Know your BFEE: The Carlyle Group

[Octafish]

Carlyle Group owns and operates NSA contract spy house Booz Allen Hamilton.



Carlyle is War Inc merged with Washington DC, personified.

Background from days when 92-percent of the country stood behind Smirko Bush:

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 [1994 dollars] 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 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

Turning the NSA on the American people is what Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) warned us in 1976. That was about the last time the United States Congress stood up to the intelligence agencies and enacted reforms.

Wonder what Sen. Church would say about a privatized intel?

[niyad]

1. k and r

[Octafish]

7. ''Presidents'' who say ''Money trumps peace'' and make money off war belong in jail.

The very words of George W Bush on Feb. 14, 2007, uttered at a press conference in which not a single of the callow, cowed White Horse press corpse saw fit to ask a follow-up.

I remember Cindy Sheehan tried to bring it to our nation's attention.

[niyad]

12. he should have been booed at the very least. the press here ceased to be useful a very, very long

time ago.

[Initech]

2. WAR!!! HUH!!! What is it good for? Profit! Sing it again y'all!!!!

[Octafish]

8. Absolutely nothing. Except making money. Lots of it.

That's why the following NSA docs are so understandable:



New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims

“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon

By Jordan Michael Smith
Salon.com
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2012 04:24 PM EDT

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

SNIP...

Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has taken credit for the drone program that the Bush administration ignored. “Things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians,” she said in 2006. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.” Rice claimed that the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies, a claim the documents disprove. “If the administration wanted to get it done, I’m sure they could have gotten it done,” says Elias-Sanborn.

Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/

[Wilms]

3. ^

[Octafish]

14. Welfare for the Wealthy. Hobnailed Boot Stamping on the Face of Humanity Forever for the Rest of Us.

We the People aren't just the Enemy. We're the real victims in all this.

Orwell, thanks to DUer Are_grits_groceries:

I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase. Hitler, no doubt, will soon disappear, but only at the expense of strengthening (a) Stalin, (b) the Anglo-American millionaires and (c) all sorts of petty führers of the type of de Gaulle.

SOURCE: http://thebea.st/1cwx0bO

Think he'd mean "billionaires" today, inflation and bubles being what they are and all.

[SaveAmerica]

4. Thank you for the info, I new something stunk to high heaven

and even had planned on e-mailing you what was the missing piece. I have a feeling that everything is not all that it seems to be, and that feeling comes from a huge mistrust of certain segments of the Government that, funnily enough, always comes back to the same core group.

I told my husband just this morning that someone or some agency is always set up as the scapegoat to cast doubt on the Democratic Party and just enough people are gullible enough to run with it. For example, it seems that every time Bushco was on TV pushing some negative a Democrat had done, it almost always was something that the Republicans had perfected but kept under the radar. They're able to sell it so well because they've invented it.

Current events have reached levels of crazy I didn't think possible; it's the ultimate in blaming Bush administration garbage on Obama and I wish he'd just forget about playing Mr. Nice Guy. If that's what he's doing.

Still waiting on you to write a book, Octafish.

[Octafish]

15. Carlyle Group spawned many identical monsters, like Richard "PNAC" Perle's Trireme Partners...

The cronies use inside information gleaned from their future employees working in government to see where the wars are and are going to be.



Below, where he literally belongs, Richard "PNAC Pearl Harbor" Perle and his $10 million pitch to Adnan "Iran-Contra and Selection 2000 Fixer-Upper" Khashoggi, please:

Lunch With The Chairman

by Seymour Hersh
The New Yorker March 17, 2003

EXCERPT...

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm’s government connections prominently: “Three of Trireme’s Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme’s principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board.” The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme’s advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle’s who handles matters in Trireme’s New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and Zuhair.

Perle served as a foreign-policy adviser in George W. Bush’s Presidential campaign—he had been an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan—but he chose not to take a senior position in the Administration. In mid-2001, however, he accepted an offer from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to chair the Defense Policy Board, a then obscure group that had been created by the Defense Department in 1985. Its members (there are around thirty of them) may be outside the government, but they have access to classified information and to senior policymakers, and give advice not only on strategic policy but also on such matters as weapons procurement. Most of the board’s proceedings are confidential.

As chairman of the board, Perle is considered to be a special government employee and therefore subject to a federal Code of Conduct. Those rules bar a special employee from participating in an official capacity in any matter in which he has a financial interest. “One of the general rules is that you don’t take advantage of your federal position to help yourself financially in any way,” a former government attorney who helped formulate the Code of Conduct told me. The point, the attorney added, is to “protect government processes from actual or apparent conflicts.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/17/030317fa_fact?currentPage=all

PS: Thank you for caring and for the kind words, SaveAmerica. After the movie...

