Behind Clinton Backer’s Arrest: Bipartisan (Magical!) Int'l Affairs & 9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan's Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and 9/11

Okay, Greg, I guess I am a conspiracist. Or is this just a really convincing, terrifying piece of fiction? Or . . . how about this? Obviously, this is no longer a secret. Wonder if the danger to Obama brings them out of the woodwork? (Or maybe it is me.) To re-cover some ground about the rightwingers surrounding the Clintons, the humbled Navy nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter and now Obama (and why his most serious narratives cannot be taken very seriously by the very seriously inclined), our bestest source on the downlow, Russ Baker informed us some time ago that the story "Behind Clinton Backer’s Arrest" was one about a "Bipartisan, International Affair" (that continues every moment up to and embracing the present). One comment: No wonder Hillary wants to bomb, bomb, bomb IRAN. It's a payoff to her "campaign manager." Oh, and you really want to know where Terry McAuliffe got his bigtime moolah? Noooooo. You really don't. And what a stand-up, public-serving guy he was, huh? And we find out, finally, much more about Dumbya's Harken sham. A joke has been played on the U.S. citizenry who have been too busy working at hard, poorly-paid jobs in order to support this supra-apparatus of self-serving hacks. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

WhoWhatWhy.com reports exclusively on the background of Hassan Nemazee, the top Hillary Clinton fundraiser who was arrested and charged with forging loan documents. Early media accounts cast the event as an embarrassment for Ms. Clinton and the Democratic Party involving the financial misdoings of one prominent backer.

Actually it is much more. Behind the Nemazee arrest lies a sprawling cautionary tale of presidents, would-be presidents, and the shadow world of wealthy operators who cozy up to them for their own gain. It reaches into the Bush operation as well as that of the Clintons, and is a microcosm of an influence bazaar that has gone global along with the economy.

 On August 25th, Hassan Nemazee, a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, was arrested and charged with forging loan documents in order to borrow $74 million from Citibank. He could face up to 30 years in prison.

. . . Hassan Nemazee, who served as a finance director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, began raising sizable sums for the Democratic National Committee in the mid-nineties. In 1998, in the midst of the Lewinsky affair, Nemazee collected $60,000 for Bill Clinton’s legal defense fund in $10,000 increments from relatives and friends.

The following year, President Clinton nominated the money manager and investor to be ambassador to Argentina. Then an article in Forbes raised questions about his business practices. Among other things, Nemazee, an Iranian-American, had magically turned himself into an “Hispanic” by acquiring Venezuelan citizenship in order to fulfill the minority-ownership requirement of a California public pension fund. The nomination was withdrawn.

That embarrassment did not, however, hamper Nemazee’s rise within the Democratic Party. By 2004 he was New York finance chair for John Kerry’s campaign, and in 2006 he served under Senator Chuck Schumer as the national finance chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC). During this period the committee raised about $25 million more than its Republican counterpart.

By 2008, Nemazee was one of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle, and was being publicly touted as a top foreign policy adviser. When another major fundraiser, a clothing manufacturer named Norman Hsu, was arrested and unmasked as a swindler, it was Nemazee who was trotted out to defend Ms. Clinton and argue that she knew little about Hsu.

But she should have known plenty about Nemazee. In 2005, Nemazee and his business partner, Alan Quasha, went deep into the Clinton circle to hire Terry McAuliffe, the Clinton confidante and former chairman of the Democratic Party, for Carret Asset Management, their newly acquired investment firm. During the interregnum between McAuliffe’s party chairmanship and the time he officially joined Hillary Clinton’s campaign as chairman, Nemazee and Quasha set McAuliffe up with a salary and opened a Washington office for him. There he worked on his memoirs and laid the groundwork for Ms. Clinton’s presidential bid.

In March 2007, Nemazee, at the behest of McAuliffe, threw a dinner for Ms. Clinton at Manhattan’s swank Cipriani restaurant, which featured Bill Clinton and raised more than $500,000. In 2008, after Barack Obama gained the nomination, Nemazee raised a comparable sum for him. But it is not fair to characterize Nemazee as an embarrassment to Democrats alone. Nemazee’s profile is considerably more complicated. For legal representation in his current troubles, for example, Nemazee has retained Marc Mukasey, a partner in Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm and the son of Michael Mukasey, who served as George W. Bush’s last Attorney General.

