POLITICO was started by BFEE chum Joseph Albritton. Yet, it does a respectable job of covering and breaking political news.
From "Democracy Now:
The Pinochet File
EXCERPT...
AMY GOODMAN: And who was Joseph Allbritton? I mean—
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, Joseph Allbritton was one of the big banking corporate moguls of Washington, D.C. He owned the sports team. I forget whether it was the basketball team or the Redskins. At one point he owned a bunch of newspapers and radio stations. He owned Riggs Bank. But fundamentally, he participated in a conspiracy to hide Augusto Pinochet’s money. And he—they evaded the assets—Juan Garcés managed to get Pinochet’s assets frozen, but Riggs Bank violated that court order to freeze his assets by secretly starting to funnel back to him all of his money in $50,000 cashier’s checks. They had a courrier that would bring literally bundles of these checks to Pinochet’s house in Santiago. And the story returns to Juan Garcés, because more than $8 million of this $20-plus million stash of money was given back to Pinochet illegally by Riggs, and Juan Garcés stepped in and said, "That money belongs to the Chilean people and to the victims of Pinochet." And he recovered it.
AMY GOODMAN: Allbritton’s son now runs Politico.
PETER KORNBLUH: Allbritton owned—started Politico, created Politico. And then, when he passed away, his son—
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Allbritton.
PETER KORNBLUH: —took over. So there’s still a presence of the family, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you got, Juan Garcés, millions of dollars of Chile’s money frozen, and then how was it distributed back to the people of Chile?
JUAN GARCÉS: Thanks to an investigation in the U.S. Senate, as Peter was explaining—
PETER KORNBLUH: Which was led by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a terrific senator.
JUAN GARCÉS: Yeah, their committee on investigations. And they accepted to cooperate with a court of justice that was prosecuting Pinochet. And thanks to this cooperation between the U.S. Senate and the Spanish court, we reached to indict the owners of Riggs Bank. That is something that is without precedent, from their own pocket—
PETER KORNBLUH: Right.
JUAN GARCÉS: —paid the totality of the money that went through the bank channels hiding the Pinochet money. And we distributed that to the victims of Pinochet that were considered such with the institution of the court. It is the only money that related directly to Pinochet has never been distributed to the victims.
AMY GOODMAN: But that money, the millions of dollars, how did you identify the victims, the survivors, and have it distributed?
JUAN GARCÉS: That was—the victims were recognized as such in the court, because thousands of them have been the object of an inquiry inside Chile by an official commission, committee Riggs, that established the list of thousands of people that were murdered, also forcibly disappeared. And we in Spain, with the cooperation of Chileans inside Chile, created a new commission for victims of torture, victims that survived the torture. And we found, through this commission, identified more than 20,000 persons. And then they have their right to receive a part of the indemnities.
CONTINUED...
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/9/10/the_pinochet_file_how_us_politicians_banks_corporations_aided_chilean_coup_dictatorship
That must be some money, to have so much you can still stay rich after paying off victims of war crimes.
OTOH, Salon has done a on excellent job of going where Corporate McPravda won't venture-- covering crimes if the national security state, from Dulles brothers to Kennedy brothers, from Hanoi and Baghdad to Wall Street and Washington.
I'll go with Salon.
= new reply since forum marked as read