[SaveAmerica]

29. Alright then, I know it's going to be a winner!

[PufPuf23]

5. Blatant kr nt

[Octafish]

16. War is Swell - Bush’s Crusades and the Carlyle Group

When War is Swell

Bush’s Crusades and the Carlyle Group

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, WEEKEND EDITION MAY 22-24, 2004

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 800, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

SNIP...

In 2002, Carlyle sold off its biggest holding, United Defense. The sale may have been prompted by insider information leaked to Carlucci by his pal Rumsfeld. In early 2001, Carlyle was furiously lobbying the Pentagon to approve contracts for the production of United Defense’s Crusader artillery system, an unwieldy and outrageously expensive super-cannon. Rumsfeld disliked the Crusader and had it high on his hit list of weapon systems to be killed off in order to save money for other big ticket schemes, particularly the Strategic Defense Initiative.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/05/22/bush-s-crusades-and-the-carlyle-group/

PS: What a coincidence, wot? Thanks, PufPuf23, for grokking.

PS: The more we beef about the BFEE, the more scared they get.

[LeighAnn]

6. Hee hee I wrote that :)

"How will President George W. Bush personally make millions (if not billions) from the War on Terror and Iraq? The old fashioned way. He'll inherit it. Meet The Carlyle Group"

I wrote that back in 2001 and added Iraq in 2003

http://www.hereinreality.com/carlyle.html

Definitely time to get back to work on that site!

[Octafish]

20. Honored to make your acquaintance, LeighAnn!

That is a most memorable phrase. HereInReality.com is a wonderful resource.

Carlyle's Way

Dan Briody, author of The Iron Triangle
Red Herring Business Magazine, Wednesday January 8, 2002

Like everyone else in the United States, the group stood transfixed as the events of September 11 unfolded. Present were former secretary of defense Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James Baker III, and representatives of the bin Laden family. This was not some underground presidential bunker or Central Intelligence Agency interrogation room. It was the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C., the plush setting for the annual investor conference of one of the most powerful, well-connected, and secretive companies in the world: the Carlyle Group. And since September 11, this little-known company has become unexpectedly important.

That the Carlyle Group had its conference on America's darkest day was mere coincidence, but there is nothing accidental about the cast of characters that this private-equity powerhouse has assembled in the 14 years since its founding. Among those associated with Carlyle are former U.S. president George Bush Sr., former U.K. prime minister John Major, and former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos. And Carlyle has counted George Soros, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's estranged family among its high-profile clientele. The group has been able to parlay its political clout into a lucrative buyout practice (in other words, purchasing struggling companies, turning them around, and selling them for huge profits)--everything from defense contractors to telecommunications and aerospace companies. It is a kind of ruthless investing made popular by the movie Wall Street, and any industry that relies heavily on government regulation is fair game for Carlyle's brand of access capitalism. Carlyle has established itself as the gatekeeper between private business interests and U.S. defense spending. And as the Carlyle investors watched the World Trade towers go down, the group's prospects went up.

SNIP...

Despite its VC troubles, however, the Carlyle Group's core business is set for some good times ahead. Though the group has raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill in the past, the firm's close ties with the current administration and its cozy relationship with several prominent Saudi government figures has the watchdogs howling. And it's those same connections that will keep Carlyle in the black for as long as the war against terrorism endures.

For the 11th-largest defense contractor in the United States, wartime is boom time. No one knows that better than the Carlyle Group, which less than a month after U.S. troops began bombing Afghanistan filed to take public its crown jewel of defense, United Defense, a company it has owned for nearly a decade. That this company is even able to go public is testament to the Carlyle Group's pull in Washington.

CONTINUED...

http://web.archive.org/web/20030607113821/http:/redherring.com/vc/2002/0111/947.html

The thing that hurts these warmongering traitors and bedwetters the most is the Truth. Keep serving it up and letting them have it, LeighAnn!

[Octafish]

22. Did Carlyle Group ever sell a 10-percent stake to the Chinese?

From DU2:

Carlyle in talks to sell 9.9% management stake to Chinese

Source: Times Online (UK)

Carlyle Group is in talks to sell up to 9.9 per cent of itself to China’s Social Security Fund in a move that would make it the latest American buyout firm to sell a stake in its management company to the Chinese.

The talks, which began over the summer, emerged five months after Blackstone Group, a key rival, sold a 10 per cent stake in itself to the Chinese Government and floated on the New York Stock Exchange.

