[Liberation News Service]: Countdown to Electoral Uprising -- 10 Days to Go -- Must Read Glimpse into Hell -- Brown Shirts are Comimg to Your Voting Place

Sat Oct 23 04:52:46 CDT 2004

Four years ago they flew their brown shirts on an
Enron jet to shut down the recount in Miami-Dade with
physical intimidation. Now, bereft of accomplishments
and stripped of excuses, they are going to deploy
their brown shirts to black and otherwise progressive
precints in Bardoground States...Because the _resident
has already been defeated. They have already lost
Ohio, Fraudida, New Hampshire and probably Nevada,
Virginia and West Virginia...They cannot wait until
election night to steal it this time, they have to
bring election day itself to a grinding halt...But
they will not succeed...This land of Woody Guthrie,
Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther
King Jr., Cesar Chavez and those four little girls in
that church in Montgomery not so many years ago is not
going to fall to the "stupid, anrgy white men" of a
Three Stooges Reich...There is an Electoral Uprising
at hand. It cannot be thwarted. Lean into the fire,
just as Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mekong Delta) and Sen.
John Edwards (D-NC) are doing...REMEMBER DUVAL COUNTY!
DO NOT LET IT HAPPEN AGAIN!!! It is within our power
to thwart the theft of this election. Please read
these THREE stories and share them with others. Please
vote and encourage others to vote. REMEMBER DUVAL
COUNTY!

MICHAEL MOSS, NY Times: Republican Party officials in
Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of
recruits inside polling places on Election Day to
challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect
are not eligible to cast ballots..
Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona
to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for
similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters
at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over
voting procedures and the anticipation of an election
as close as the one in 2000.
Ohio election officials said they had never seen so
large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges.
They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready
for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm
and complaints among voters. Some officials said they
worried that the challenges could discourage or even
frighten others waiting to vote. 
Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the
Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks.
Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they
had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans
said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in
heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland,
Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid
$100...
Ohio election officials said that by state law, the
parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable"
justification for doubting the qualifications of a
voter before asking a poll worker to question that
person. And, the officials said, challenges could be
made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a
citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county
and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.
Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the
criteria would minimize the potential for disruption.
But Democrats worry that the challenges will
inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.
"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in
large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting,
because challenging takes a long time,'' said David
Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the
national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long
lines causes our people to leave without voting.''
The Republican challenges in Ohio have already begun.
Yesterday, party officials submitted a list of about
35,000 registered voters whose mailing addresses, the
Republicans said, were questionable. After
registering, they said, each of the voters was mailed
a notice, and in each case the notice was returned to
election officials as undeliverable...

Lucy Komisar, AlterNet: Kerry took on not only the
Bush clan and its friends, but the CIA, and members of
Congress on both sides of the aisle. This is not
irrelevant history, but important to examine, because
it reveals a lot about Kerry and how he might respond
to terrorism or other global criminal enterprises.
Kerry’s record shows that he took on powerful
political and bureaucratic interests, was a tenacious
investigator, and savvy about international crime and
money flows, which is crucial in the fight against
terrorism.
Against the opposition of powerful Republicans and
Democrats, and in light of a lack of cooperation from
a very politicized Justice Department and stonewalling
by the CIA, Kerry worked with investigators and ran
Senate hearings that exposed the bank’s shadowy
multi-billion-dollar scams and precipitated its end...
During this presidential campaign, Kerry has talked a
lot about his service in Vietnam, but he doesn’t take
credit now for exposing BCCI, perhaps because he
thinks it’s too complicated for the American public to
understand the scandal. Yet, more than physical
courage, what the U.S. needs is guts and smarts and
the resolution and courage to fight scourges that
range from terrorism to international crime to
corporate corruption and tax evasion.
So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected
President? He would be not only the nation’s president
but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who
knows how to — and is willing to — overcome obstacles,
whether they be international criminals or U.S. power
brokers, to “follow the money” and bring about
justice.

Brian Witte, Associated Press:
The wife of an Army reservist sentenced to prison for
abusing prisoners in Iraq said she knows her husband
was wrong, but she also blames higher-ranking
officials who "sit behind the curtains" for the abuse.