There’s more than choice of counsel involved. Before moving into the Democratic camp, Nemazee had backed such Republican senators as Jesse Helms, Sam Brownback and Alfonse D’Amato. None could be described as Clinton fans. Nemazee’s business partner, Alan Quasha, who specializes in buying up troubled companies, has also played both sides of the partisan divide. Quasha gave to both Bush and Al Gore in 2000, and in the 2008 race gave to Republicans Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani as well as Democrats Barack Obama and Chris Dodd.

The strikingly trans-partisan and trans-national nature of this high-stakes influence game is best exemplified by the relationship between Quasha’s oil company, Harken Energy, and George W. Bush. Harken provided a home for Bush in the 1980’s when his own oil businesses failed, offering him handsome compensation and a solid financial base from which to enter politics. Bush was named to the Harken board and received a range of benefits from the company while devoting most of his time to his father’s presidential campaign and then his own outside career efforts.

Harken is a curious outfit. Its early funding sources were opaque, and its investors and board members had a dizzying array of connections into global power centers — and ties to the Saudi leadership and the former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah of Iran, as well as to the Swiss Bank, UBS, which has been charged by the US government with providing cover for Americans who were evading taxes.

Around the time George W. Bush joined its board, Harken received an unusual and sizable cash infusion from the Harvard Management Company, which handles Harvard University’s endowment, the largest in the nation.

Robert G. Stone, Jr., a figure with ties to US intelligence and to the Bushes, was head of the Harvard board of overseers that approved financial strategies. Former employees of Harvard Management have recently made highly-publicized charges that the company engaged in Enron-style investment practices. (Prior to going to work for Nemazee and Quasha, Terry McAuliffe had publicly criticized Bush for his financial dealings with Harken, disparaging that company’s own Enron-like accounting. Both Quasha and Nemazee, like Bush, have Harvard degrees, and both have sat on prestigious Harvard committees in recent years.)

Nemazee’s role as a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton can be better understood through his own Iranian connections. His father was a shipping magnate who was close with the Shah of Iran and served as the Shah’s commercial attaché in Washington; Nemazee was a founding member of the Iranian-American Political Action Committee, a lobbying group. Recent strains have been reported between President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over policy toward Iran. Clinton has advocated a harder line toward the Islamic fundamentalists who took over when the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1979, while Obama has stressed dialogue.

With Nemazee’s arrest for financial fraud certain to attract some sustained coverage, it remains to be seen whether it will be treated as yet another isolated case of financial wrongdoing, or lead to a deeper look at the influence bazaar that American politics has become.

For a more in-depth look at Nemazee and Quasha, see the 2007 whowhatwhy article by Russ Baker and Adam Federman. For a thorough investigation of Harken, see Baker’s 2009 book, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America.) For the latest update to this story, CLICK_HERE http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/07/in_plea_deal_ex-clinton_fundraiser_nemazee_gets_12.php

And, of course, the CIA is on your side.

Michel Chossudovsky is an excellent source of insider information and "9/11 ANALYSIS: From Ronald Reagan and the Soviet-Afghan War to George W Bush and September 11, 2001." You can bet on it (some emphasis marks were inserted by me - Ed.)!

This article summarizes earlier writings by the author on 9/11 and the role of Al Qaeda in US foreign policy. For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005

"The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings....The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books,..", (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

"Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the [Islamic] Jihad." (Pervez Hoodbhoy, Peace Research, 1 May 2005)

"Bin Laden recruited 4,000 volunteers from his own country and developed close relations with the most radical mujahideen leaders. He also worked closely with the CIA, ... Since September 11, [2001] CIA officials have been claiming they had no direct link to bin Laden." (Phil Gasper, International Socialist Review, November-December 2001)

Highlights:

- Osama bin Laden, America's bogyman, was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihad. He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerilla training camp.