<snip>

The Social Security Fund, which has about $62 billion of assets, is thought to be keen to tap the vast profits that private equity firms have made in recent years and is said to have also spoken to other suitors.

A deal with the Chinese fund would mark the third sale of a management stake by Carlyle. Previously it has sold small stakes to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) and the Mubadala arm of the Abu Dhabi Government.

Read more: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry...

Original DU2 thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3047190

Can't get the original due to pay wall and the Waybac won't go there. Odd how this story seems to have dropped off the face of the totalitarian earth.

[johnnyreb]

39. You have taught me much, LeighAnn!

Hereinreality was one of the first sites I found back in those early days. I am one of your ripples! I have a few ripples of my own now, and etc. Thanks so much!

[Berlum]

9. "Smirk." - Dickie "Five Freaking Military Deferments" Cheney (R - War Profiteer)

[Octafish]

21. How'd the same guy who sent millions to early graves get on top of the donor heart transplant list?

Money + Power = BFEE.

The Carlyle Group: Crony Capitalism without Borders

excerpted from the book

How Much Are You Making On The War Daddy?

A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration

by William D. Hartung
Nation Books, 2003, paper

EXCERPT...

Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone

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."

The Somalia operation led to additional, more limited work on behalf of smaller U.S. deployments to Rwanda and Haiti. But the big payoff came in the Balkans, where Halliburton's Brown and Root Services unit started out supplying logistical support for Operation Deny Flight, the United Nations-mandated no-fly zone in Bosnia, and ended up building and operating bases and refugee camps in Croatia, Bosnia, and, most lucratively of all, in KOSOVO. The firm's Balkan adventures started during the same year that Cheney took over as CEO of the company, and accounted for a good deal of the company's growth on the military side of its operations during his five-year tenure at the head of the firm.

The Army contract to provide logistical support for 20,000 U.S. troops deployed as part of the NATO IFOR forces in Bosnia came in at a cool $546 million, and it resulted in Halliburton doing work on behalf of U.S. and allied forces in Hungary, Bosnia, and Croatia. Just as it seemed that Halliburton had struck pure gold, there was a setback in 1997 when the company lost in its bid to renew its overall LOGCAP contract with the Army to a competitor, DynCorp, who had underbid them for the next round of work. But the sting was taken out of the loss when the Army decided to remove the BaIkans work from the larger LOGCAP contract, allowing Halliburton to go full speed ahead on its lucrative support operations there.

The Bosnia work set the stage for an even bigger role for Halliburton in Kosovo, where the company was involved in everything from building make-shift refugee quarters to building two major Army bases from scratch. The company's contract for its first year in Kosovo alone ballooned from the base level fee of $180 million to $1 billion. During its first three months in Kosovo alone, Singer reports that the company did the following: "built 192 barracks . . . thirteen helipads, two aviation-maintenance facilities, twelve mess-kitchen dining facilities, two large base dining facilities, and 37 temporary bathing facilities," even as it was delivering over I million meals, providing more than 55 million gallons of water, supplying over 383,000 gallons of diesel fuel, collecting over 89,000 cubic meters of trash, and loading and off-loading over 4,200 containers with needed supplies.

Halliburton's growth under Cheney's leadership is nothing compared to what it has done since he became vice president. In 2001, it won back the Army's LOGCAP contract, just in time to cash in on the logistical bonanza involved in providing facilities and provisions for U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, and all the other far-flung outposts of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The company is also in charge of making the cages used to house Taliban members and terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A late August 2003 analysis in the Washington Post estimated that Halliburton had raked in $1.7 billion in military contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond since the start of the Bush administration.

The company's biggest prize-which it was awarded on a no-bid basis by the Army Corps of Engineers after Halliburton officials had helped the Defense Department write the specs for the contract-was an open-ended, two year contract worth up to $7 billion for putting out oil fires and repairing oil infrastructure in Iraq.

CONTINUED...

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

And to think many thousands, if not a million, American families sleep on the street, among other degradation to the 99-percent, so turds like Cheney can get whatever he wants.

[SaveAmerica]

30. I asked my husband (Iraq Vet) how Cheney could ever be Secretary of Defense?

What criteria did he fulfill that showed any expertise that would make anyone want to have him on board as SoD? We couldn't come up with anything. Just a connection and desire to pocket cash on the backs of America's treasure.

[Octafish]

32. Cheney spearheaded the privatization of Pentagon profits for Poppy madministration.

Your husband is wise, brave and spot-on.