    Martha Frederick, wife of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip"
Frederick, said the eight-year sentence he received
Thursday for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
will force her family to "endure hardships and many
sacrifices." 
    "The pain sets deeper yet in knowing that he
serves these years not only for his actions or actions
of a few reservists, but those included in the chain
of command," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated
Press...
    "I feel outrage that he and a few others will bear
the weight for the actions of many," she wrote...
    Martha Frederick said she will always see her
husband as a "good soldier." 
    "I will see my husband as a far greater man than
those who have abandoned him, left him to be convicted
for his acts and the failures of their own," she
wrote.

Support Our Troops, Save the US Constitution,
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Restore Fiscal Responsibility in the White House,
Thwart the Theft of a Second Presidential Election,
Save the Environment, Break the Corporatist
Stranglehold on the US Mainstream News Media, Rescue
the US Supreme Court from Right-Wing Radicals, Cleanse
the White House of the Chicken Hawk Coup and Its
War-Profiteering Cronies, Show Up for Democracy in
2004: Defeat the Triad, Defeat Bush (again!)

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/politics/campaign/23vote.html?ei=5059&en=420a0a2df3218dec&hp=&ex=1098504000&partner=AOL&pagewanted=print&position=

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 23, 2004
Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key
State
By MICHAEL MOSS

epublican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps
yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside
polling places on Election Day to challenge the
qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible
to cast ballots.

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard
against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the
Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters
in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds
in the Nov. 2 elections. 

Election officials in other swing states, from Arizona
to Wisconsin and Florida, say they are bracing for
similar efforts by Republicans to challenge new voters
at polling places, reflecting months of disputes over
voting procedures and the anticipation of an election
as close as the one in 2000. 

Ohio election officials said they had never seen so
large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges.
They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready
for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm
and complaints among voters. Some officials said they
worried that the challenges could discourage or even
frighten others waiting to vote. 

Ohio Democrats were struggling to match the
Republicans' move, which had been rumored for weeks.
Both parties had until 4 p.m. to register people they
had recruited to monitor the election. Republicans
said they had enlisted 3,600 by the deadline, many in
heavily Democratic urban neighborhoods of Cleveland,
Dayton and other cities. Each recruit was to be paid
$100. 

The Democrats, who tend to benefit more than
Republicans from large turnouts, said they had
registered more than 2,000 recruits to try to protect
legitimate voters rather than weed out ineligible
ones. 

Republican officials said they had no intention of
disrupting voting but were concerned about the
possibility of fraud involving thousands of newly
registered Democrats.

"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote,
register voters - I call them ringers - have created
these problems," said James P. Trakas, a Republican
co-chairman in Cuyahoga County. 

Both parties have waged huge campaigns in the
battleground states to register millions of new
voters, and the developments in Ohio provided an early
glimpse of how those efforts may play out on Election
Day.

Ohio election officials said that by state law, the
parties' challengers would have to show "reasonable"
justification for doubting the qualifications of a
voter before asking a poll worker to question that
person. And, the officials said, challenges could be
made on four main grounds: whether the voter is a
citizen, is at least 18, is a resident of the county
and has lived in Ohio for the previous 30 days.

Elections officials in Ohio said they hoped the
criteria would minimize the potential for disruption.
But Democrats worry that the challenges will
inevitably delay the process and frustrate the voters.

"Our concern is Republicans will be challenging in
large numbers for the purpose of slowing down voting,
because challenging takes a long time,'' said David
Sullivan, the voter protection coordinator for the
national Democratic Party in Ohio. "And creating long
lines causes our people to leave without voting.''

The Republican challenges in Ohio have already begun.
Yesterday, party officials submitted a list of about
35,000 registered voters whose mailing addresses, the
Republicans said, were questionable. After
registering, they said, each of the voters was mailed
a notice, and in each case the notice was returned to
election officials as undeliverable.

