Letter Never Sent

From LA Weekly:

The Weekly has learned that Chicago-based special agent Robert Wright has accused the agency of shutting down his 1998 criminal probe into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City. The apparent goal of the training camps, according to confidential documents obtained by the Weekly, was to recruit and train Palestinian-American youths, who would then slip into Israel. Recruits at these camps reportedly received weapons training and instruction in bomb-making techniques in the early 1990s. The bomb-making curriculum included the sort of explosives later used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And government documents state that two trainees came from the Oklahoma City area.

From the Independent:

Italian police planted two Molotov cocktails in a school where anti-globalisation pro-testers were sleeping to justify a brutal crackdown during last year’s G8 summit in Genoa.

A policeman has confessed that he planted the explosives following a year of acrimony over the handling of security at the summit where a protester was shot dead by the police.

Who would benefit from the privatization of Social Security? Bush and the rest of those bloodsucking elites he surrounds himself with. It’s outright corruption and Americans are bending right over for it and asking for seconds. From the NYTimes:

But there may be a third reason. Ask yourself: Who would benefit directly from the creation of “personal accounts” under Social Security?

Those personal accounts won’t be like personal stock portfolios. The Social Security Administration can’t and won’t become a stockbroker for 130 million clients, most of them with quite small accounts. Instead it’s likely that a privatization scheme would require individuals to invest with one of a handful of designated private investment funds.

That would mean enormous commissions for the managers of those funds. And those who would be likely to benefit showed their appreciation, in advance: During the 2000 election, according to opensecrets.org, campaign contributors in the two categories labeled “securities and investment” and “miscellaneous finance” (basically individual wheeler-dealers) gave Mr. Bush almost six times as much as they gave Al Gore.

Here, too, Mr. Bush’s past is prologue. I reported in an earlier column the story of Utimco, the University of Texas fund that, while Mr. Bush was governor and the current secretary of commerce, Donald Evans, headed the U.T. regents, placed more than $1 billion with private funds, many with close business or political ties to Mr. Bush himself. Among the beneficiaries were the Wyly brothers, who later financed a crucial smear campaign against John McCain. (“Bush reveals his poisonous colors” was the headline of a piece about that campaign, written by the online pundit Andrew Sullivan.)

Could America’s retirement savings really be used to reward the administration’s friends? Ask the teachers of Texas. In one of many odd deals during Mr. Bush’s time as governor, the Texas teachers’ retirement system sold several buildings without open bids, taking a $70 million loss, to a company controlled by Richard Rainwater, a prime mover behind Mr. Bush’s rise to wealth.

Ordinary murderers get the death penalty in Texas, and this corrupt shitheel gets to be president of the most powerful nation on earth. Life sure has a way of kicking you in the nuts.

Harken Energy is likely a CIA front, according to well-known left-wing rag (haha), Fortune Magazine:

Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left. CEO Mikel Faulkner and COO Bruce Huff, CPAs who have been with the Harken since 1980 and 1990 respectively, pursued a variety of deals to jump-start its operations. But without much luck. The company’s Latin American operations in particular were a drag, and Harken lost some $263 million over the past five years. And in a complex series of transactions, Harken recently moved its South American operations into a British company called Global PLC, of which Harken owns 92%. “It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection,” says Gheit of Fahnestock. “That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn’t add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front.” That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.

Of course, only rumor.

Surprise. Crafty tax lawyers for the extremely wealthy have found further loopholes to keep the elite from paying their fair share. Read it and weep for yourself. Of course, that shitbird in the Whitehouse goes making the long face for estate tax abolition and huge tax cuts for the wealthy. From the NyTimes:

Through a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate $9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.

“I’m not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s really good for pushing wealth forward tax free,” said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.

The technique is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn’t be. They say it effectively disguises a gift to one’s heirs that should be taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit the very richest Americans.

Several thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according to people who have seen documents in the deal.

Okay. So, 170,000 government employees were moved into this new ‘Homeland Security Department’. As far as I can tell the only thing new to this is a stupid Orwellian name and the fact that Bush effectively succeeded in stripping 170,000 people and an entire department of its union rights and protections. Bravo, you waterhead.

A courier was threatened with arrest by SS (Secret Service) thugs for trying to serve Vice President Dick Cheney with a lawsuit accusing him of defrauding investors while at the helm of oil giant Halliburton. Cheney should be pilloried in the public square while wearing a tricornered hat. Do we even have public squares anymore? Ok, forget it. From Yahoo News:

Judicial Watch said its process server went the White House on July 22 to deliver the lawsuit to the vice president, who was chief executive of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. But the group said the courier was turned away by the Secret Service and allegedly threatened with arrest.

“We have served many a lawsuit on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton when they were in the White House … Never before have our process servers been threatened with arrest,” said Larry Klayman, who serves as chairman and general counsel of the 8-year-old legal foundation that has filed a number of highly publicized lawsuits against government officials.

I’m surprised Judicial Watch has been this dogged. I admire their stance as it puts millions of dollars in Republican donations in jeopardy.

‘Unnamed sources’ and ‘senior U.S. intelligence officials’ are now saying Osama bin Laden is dead. Does this matter? Why are they saying this now? What’s important is what our own tax-paid terrorists want you to think. Speculating whether or not bin Laden is dead only serves craven propaganda purposes. For one, declaring bin Laden must be dead because basically ‘we haven’t seen him’ diminishes his power to those that support him and his goal of disrupting US hegemony and global domination through sabotage. It also serves as a goad to provoke bin Laden or Al Quaeda to make a statement or to appear to dispel the rumors of his demise. The fact is, the US government doesn’t know shit. They like to appear as if they do, but as long as the money keeps rolling in and they can continue with their charades it doesn’t really matter to them. Hell, even if they knew for a fact that he was dead I’m pretty sure they would keep that information to themselves as long as it serves their purposes. As long as Americans can personify the ‘enemy’ and ‘evil’ they can be more easily manipulated. The same thing happened in the Gulf War with Hussein. Who was Saddam to 99% of Americans before 1991? Nothing. It wasn’t until we needed a strawman that we built him up into the big bad wolf, the Arab Hitler with his big, bushy moustache. Of course, no one thinks its significant that he was a big bud of the CIA and the US for decades. I’m just tired of the bullshit. People have such short memories.

Files: Bush Knew Firm’s Plight Before Stock Sale:

As a businessman in 1990, George W. Bush was deluged with confidential information about the financial plight of a Texas oil company before he sold the majority of his holdings and triggered a federal investigation, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records.

Stonewalling, this guy’s just as sleazy as Clinton and about half as smart. Of course, most conservatives will continue to pretend like Bush is beyond reproach. A bit hypocritical, no?