Mr. Other Priorities' main qualifications for Secretary of Defense seems to have been his voting record in support of War Inc. History unmentioned on campus, what was news left out of the newspapers and off the television screen:

Cheney's Multi-Million Dollar Revolving Door

News: As Bush Sr.'s secretary of defense, Dick Cheney steered millions of dollars in government business to a private military contractor -- whose parent company just happened to give him a high-paying job after he left the government.

By Robert Bryce
Mother Jones
August 2, 2000

EXCERPT...

In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney's direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies -- like itself -- could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. BRS specializes in such work; from 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company worked in the former South Vietnam building roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.

After Bill Clinton's election cost Cheney his government job, he wound up in 1995 as CEO of Halliburton Company, the Dallas-based oil services giant -- which just happens to own Brown & Root Services. Since then, Cheney has collected more than $10 million in salary and stock payments from the company. In addition, he is currently the company's largest individual shareholder, holding stock and options worth another $40 million. Those holdings have undoubtedly been made more valuable by the ever-more lucrative contracts BRS continues to score with the Pentagon.

Between 1992 and 1999, the Pentagon paid BRS more than $1.2 billion for its work in trouble spots around the globe. In May of 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers re-enlisted the company's help in the Balkans, giving it a new five-year contract worth $731 million.

CONTINUED...

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/08/cheney.html

Must've been an, eh, awkward moment for the draft dodger. Then, of course, a big cash bonus from Halliburton has long since made that hurt go away. A new heart also must help.

[Hotler]

10. Kicking m n/t

[Octafish]

24. Here's the Blueprint for Dealing with Democracy

Christopher Simpson details how Poppy Bush started the big ball of surveillance wax after he pried control of the spyworks out of the bed-ridden Pruneface, way back in 1981:

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of "Counter-Terrorism"

By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58

A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.

During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.

Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.

The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.

SNIP...

Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.

CONTINUED...

http://books.google.com/books?id=YZqRyj_QXf8C&pg=PA75&lpg=PA75&dq=christopher+simpson+The+Uses+of+%E2%80%98Counter-Terrorism%E2%80%99&source=bl&ots=8klB0PzATX&sig=hi9DpE3qF43Oefh7iGn79W4jXQs&hl=en&ei=zAFQTeriBsr2gAfu1Mgc&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=christopher%20simpson%20The%20Uses%20of%20%E2%80%98Counter-Terrorism%E2%80%99&f=false

Gangster times in Chicago would be a picnic compared to what these are become for the United States of America.

[chimpymustgo]

11. Big K&R. Know what's behind the curtain.

[Octafish]

25. CalPERS and Carlyle

Tim Shorrock
The Nation, March 14, 2002; published in the April 1, 2002 edition

On February 21 the California Public Employees Retirement System stunned financial markets in Asia when it said it would withdraw its $450 million investments in publicly traded companies in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia to comply with new investment guidelines on human rights, labor standards and other political factors.

But the new guidelines don't apply to the fund's substantial investments in private equity markets, including its $475 million stake in the Carlyle Group--nor does CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, see any reason why it should. "I don't have any moral reservations at all" about Carlyle, said Michael Flaherman, chairman of the investment committee of CalPERS.

The $151 billion CalPERS retirement fund, the largest such fund in the world, is invested on behalf of California's 1.2 million state workers and includes $35 billion invested overseas. The fund's relationship with Carlyle began in 1996; over the next four years it invested $330 million in two Carlyle funds, including $75 million in Carlyle Asia Partners. The relationship deepened last spring when CalPERS invested $175 million to buy a 5.5 percent stake in Carlyle. The relationship--so close that CalPERS owns the elegant office building in Washington, DC, where Carlyle's headquarters are located--is far more important to Carlyle than it is to CalPERS, industry analysts said. "CalPERS is called an anchor investor," explained David Snow, editor of PrivateEquityCentral.net, an industry newsletter. "When Carlyle goes to other investors, they can say CalPERS is in."

Carlyle's experience with CalPERS has apparently whetted its appetite for labor pension money. According to an official close to Carlyle, the bank is raising money for a $750 million fund to invest in "worker-friendly companies." Of that total, Carlyle hopes to attract at least $250 million in labor pension money, the official said. Questions about pension fund investments in private equity have become more relevant since the collapse of Enron, with which CalPERS had extensive private business partnerships. Several unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), strongly opposed the partnerships as well as CalPERS investments in Enron stocks and bonds. Those concerns included Enron's support for energy privatization, its employment of former government officials to lobby for privatization and its sordid human rights record in India. (CalPERS made $133 million from one Enron partnership and may see a gain on another; it lost $105 million on its stock and bond holdings.)