In Cuyahoga County alone, which includes the heavily
Democratic neighborhoods of Cleveland, the Republican
Party submitted more than 14,000 names of voters for
county election officials to scrutinize for possible
irregularities. The party said it had registered more
than 1,400 people to challenge voters in that county.

Among the main swing states, only Ohio, Florida and
Missouri require the parties to register poll watchers
before Election Day; elsewhere, party observers can
register on the day itself. In several states
officials have alerted poll workers to expect a
heightened interest by the parties in challenging
voters. In some cases, poll workers, many of them
elderly, have been given training to deal with any
abusive challenging. 

Mr. Trakas, the Republican co-chairman in Cuyahoga
County, said the recruits would be equipped with lists
of voters who the party suspects are not county
residents or otherwise qualified to vote.

The recruits will be trained next week, said Mr.
Trakas, who added that he had not decided whether to
open the training sessions to the public or reporters.
Among other things, he said, the recruits will be
taught how to challenge mentally disabled voters who
are assisted by anyone other than their legal
guardians. In previous elections, he said, bus drivers
who had taken group-home residents to polling places
often helped them vote.

Reno Oradini, the Cuyahoga County election board
attorney, said a challenge would in effect create
impromptu courts at polling places as workers huddled
to resolve a dispute and cause delays in voting. He
said he was working with local election officials to
find ways of preventing disruptions that could drive
away impatient voters and reduce turnout.

State law varies widely on voter challenges. In
Colorado, challenged voters can sign an oath that they
are indeed qualified to vote; voters found to have
lied could be prosecuted, but their votes would still
be counted. In Wisconsin, it is the challenger who
must sign an oath stating the grounds for a challenge.

"You need personal knowledge," said Kevin J. Kennedy,
executive director of the Wisconsin State Elections
Board. "You can't say they don't look American or
don't speak English."

National election officials said yesterday that
Election Day challenging had been done only
sporadically by the parties over the years, mainly in
highly contested races. In the bitterly contested 2000
presidential election, they said, challenges occurred
mainly after Election Day. 

The preparations for widespread challenging this year
have alarmed some election officials. 

"This creates chaos and confusion in the polling
site," said R. Doug Lewis, executive director of the
Election Center, an international association of
election officials. But, he said, "most courts say
it's permissible by state law and therefore can't be
denied."

In Ohio, Republicans sought to play down any concern
that their challenging would be disruptive.

"I suspect there will be challenges," said Robert T.
Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. "But
by and large, people will move through quickly. We
want to make sure every eligible voter votes." He
added, "99.9 percent will fly right by."

Challengers on both sides said they were uncertain
about what to expect. Georgiana Nye, 56, a Dayton real
estate broker who was registered by the Republicans as
a challenger, said she wanted to help prevent fraud
and would accept the $100 for the 13 hours of work and
training.

For the Democrats in Dayton, Ronald Magoteaux, 57, a
mechanical engineer, said he agreed to be a poll
watcher out of concern for new voters. "I think it's
sick that these Republicans are up to dirty tricks at
the polls," Mr. Magoteaux said. "I believe thousands
of votes were lost in 2000, and I want to make sure
that doesn't happen in Ohio."

Democrats said they were racing to match the
Republicans, precinct by precinct. In some cities,
like Dayton, they registered more challengers than the
Republicans, election officials said. But in Cuyahoga
County, where the Republicans said they had registered
1,436 people to challenge voters, or one in every
precinct, Democrats said they had signed up only about
300. 

The parties are also preparing to battle over voter
qualifications in Florida, where they had until last
Tuesday to register challengers. In Fort Myers,
Republicans named 100 watchers for the county's 171
precincts, up from 60 in 2000. But Democrats
registered 300 watchers in the county, a sixfold
increase.

Nader Loses Ohio Ballot Bid

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 22 (AP) - The Ohio Supreme Court
on Friday rejected an effort by Ralph Nader to get his
name on the ballot, most likely ending his chances in
the state for the Nov. 2 election.

Mr. Nader wanted the court to force election boards to
review their voter registration lists, a process he
said could have led to the validation of petitions to
place him on the ballot. The court ruled 6-1 against
him.

