state, its essentially parasitic, extractive nature means that it is still tethered to the formal proceedings of governance. The Deep State thrives when there is tolerable functionality in the day-to-day operations of the federal government. As long as appropriations bills get passed on time, promotion lists get confirmed, black (i.e., secret) budgets get rubber-stamped, special tax subsidies for certain corporations are approved without controversy, as long as too many awkward questions are not asked, the gears of the hybrid state will mesh noiselessly. But when one house of Congress is taken over by tea party Wahhabites, life for the ruling class becomes more trying.

If there is anything the Deep State requires it is silent, uninterrupted cash flow and the confidence that things will go on as they have in the past. It is even willing to tolerate a degree of gridlock: Partisan mud wrestling over cultural issues may be a useful distraction from its agenda. But recent congressional antics involving sequestration, the government shutdown and the threat of default over the debt ceiling extension have been disrupting that equilibrium. And an extreme gridlock dynamic has developed between the two parties such that continuing some level of sequestration is politically the least bad option for both parties, albeit for different reasons. As much as many Republicans might want to give budget relief to the organs of national security, they cannot fully reverse sequestration without the Democrats demanding revenue increases. And Democrats wanting to spend more on domestic discretionary programs cannot void sequestration on either domestic or defense programs without Republicans insisting on entitlement cuts.

So, for the foreseeable future, the Deep State must restrain its appetite for taxpayer dollars. Limited deals may soften sequestration, but agency requests will not likely be fully funded anytime soon. Even Wall Street’s rentier operations have been affected: After helping finance the tea party to advance its own plutocratic ambitions, America’s Big Money is now regretting the Frankenstein’s monster it has created. Like children playing with dynamite, the tea party and its compulsion to drive the nation into credit default has alarmed the grown-ups commanding the heights of capital; the latter are now telling the politicians they thought they had hired to knock it off.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/22075-anatomy-of-the-deep-state

[bobthedrummer]

39. K&R + a link to another informative thread that could use some input from DUers when it comes to the

history of the US national security community as they have led US to today...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101685134

[JDPriestly]

40. Thank yoyu, Octafish.

[Octafish]

41. You are most welcome, my Friend!

The future looks grim, that is, unless We the People wake up to their gangster game.