Within the labor movement, CalPERS is highly respected for its cooperation in challenging managers and corporations suspected of violating human rights or abusing workers. In 1999 CalPERS supported two union-backed candidates for the board of Maxxam during a bitter strike by the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Two years ago CalPERS joined the AFL-CIO in an investors' boycott when the Chinese government and Goldman Sachs took Petrochina, a state-owned oil company, public. The fund's new standards for public investments in emerging markets are the culmination of more than two years of sometimes fierce internal debate. CalPERS investment managers must now consider a wide range of non-economic factors, including a country's political stability, financial transparency and record on labor standards, workers' rights and building democracy. Based on a review by Wilshire Associates, the CalPERS pension consultant, thirteen emerging markets, including Turkey, South Korea and South Africa, passed the test, compared with four that failed. The fund had already banned its managers from investing in publicly traded companies in China and India. "CalPERS is taking more steps in this direction than any pension fund we know about," said Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO's associate general counsel who focuses on investment strategy.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/article/calpers-and-carlyle#axzz2brxZHLGi

[AzDar]

13. K & R

[Octafish]

26. Ex CIA boss Gen David Petraeus went to work for the predatory capitalists at KKR...

News vital for democracy that failed to show on my television screen:

Former CIA head David Petraeus joins buyout firm

By Andre Damon
wsws.org, 5 June 2013

KKR, the giant private equity firm, announced Thursday that it had hired David Petraeus, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and head of US combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The move points to the integration of the upper echelons of the military/intelligence apparatus and the most predatory sections of finance capital, which are natural allies in the war against the working class domestically and throughout the world.

SNIP...

Private equity firms, which are not publicly traded and therefore far less regulated than publicly traded corporations, provide among the highest payouts to their executives and consultants. This has made them the main choice for ex-politicians seeking to monetize their connections made in office. The list of former top government officials serving as advisors and executives of private equity companies includes:

* George H.W. Bush, former US president and CIA director, who has longstanding connections to the Carlyle Group, including having sat on the board of directors of one of its subsidiaries, Caterair, an airline catering company
* Former US President Bill Clinton, who served as an advisor to Yucaipa Companies for six years, making $12.5 million
* Former Vice President Dan Quayle, who serves as global investment chairman at Cerberus Capital Management, along with former US Treasury Secretary John Snow, who serves as the company's chairman.
* Colin Powell, former secretary of state and four-star army general, who chairs the advisory board of Leeds Equity Partners
* Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, who serves on the board of private equity firm Forstmann, Little & Company.

While private equity firms are the most common employers for high-profile public officials, most former generals who are not as well-known as Petraeus and Powell go on to work for defense contractors, sometimes employed as consultants for both the military and defense contractors at the same time.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/06/05/petr-m04.html

Thanks for grokking the seriousness of the situation and giving a kick for news and analysis that seems to have been missed by Corporate McPravda.

[SaveAmerica]

31. I always felt that Obama was cleaning up and realigning Generals

in the Middle East because of their allegiance to BushCo and the dangers following the wrong chain of command could have on plans to withdraw in the middle east. Funny to read Republicans complain on military forums that they were sure Obama was clearing out the Christian Generals so he could fulfill some Muslim take-over within the military.

I have been away from DU for a while (in an active way), didn't you have some kind of chart that showed these connections or am I thinking of something else?

[Blue Owl]

17. All the shit going on in this fucked up country is for their gain

n/t

[Octafish]

27. Crony Capitalism Goes Global

Bush Sr. and others open doors for the Carlyle Group.

Tim Shorrock
The Nation, March 14, 2002; appeared in the April 1, 2002 edition

EXCERPT...

Looking East

Where Carlucci has led Carlyle's foray into defense, Bush Sr. and Baker have helped the bank forge deep ties with the Middle East. Just after his son was sworn into office, Bush was invited by Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz to speak to potential US investors in Saudi Arabia at a two-day conference in Houston. Bandar, who is close to the Bush family, was not relying purely on friendship, however: The Washington Post recently disclosed that Bandar has invested in Carlyle, along with his father, Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister. (Bush Jr. also has a Carlyle connection: In the early 1990s he was on the board of Caterair, a Carlyle company that provided in-flight food services to airlines but never made a profit.)

Through a 51 percent joint venture with the Saudi government, Carlyle's United Defense provides tactical training and maintenance for the thousands of Bradley Fighting Vehicles purchased by the Royal Saudi Land Forces after the Gulf War. Carlyle had a long relationship with Saudi Arabia through BDM Corporation and Vinnell Corporation, which train the Saudi National Guard and were sold to TRW in 1998. In the early 1990s Carlyle advised Al-Waleed bin Talal--the Saudi prince whose $10 million donation to the World Trade Center victims' fund was rejected by Rudy Giuliani--on his US investments, including a $600 million bailout of Citicorp, now Citigroup.