James Dao contributed reporting from Ohio for this
article, and Ford Fessenden and Anthony Smith from New
York.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home |
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http://www.alternet.org/election04/20268/

The Case That Kerry Cracked
By Lucy Komisar, AlterNet
Posted on October 22, 2004, Printed on October 23,
2004
http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/
One gets an eerie sense of déjà vu watching John Kerry
battle the Bush clan. He’s done it once before,
against the old man, President Bush’s father, though
many voters have probably forgotten. That battle
involved the first Bush administration’s attempt to
put the lid on an investigation that connected a
worldwide criminal bank to narco-traffickers,
terrorists, and to Middle East money men who helped
the Bush family make piles of cash. Those links
connect to people now on the U.S. post-9/11 terrorist
list.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kerry fought to
expose an international criminal bank, BCCI — the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was run
by a Pakistani, working with Persian Gulf managers who
operated through a network of secret offshore centers
to hide their operations from the world’s bank
examiners. They weren’t, however, hidden from the CIA,
which not only knew what the bank was doing, but used
the bank to funnel cash through its Islamabad and
other Pakistani branches to CIA client Osama bin
Laden, part of the $2 billion Washington sent to the
Afghani mujahideen. The operation gave bin Laden an
education in black finance. CIA director William Casey
himself met with BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi. The
CIA also paid its own agents through the bank and used
BCCI to fund black ops all over the world.

Kerry took on not only the Bush clan and its friends,
but the CIA, and members of Congress on both sides of
the aisle. This is not irrelevant history, but
important to examine, because it reveals a lot about
Kerry and how he might respond to terrorism or other
global criminal enterprises. Kerry’s record shows that
he took on powerful political and bureaucratic
interests, was a tenacious investigator, and savvy
about international crime and money flows, which is
crucial in the fight against terrorism.

Against the opposition of powerful Republicans and
Democrats, and in light of a lack of cooperation from
a very politicized Justice Department and stonewalling
by the CIA, Kerry worked with investigators and ran
Senate hearings that exposed the bank’s shadowy
multi-billion-dollar scams and precipitated its end. 

The Bank and the CIA

BCCI was founded in 1972 by Pakistani banker Agha
Hasan Abedi and initially capitalized by Sheik Zayed
of Abu Dhabi. It incorporated in the bank secrecy
jurisdiction of Luxembourg but operated out of London.
During two decades, it expanded to 73 countries
worldwide, with nearly a million depositors with
accounts totaling more than $10 billion. When the bank
was finally shut down nearly 20 years later, between
$9.5 and $15 billion — the analysts differ — had been
lost or stolen, making this the biggest bank fraud in
the world.

The bank had carved out a niche: it was the banker to
the bad guys. One U.S. indictment would say that money
laundering was BCCI's "corporate strategy." BCCI
survived for two decades because it floated on the
waves of the offshore system, with key booking
operations in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, where
bank regulators couldn’t go. Its Grand Cayman
"bank-within-a-bank" was just a post office box. The
bank also had friends in high places in the U.S. and,
of course, the wink and nod of the CIA and the
Reagan-Bush administration, which depended on its
services. Over the years, BCCI was involved with:

Drug cartels. As early as 1985, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the IRS found
that BCCI was involved in laundering heroin money,
with numerous branches in Colombia to handle accounts
for the drug cartels. It ran accounts for the
traffickers’ protector, Panamanian dictator Manuel
Noriega, as well as for the drug kingpins of Asia’s
Golden Crescent, including Burmese heroin warlord Khun
Sa, and for drug trafficking Afghanis and Pakistanis.

Illegal arms traders. For the Afghanis, the rule was
“drugs out, American and British arms in.” Clients
also included Middle East terrorist Abu Nidal, who
used bank financing to get weapons; the sellers of
nuclear technology to Pakistan; and Syrian drug
trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer
Al-Kassar. The bank served international organized
crime involved in extortion, bribery, kidnapping and
murder, and ran accounts for Philippines dictator
Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier,
Liberian strongman Samuel Doe and other thieving heads
of state who needed to hide their stolen cash.