- The architects of the covert operation in support of "Islamic fundamentalism" launched during the Reagan presidency played a key role in launching the "Global War on Terrorism" in the wake of 9/11.

- President Ronald Reagan met the leaders of the Islamic Jihad at the White House in 1983

- Under the Reagan adminstration, US foreign policy evolved towards the unconditional support and endorsement of the Islamic "freedom fighters". In today's World, the "freedom fighters" are labelled "Islamic terrorists".

- In the Pashtun language, the word "Taliban" means "Students", or graduates of the madrasahs (places of learning or coranic schools) set up by the Wahhabi missions from Saudi Arabia, with the support of the CIA.

- Education in the years preceding the Soviet-Afghan war war largely secular in Afghanistan. The number of CIA sponsored religious schools (madrasahs) increased from 2,500 in 1980 to over 39,000.

The Soviet-Afghan war was part of a CIA covert agenda initiated during the Carter administration, which consisted in actively supporting and financing the Islamic brigades, later known as Al Qaeda. The Pakistani military regime played from the outset in the late 1970s, a key role in the US sponsored military and intelligence operations in Afghanistan. in the post-Cold war era, this central role of Pakistan in US intelligence operations was extended to the broader Central Asia- Middle East region.

From the outset of the Soviet Afghan war in 1979, Pakistan under military rule actively supported the Islamic brigades. In close liaison with the CIA, Pakistan's military intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), became a powerful organization, a parallel government, wielding tremendous power and influence.

America's covert war in Afghanistan, using Pakistan as a launch pad, was initiated during the Carter administration prior to the Soviet "invasion": "According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.

For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005

Please read the rest. It really doesn't take that much time to figure this history out you know.

And "Now Comes a Topper: Obama's Newest Giveaway to the Banks $50 Billion "Infrastructure" Gift to the Banks" (emphasis marks added - Ed.). Did I mention already that the banks OWN us? The most interesting part is that the continued tax cuts have insured that we must sell off all our public ownership to private interests in order to keep the ship-of-country afloat. After all, if there aren't enough taxes paid to maintain the structure, you've got to sell off the capital (like Chicago and many states are doing already). (And who are the buyers?)

Michael Hudson

Global Research, September 14, 2010

I can smell the newest giveaway looming a mile off. The Wall Street bailout, health-insurance giveaway and support of real estate prices rather than mortgage-debt write-downs were bad enough, not to mention the Oil War¹s Afghan extension. But now comes a topper: the $50 billion transportation infrastructure plan that Obama proposed in Milwaukee ­ cynically enough, on Labor Day. It looks like the Thatcherite Public-Private Partnership, Britain¹s notorious giveaway to the City of London underwriters.

The financial giveaway had the effect of increasing prices for basic infrastructure services by building in heavy financial fees ­ guaranteed for the banks, who lent the money that banks and property owners used to pay in taxes in more progressive times.

The Obama transport plan is like a Fannie Mae for bankers, based on the President's guiding mantra: Let's help Wall Street put Americans back to work. The theory is that giving public guarantees and bailouts will enable financial managers to use some of the money to fund some projects that employ people ­ with newly created, non-unionized companies, presumably.

Here's the problem. Transportation projects will make real estate speculators, the construction industry and their bankers very rich unless the government recovers its public spending through windfall site-value gains on property along the right-of-way. What's the point of a party having a constituency, after all, if not to sell it out? Is not the Democratic Party's role to deliver labor, the minorities and the large cities hog-tied to Wall Street? Hollywood surely has made enough movies along these faux-populist lines.

The banker of a Western town manages to grab property along the railroad tracks coming through, to make a killing. The local mobster pays off a state legislator to build a highway by his property, making his land much more valuable.

Mortgages will be refinanced in much larger sums. At least, this seems to be President Obama's hope as he positions himself to become America's Tony Blair.

Read the rest of this sickening dissection (sad truth) here.

And do something about it.

One last shocking fact (which you don't want on the weekend, but could need):

Report: More Than a Third of Americans OK with Strategic Default - can the country's be far behind? Suzan _________________