Last April, Bush Sr. led a Carlyle delegation to Turkey, where Rubenstein negotiated a joint venture with the Koc Group, Turkey's largest conglomerate, which has holdings in energy, telecommunications and defense. During a dinner with Turkish business executives, Bush reminded the audience of Turkey's support during the Gulf War and promised to "help Turkey as we did in the past." FNSS, a joint venture between United Defense and the Nurol Group, is Turkey's largest manufacturer of armored vehicles and exports to Malaysia and other nations.

Over the past three years, in addition to visiting Turkey, Bush has been to South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Australia, France, Thailand and Hong Kong on Carlyle's behalf. In his speeches to investment conferences, said Conway, Bush "talks about the world, what he sees, what he thinks. Period." Carlyle's newly hired spokesperson, Chris Ullman, would not discuss Bush's compensation or his schedule, but added that Bush "does not and has never represented Carlyle before other governments or government officials. He has made no business deals for Carlyle."

Investors, however, recognize that the Bush name--and the many contacts Bush developed as President, CIA director and ambassador to the UN--carry tremendous weight as he travels around the world on behalf of Carlyle. [font color="red"]"Nothing beats the ability to have George Bush call up some contact he's known for the last twenty years to comment on the worthiness of a particular deal," said Pat Macht, a spokesperson for CalPERS,[/font color] after consulting with investment managers about Bush's role in Carlyle. That is particularly true in Asia, where personal relationships are key to business deals and Bush chairs the annual meeting of Carlyle's Asian Advisory Board.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thenation.com/article/crony-capitalism-goes-global?page=0,0#axzz2brxZHLGi

And most people, including most Democrats, wonder why the wars never end and the rich keep getting richer. Thanks for grokking, Blue Owl.

[Scuba]

18. Kick. Should be mandatory reading.

[Berlum]

23. + 1,000

nt

[sabrina 1]

19. What would Church say? I think he would say 'I told you so, you were not vigilant enough'.

[Octafish]

34. Agree, totally. Here's added perspective from Michael Ames of Harper's...

On the NSA’s That ’70s Show Rerun

What would Frank Church say about the Snowden Affair?

By Michael Ames
Harper's, PERSPECTIVE — June 21, 2013, 9:00 am

EXCERPT...

The Snowden Affair is a “rerun” of issues first uncovered during the 1970s, though these problems trace back to the earliest American efforts at espionage, says Shea. Between 1975 and 1976, the Church committees produced more than a dozen reports detailing the illegal activities of the NSA, CIA, and FBI, which included opening mail, intercepting telegrams, planting bugs, wiretapping, and attempting to break up marriages, foment rivalries and destroy careers of private citizens. “We thought we put a stop to this wholesale collection of information on Americans forty years ago,” says Peter Fenn, another former Church staffer.

Espionage and its attendant notions of paranoia and dishonor were established intrigues of the era. In 1970, before Nixon made eavesdropping the iconic crime of the decade, a Newsweek cover asked, “Is Privacy Dead?” Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) starred Gene Hackman as a tech-savvy private eye who runs around San Francisco in a membranous trench coat, penetrating various barriers to privacy before eventually succumbing to the paranoia inherent to his work. Later that year, Seymour Hersh and the New York Times broke a bombshell about the CIA’s “family jewels” operations—a nefarious laundry list of overseas-assassination plots, break-ins, and surveillance of journalists (current Fox News commentator Brit Hume among them) and popular antiwar figures including Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lennon.

SNIP...

According to an internal report written by NSA historian George Howe and declassified in 2007, the NSA has had “responsibilities exceeding its ill-defined powers” since it was a military outfit known as the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) in the early 1950s. The revelations that the government had ordered Verizon to turn over bulk call logs of millions of customers, and that the NSA’s PRISM program had, with the participation of tech companies, gained access to private electronic communications was scandalous, but far from unprecedented; in the years after World War I, Herbert Yardley, the pioneering codebreaker and founder of the proto-NSA Cipher Bureau, coerced Western Union and Postal Telegraph into sharing private international telegrams. The secret arrangement expanded after World War II to include RCA Global and ITT World Communications, helping the government copy and store ever greater troves of data, first on reels of punched paper and then on magnetic tape. The program, which ran from 1945 to 1975, was codenamed SHAMROCK, and according to a report written in 2007 by former CIA Inspector General Britt Snider, it was “known only to a few people within the government.”