The Iran/Contra scandal. BCCI had a role in the
infamous scandal of the Reagan years. The CIA told
Noriega to use the bank for the payoffs he got for
helping National Security Council (NSC) staffer Oliver
North set up shell companies and secret bank accounts
in Panama to illegally move funds to the Contras in
Nicaragua and arms to Iran in 1985-86. North had
arranged to illegally sell 1,250 U.S. Tow missiles to
Iran in exchange for a promise that Teheran would
press militants in Lebanon to release American
hostages. Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman and
fixer, used a BCCI account to move $20 million for the
illegal arms and money plot. BCCI prepared phony
documents for the arms sale, and checks signed by
North were drawn on the Paris branch of BCCI, which
“had no records” of the account when U.S. law
enforcement later sought them. The profits were sent
to Nicaragua’s right wing Contra rebels, violating a
congressional ban on such aid.

Saddam Hussein. During the Reagan-Bush support of Iraq
as an adversary to Iran, BCCI funneled millions of
dollars to Baghdad's banker in the U.S., the Atlanta
branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, (an Italian
bank), so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4
billion in secret loans to Iraq — money for arms. BNL
was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry
Kissinger was on the bank’s international advisory
board along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become
Bush Sr.’s National Security Advisor.

BCCI’s global connections also helped bring private
profit to the Bushes. Former Senate investigator Jack
Blum told me, “This whole collection of people were
wrapped up in the Bush crowd in Texas.” Prominent
Saudis played a key role: Khalid Bin Mahfouz, head of
National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, and a major
investor and BCCI board member; Kamal Adham,
brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, former
head of Saudi intelligence and a major shareholder and
frontman for BCCI, and; Ghaith Rashad Pharaon, a BCCI
shareholder and front man for the bank’s illegal
purchase of three U.S. banks.

Then there was James Bath, a Texas businessman, who
owned Houston’s Main Bank with Bin Mahfouz and
Pharaon. When George W. Bush set up Arbusto Energy
Inc. in 1979 and 1980, Bath provided some of the
financing. As it turned out, Bush was not much of a
businessman, and when Arbusto needed a bailout,
political connections eventually got him a buyout by
Harken Energy Corp., which paid him $600,000 in stock
and a $120,000-a-year consultancy.

BCCI-connected friends were there again with money to
help when Harken got into trouble. Arkansas investment
banker Jackson Stephens in 1987 worked out Harken’s
debts by getting $25 million financing from Union Bank
of Switzerland (UBS), a partner with BCCI in the Swiss
Banque de Commerce et de Placements. As part of that
deal, a board seat was given to Harken shareholder
Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was
BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

Were the Bushes putting their financial interests
ahead of American security? Given the Bush links to
BCCI, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration
tried to smother the investigation and prosecution of
the bank. 

It might have succeeded, were it not for New York
District Attorney Robert Morgenthau — and the junior
Senator from Massachussetts, John Kerry.

Kerry The Investigator

As a former prosecutor, Kerry knew a lot about the
workings of financial crime. Kerry pointed out how
billions of dollars looted from U.S. savings and loans
in the 1980s — after Ronald Reagan deregulated the
thrift industry — had been stashed in secret offshore
accounts. After he became head of the Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International
Operations, Kerry had wanted to look into cocaine
trafficking by Contras fighting the Sandinistas in
Nicaragua and the connection to Oliver North’s illegal
offshore Contra-support operation. So, in 1986, Kerry
hired Washington lawyer Jack Blum to head the
investigation.

 Four books were written about BCCI in the early
1990s:

"False Profits" by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin
(Houghton Mifflin: 1992).

"A Full Service Bank," by James Ring Adams and Douglas
Frantz (Pocket Books, 1992). 

"Dirty Money," by Mark Potts, Nicholas Kochan and
Robert Whittington (National Press Books, 1992). 

"The Outlaw Bank," by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne
(Random House, 1993).

As an investigator for Senator Frank Church’s
subcommittee on multinational corporations, Blum had
exposed the Lockheed bribes and ITT’s attempts to
destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in
Chile.

“The Foreign Relations Committee was looking at the
relationship between drug trafficking and arms dealing
and the way we run foreign policy,” says Blum. “’Did
we ignore all the stuff going on to support the war in
Nicaragua?’ We got into the issue of money
laundering.” Blum said he “stumbled across Lee Ritch,”
who told the panel, “I used to launder my money in the
Cayman Islands. The U.S. wised up, and the bankers
told me to shift to Panama. In Panama, I’m told the
only guy to talk to is Noriega. He sends me to BCCI.”

Blum says, “We go poking around. I found a guy who had
worked for BCCI. I met him in Miami. He said, ‘That’s
their major line of work. They’re a bunch of
criminals.’ He goes on to say that in addition to
handling drug money, they were managing Noriega’s
personal finances and that the bankers who did that
lived in Miami.” Noriega even carried a BCCI Visa
credit card.

So Blum subpoenaed that information. He said, “There
is a subplot between us and the federal government and
prosecutors. We find out about coming arrests for
money laundering [in an ongoing Tampa drug trafficking
investigation], but the feds want to make only a
limited case in Tampa; they don’t want to investigate
other ramifications. Their story is they had their
case and didn’t want it messed up with extraneous
stuff. The notion the other stuff was extraneous
boggles the mind.”

Blum began poking deeper and came across the CIA
standing in the shadows. He found that during the
1980s, the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports that
discussed BCCI’s criminal connections — drug
trafficking, money laundering — and its control of
Washington's First American Bank, part of an illegal
plot to get into the U.S. banking system. He also
found that this was accomplished with the help of
major U.S. figures, including former Treasury
Secretary Bert Lance, former Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford, former U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington,
ex-federal bank regulators, and former and current
local, state and federal legislators.

The CIA provided its reports to Treasury Secretary
Donald Regan but not to the prosecutors in Tampa. The
Treasury and Customs departments also sat on evidence.
Kerry tried to get the Bush Justice Department to
expand the Tampa investigation or to turn its
information over to the FBI or other agencies. It
refused.

Blum told me, “We started with laundering drug money,
but then pursued it much further and got in testimony
a pretty good layout of the criminal nature of the
bank. Having done that, we wrote a report and said the
matter needs further investigation. But the Justice
Department doesn’t pick up on any of the clues. I
talked to them. I got a leading figure in the bank to
turn evidence to the government, which didn’t want to
listen. I taped him for three days with undercover
agents in a hotel room in Miami; the government didn’t
transcribe the tapes.”

The chief Customs undercover agent who handled the
drug sting against BCCI was so disgusted, he quit. The
Justice Department ordered key witnesses not to
cooperate with Kerry, and it refused to produce
documents subpoenaed by his subcommittee. The CIA also
stonewalled or lied to the Kerry investigators.

As a junior senator, Kerry was further hampered
because his subcommittee mandate was limited to
looking into terrorism and drugs. But even that
investigation was bothering too many important people,
so Clayborne Pell, a Democratic senator, shut it down.

Then the Justice Department closed the Tampa case with
a plea bargain that let BCCI off the hook. Kerry was
furious. He thought the crooked bank should be shut
down. He said the deal kept the bank alive and
discouraged bank officials from telling the U.S. what
they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including
its ownership of First American and other U.S. banks.
However, the bank relied on its friends. Sen. Orrin
Hatch (R-Utah) defended the plea bargain on the Senate
floor, and then asked the bank to lend $10 million to
a friend.

Following the plea agreement, the Justice Department
stopped investigating BCCI for about 18 months. It
even lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open —
after being urged to do that by former Justice
Department personnel working for BCCI.

Kerry tried in 1990 and 1991 to get an investigation
by the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Democrat
Donald Riegle. But Riegle and four of the other
members of his committee had gotten money from Charles
Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who was
later convicted of fraud, and they weren’t interested
in drawing attention to crooked banks.

Finally, Kerry got permission to run a one-day
subcommittee hearing in May 1991. Then he started
holding public hearings through the banking committee,
which wouldn’t staff them; he had to use his own
people. “Riegle considered himself a gentlemen,
because he let Kerry do that,” says Blum. “Riegle is
probably the most misnamed U.S. senator.”