SNIP...

Nearly forty years after Church, the NSA has grown to three times the size of the CIA. Partly in response to the gross intelligence failures of the years leading up to September 11, 2001, the physical infrastructure of surveillance has metastasized. In the Utah desert, the government is finishing construction on a massive data center — essentially a $2 billion external hard drive — that Bamford reports will use as much energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

When Pat Shea left the senate intelligence committee in 1976 to move back to Utah for work at a private law firm, a friend who worked for the CIA gave him a satellite photo of Salt Lake City. “Just know that we’ll always be watching,” the man joked. Shea left Washington wary of intelligence overreach, but he also believes, contra Snowden, that most of what the NSA is currently doing entails “reasonable law enforcement.” He also recognizes that since 9/11, there has been constant pressure to build a more powerful vacuum cleaner. Contractors like Snowden’s Booz Allen Hamilton have been brought in to offer the government more eyes and ears, earning billions for their services, and bringing us to an era when roughly 1.4 million Americans have top-secret clearance.

CONTINUED...

http://harpers.org/blog/2013/06/on-the-nsas-rerun-of-that-70s-show/

[DirkGently]

28. We're basically replacing the wars as they end.

We're apparently not permitted to stop shoveling billions into the gaping maws of various well-connected entities.

Now, instead of paying to kill and in the Middle East, we're paying for the privilege of being tracked and stalked and suspected.

[Octafish]

33. President Obama recently praised the Vietnam War...

DUer David Swanson brought the artful erasing what Poppy called "The Vietnam Syndrome" to our attention:

Obama's Campaign to Glorify the War on Vietnam

By davidswanson - Posted on 13 August 2013

Wars exist because lies are told about past wars.

When President Obama escalated the war on Afghanistan, he revived virtually every known lie about the war on Iraq, from the initial WMD BS to the "surge." While Americans remain unfathomably ignorant about the destruction of Iraq, a majority says the war shouldn't have been fought. A majority says the same about the war on Afghanistan. This is, pretty wonderfully, impeding efforts toward a U.S. war on Syria or Iran.

The new wars were supposed to cure the Vietnam Syndrome -- that public reluctance to support mass murder for no good reason. The Pentagon is now turning to the source of the disease. The war in most need of beautification for Americans, the military has decided, is the war the Vietnamese call the American War.

Most people in the United States have no idea that this was, like all other recent U.S. wars, a one-sided slaughter -- in this case, of 3.8 million Vietnamese men, women, and children. But most Americans know the war was awful, even on the side of the aggressor. The Vietnam Syndrome (popular opposition to wars) still frightens war makers.

Obama is usually opposed to any "looking backwards," as doing so might involve prosecuting criminals for their crimes. But, making a big exception, he is dumping 65 million of our dollars into prettying up the war on Vietnam.

Please read the following statement, put together by some U.S. veterans of that war, and sign onto it here.

An Open letter to the American People about a Project to Accurately Commemorate the American War in Viet Nam

We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of key moments in the American war in Viet Nam. As peace and justice activists, we believe it is crucial that the realities of the war be faced squarely. President Obama has announced his plan for a 13-year-long commemoration funded by Congress at $65 million, featuring a full panoply of Orwellian forgetfulness and faux-patriotism. On May 25, 2012, President Obama proclaimed: “As we observe the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, we reflect with solemn reverence upon the valor of a generation that served with honor. We pay tribute to the more than 3 million servicemen and women who left their families to serve bravely, a world away from everything they knew and everyone they loved ... fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions of our Armed Forces.”. The purpose of the official proclamation -- rather than honestly looking backward so as to glean and educate about important lessons -- will be to promote an ex post facto justification of the war, lay lingering doubts to rest, and provide a stamp of approval without attending to or contending with the horrors of the war that many of us opposed.

The whole idea is a bit staggering, that this project was put into the hands of the Department of Defense (DoD) so that they can attempt – a half century later – to rewrite a tragic history which already has been distorted and manipulated by those in power in the US. The DoD is recruiting "partner" organizations from across the country to help them distort and silence much of the real history. Numerous events are scheduled over the next 12 years to “honor” our soldiers and extol the selfless sacrifices of Americans during an ugly period of our history. There will likely be little mention of the Vietnamese, and what the nation and the society of Viet Nam suffered as a result of U.S. intervention, nor of the resistance to the war by courageous and committed Americans. Almost certainly, the DoD project will not pay tribute to the voices and postwar reconciliation activities of many antiwar veterans.