The bank’s friends prevented more Kerry hearings, says
Blum. “They got it out of Foreign Relations,” he
recalled. “We later learned that BCCI, between
September 1988 and July 1991 when the bank closed,
spent $26 million on lawyers and lobbyists trying to
keep themselves in business. They hired people on both
sides to shut [the investigations] down.”

But, Blum adds, “They didn’t stop me from going to the
New York County DA’s office with Kerry’s blessing to
assure a prosecution would ensue.” Blum went to see
New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and told
him about the Justice Department’s refusal to
investigate BCCI's involvement in drug money
laundering and other crimes. The Justice Department
and the Federal Reserve, run by Paul Volcker, refused
to aid the DA’s investigation.

However, Morgenthau got a grand jury indictment of
BCCI in July 1991. It said the bank and its founders
had defrauded depositors, falsified bank records to
hide illegal money laundering, committed millions of
dollars in larcenies and paid off public officials. It
charged that BCCI had been a criminal enterprise since
1972 and had paid millions of dollars in bribes to
central bankers or other financial officials in a
dozen developing countries. Morgenthau named Ghaith
Pharaon as a front man for BCCI who had gotten a
secret loan from the bank to invest in three U.S.
banks.

The New York Fed — not Washington — also took action.
It coordinated an action on the fourth of July weekend
1991 to shut BCCI down. And, finally, the DA’s
investigation forced Washington to act, though it kept
the case as limited as possible. Soon after, Assistant
Attorney General Robert S. Mueller III (now head of
the FBI) oversaw the indictment by a federal grand
jury of Democratic influence-peddler and former
Johnson Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and his
protégé Robert Altman — the top officials of First
American Bank — for misleading the Federal Reserve
Board about BCCI's secret control of the bank and
obstructing the Fed's inquiries into BCCI.

Altman got off after convincing the jurors that he —
an executive worth multi-millions of dollars in pay
and stock benefits — didn’t know who the bank’s true
owners were. Clifford evaded trial because of the
Pinochet defense: his health.

In September, the Justice Department came up with an
indictment of top BCCI officials which focused only on
drug-money laundering, not on fraud against the bank’s
depositors. It ignored leads, witnesses and evidence
that would have revealed the bank’s large scale frauds
— and exposed CIA and Reagan-Bush use of the bank.

“When I first looked at it, I thought there’s
something nefarious or embarrassing — what is it?
Their own incompetence? Worse? You never know the
answer,” says Blum. “There was the Fed, which looked
stupider than hell, the Office of the Comptroller who
were stupid beyond comprehension. The then head of CIA
said, yes, the CIA had used the bank. Everything you
touched about that bank led to somebody ugly. Margaret
Thatcher’s husband and maybe son, the prime minister
of Canada, a 'who’s who of politics and the worlds of
skullduggery.”

In July 1992, a New York County grand jury indicted
Khalid Bin Mahfouz and an aide for defrauding BCCI and
its depositors of as much as $300 million. But Bin
Mahfouz was in Saudi Arabia, out of reach, and in the
end Morgenthau settled for a fine. The Fed fined Bin
Mahfouz $170 million. The Justice Department didn’t go
after Bin Mahfouz at all. 

The Kerry Committee report issued in 1992 was damning.
It said that the White House knew about BCCI’s
criminal activities, that the U.S. intelligence
agencies used it for secret banking and that BCCI
routinely paid off American public officials. Among
the Kerry Report’s major findings:

Federal prosecutors handling the Tampa drug money
laundering indictment of BCCI did not use the
information they collected to focus on — or report to
federal agencies — BCCI’s other crimes, including its
secret, illegal ownership of First American Bank.

The Justice, Treasury and Customs departments failed
to support or aid investigators and prosecutors.

Following lobbying by former Justice officials working
for BCCI, the U.S. attorney in Tampa accepted a plea
agreement that kept BCCI alive and discouraged bank
officials from revealing other crimes.

CIA chief Casey and the agency knew, by early 1985, a
lot about what BCCI was up to and didn’t inform the
Justice Department or the Federal Reserve.

“After the CIA knew that BCCI was, as an institution,
a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it
continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's
secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations.”

The Federal Reserve approved the first hidden BCCI
takeover despite evidence the bank was behind it
because it was swayed by influence-peddlers such as
Clifford and because the CIA and Treasury failed to
raise warnings about what they knew.

There’s a lot about BCCI that outsiders will never
know. Once the investigations started, there were
seven fires in the fireproof London warehouses where
BCCI stored records. In one of them, four firemen were
killed.

Experience That Counts

During this presidential campaign, Kerry has talked a
lot about his service in Vietnam, but he doesn’t take
credit now for exposing BCCI, perhaps because he
thinks it’s too complicated for the American public to
understand the scandal. Yet, more than physical
courage, what the U.S. needs is guts and smarts and
the resolution and courage to fight scourges that
range from terrorism to international crime to
corporate corruption and tax evasion.

So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected
President? He would be not only the nation’s president
but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who
knows how to — and is willing to — overcome obstacles,
whether they be international criminals or U.S. power
brokers, to “follow the money” and bring about
justice.

Jack Blum, who is not involved in the Kerry campaign,
says: “There has never been a guy who has run for
president who has, hands-on, known the kinds of
substantive things he knows about the world of
international crime, about banking and international
bank regulation and finance, about the
interconnectedness of the world finance system and how
various intelligence agencies play into it. He is
uniquely qualified.”

Kerry’s experience fighting the Washington
establishment over BCCI also gave him a profound
education in the workings of the insider Washington
power and corruption that support corporate and
organized crime and weaken the country’s ability to
counter terrorism. He showed that he has what it takes
to stand up to the big-money special interests that
don’t want the system to change. 

Wife of Soldier Sentenced in Prison Abuse Scandal
Speaks Out 
    By Brian Witte 
    The Associated Press 

    Friday 22 October 2004 

    Baltimore - The wife of an Army reservist
sentenced to prison for abusing prisoners in Iraq said
she knows her husband was wrong, but she also blames
higher-ranking officials who "sit behind the curtains"
for the abuse. 

    Martha Frederick, wife of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip"
Frederick, said the eight-year sentence he received
Thursday for his role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
will force her family to "endure hardships and many
sacrifices." 

    "The pain sets deeper yet in knowing that he
serves these years not only for his actions or actions
of a few reservists, but those included in the chain
of command," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated
Press. 

    Her 38-year-old husband, of Buckingham, Va.,
received the stiffest punishment given so far in the
scandal. But she questioned why her husband's
superiors weren't being punished for what she said was
their complicity on the abuse. 

    "I feel outrage that he and a few others will bear
the weight for the actions of many," she wrote. 

    Since finding out her husband faced charges,
Frederick wrote that her family has felt as if they
were "facing a life-threatening situation when you
relive your life's most memorable moments as well as
contemplating all the things that you wish you could
change or have done differently." 

    Martha Frederick said she will always see her
husband as a "good soldier." 

    "I will see my husband as a far greater man than
those who have abandoned him, left him to be convicted
for his acts and the failures of their own," she
wrote. 

    Throughout the e-mail, she claims "misguided"
leadership led to the abuse of Iraqi detainees. She
wrote that the photographs and videos showing abuse
"do not represent the people of this country, nor do
they represent Chip as a person." 

    "I do not see Chip as a good soldier gone bad but
as a good soldier thrust into a no-win situation," she
wrote. 

    She writes of the pain and isolation her family
has felt, especially her husband, who was sentenced in
Iraq, far from his family. 

    "It is not just how my husband will endure
incarceration but how he will endure being left
behind, used and discarded," she wrote. 

    Frederick joined the Army National Guard at 17,
after convincing his mother to sign the papers
authorizing his enlistment. 

    Seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company
of Cresaptown, Md., have been charged in the scandal.
Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., is already
serving a one-year sentence after pleading guilty in
May to three counts. 

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