Those years many of us remember, with painful acuity, as other than glorious. We feel compelled to make sure that the history of US involvement in Viet Nam is told truthfully.

Rather than let this Madison Avenue PR campaign just roll over us, we are viewing this as an opportunity to truly examine what happened during those tragic and tumultuous Viet Nam years, and use those lessons to turn American policy and shape a better future for ourselves and other nations. The US seems as committed as ever to military interventions heedless of the consequences for the invaded and occupied people or even for those called upon to invade and occupy.

We believe that an honest remembrance of what actually went on in Viet Nam is essential – to face the realities for the millions of Vietnamese civilians killed, maimed, poisoned, and traumatized; our soldiers propagandized, thrown into a ‘war of choice’; and subsequently largely abandoned to cope with postwar stress, our citizenry lied to and manipulated who came to recognize the war’s futility, if not its immorality.

It is incumbent on us not to cede the war’s memory to those who have little interest in an honest accounting and who want to justify further acts of military adventurism. The experience of the war ought to be cautionary against the fantasy of world dominance that besots many of our political and military leaders. What are the consequences of trying to control the fate of a people from afar with little understanding or interest -- except for the purposes of counterinsurgency -- in their history and culture, or their human desires? What are the consequences of dehumanized ideologies used to justify wars of aggression? To honor the Viet Nam generation and to inform current and future generations, we should make every effort to pass on a critical and honest history of the war.

As part of our counter-commemoration, we also will also pay tribute to the broad-based resistance to the war. Taking inspiration from the civil rights movement, an unprecedented opposition movement arose not just on campuses, but in the streets, in the military, and around family dinner tables. Millions of Americans resisted the war spontaneously, as well as in organizations ranging from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to the Chicano Moratorium, Women’s Strike for Peace, the War Resistors League, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friend Service Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, Labor for Peace, Business Executives Move for Viet Nam Peace, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, not to mention countless community groups. The movement made the morality of the war an issue for Americans, moving beyond the cost-benefit analysis favored by the punditocracy. The war was wrong, not just too costly; as Martin Luther King warned in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech: “the US was on the wrong side of the world revolution.”

In tandem with the civil rights, Black liberation, and women’s movements, the anti-war movement fostered a cultural and intellectual revolution which undermined Euro-centrism and traditional hierarchies while honoring the previously marginalized. Our grasp of history, culture, and human capacity was qualitatively expanded. We learned and demonstrated that history could be made by ordinary people; by people of color, by women, by the ignored and excluded.

The work around the quincentennial of Columbus’s voyages is a useful precedent. Originally designed as a celebration of Eurocentrism and empire, widespread grassroots action instead turned the quincentennial into a critique of the conquest and destruction of native peoples.

We therefore are inviting you to join us in developing a strategy for an antiwar commemoration with direct relevance for today. Here are some beginning, suggestive ideas to expose the truths of war and pose alternatives to its normalization by developing:

A central storehouse of information, a web site, and digitized archives;
Curriculum for schools and colleges;
A speaker’s bureau;
A program on the model of the Viet Nam era’s teach-ins and Winter Soldier investigations;
Our own commemorations of significant war and antiwar events.

Sign here.

SOURCE: http://warisacrime.org/content/obamas-campaign-glorify-war-vietnam

I'm old. I remember the Vietnam war for Profit killed three young men to whom I was closely related through marriage and friendships like family. Their families were never the same. I imagine that if they'd lived, along with the other 59,000 American men and women, and millions and millions of Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, this would be a very different nation and world -- better places where peace was more important than profits.

[DirkGently]

37. This needs to be an OP, Octafish.

Jesus fing Christ.

[Fire Walk With Me]

35. Old men profit; young men and innocent foreigners die! n/t

[no_hypocrisy]

36. War Is A Racket, Inc.

[Octafish]

40. A great American, Lt. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC.

I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

For DUers and all who enjoy reading about the nation's true state of affairs: "War Is a Racket" in PDF form.

He also helped thwart a coup by Wall Street and Big Business against FDR. Details excerpts from a book by Jules Archer.

And scroll down to December 30, 2008: FTR #602 for a radio interview with the author, also a great American.

[WillyT]

38. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!

[Octafish]

41. Excellent essay here on President Kennedy and when he opposed national security state...

Doug Horne, a staffer on the Assassination Records Review Board wrote an outstanding essay in which he brings together a lot of important information learned over the last few years:

JFK’S WAR AGAINST THE NATIONAL SECURITY ESTABLISHMENT: WHY KENNEDY WAS ASSASSINATED, PART 1

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/jfks-war-against-the-national-security-establishment/

It's vital history that explains why things never really change for the War Party.