Cheney was covering up for terrorists by trying to end BCCI investigations

[blm]

When Kerry was investigating the terrorists' bank BCCI, I recall a certain Bush thug operative named Dick Cheney branding John Kerry as a "conspiracy theory nut" in hopes that the investigations could be stopped.

Shades of 9-11. Cheney threatened Daschle not to call for an investigation into it, either.

Cheney has been trying to cover up for the terrorists and those who really fund the terrorists for almost 20 years now. Would he like to explain this to the American people?



Follow the Money
How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank.
By David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Two decades ago, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a highly respected financial titan. In 1987, when its subsidiary helped finance a deal involving Texas oilman George W. Bush, the bank appeared to be a reputable institution, with attractive branch offices, a traveler's check business, and a solid reputation for financing international trade. It had high-powered allies in Washington and boasted relationships with respected figures around the world.

All that changed in early 1988, when John Kerry, then a young senator from Massachusetts, decided to probe the finances of Latin American drug cartels. Over the next three years, Kerry fought against intense opposition from vested interests at home and abroad, from senior members of his own party; and from the Reagan and Bush administrations, none of whom were eager to see him succeed.

By the end, Kerry had helped dismantle a massive criminal enterprise and exposed the infrastructure of BCCI and its affiliated institutions, a web that law enforcement officials today acknowledge would become a model for international terrorist financing. As Kerry's investigation revealed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, BCCI was interested in more than just enriching its clients--it had a fundamentally anti-Western mission. Among the stated goals of its Pakistani founder were to "fight the evil influence of the West," and finance Muslim terrorist organizations. In retrospect, Kerry's investigation had uncovered an institution at the fulcrum of America's first great post-Cold War security challenge.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html

[KoKo]

1. I remember this...it's a good one. Not much has been said about

Kerry and BCCI Investigation. :kick:

[cthrumatrix]

11. I'm sure NBC will jump right on it.... sarcasm off

[DinahMoeHum]

2. Cheney's a terrorist mollycoddler. (singsong)

:evilfrown:

[Sarvis]

3. drop the last word...

After his terror-inducing comments in his speech the other day (vote Bush or we'll get attacked), I think we can safely just say "Cheney is a terrorist."

[DinahMoeHum]

4. Touche! Welcome to DU, friend. . .

and get yourself a virtual drink in the Lounge.

:beer:

[blm]

5. I agree. Cheney and the rest of BushInc have been handinhand with

terrorists for decades. Now they want the public to believe they are best suited to fight them? What a crock. All they are doing is increasing the profit margins for all of the involved, including themselves.

[Octafish]

6. BCCI helped build Pakistani nuclear bomb. Thanks, Dick!

What Sneer doesn't want everyone to know is the BFEE helps nuclear proliferation. The bomb is good for bidnis. Why else would they out Valerie Plame, who was working to stop it? Here's the scoop on BCCI and Cheney.

Cheney helped cover-up Pakistani nuclear proliferation in '89 so US could sell country fighter jets

Tuesday, March 16 2004 @ 04:04 PM Eastern Standard Time
Jason Leopold

EXCERPT...

Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan's sales of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the U.S.-- nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq -- but turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen. In 1989, the year Khan first started selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow, a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared a shocking report for Cheney, who was then secretary of defense under the Bush I administration: Pakistan built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism. But Barlow's findings, as reported in a January 2002 story in Mother Jones magazine, were "politically inconvenient."

"A finding that Pakistan possessed a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported. Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and alleged 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes. Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses at the Pentagon and was fired.

"Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987," Mother Jones reported. "In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb." During the time that Barlow prepared his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert an Energy Department analyst, was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in Iraq. Siebert concluded that "Iraq has a major effort under way to produce nuclear weapons," and said that the National Security Council should investigate his findings. But the Bush administration?which had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran?ignored the report, the magazine reported. "This was not a failure of intelligence," Barlow told Mother Jones. "The intelligence was in the system."

Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published on March 29, 1993, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal so as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad, which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan's nuclear capabilities and had become so grave by the spring of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani nuclear threat was worse than the Cuban Missile crisis in the 1960s. "It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I've been in the U.S. government," Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. "It may be as close as we've come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis."

CONTINUED...

http://www.pakistan-facts.com/article.php/2004031621042158

Don't you just LOVE south Asia journalism? America should be so lucky.

[blm]

7. Hersh has so much on his plate with these thugs.

He could do a devastating article with all these links. But, for now, he's totally absorbed by Abu Ghraib.

[Octafish]

8. BFEE wants WW III ... Chimpageddon.

DrBB mentioned this scary article on a DU thread from long ago…

On the Nuclear Edge

by Seymour M. Hersh
Issue of 1993-03-29
Posted 2004-01-12

In the past few weeks, news reports have revealed troubling information about the possible export of Pakistani nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Libya, and about the role played in the transfers by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. There have long been questions about Dr. Khan, who has, whenever possible, avoided the public eye. In this piece from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh takes a prescient look at Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation, and at Dr. Khan.

On May 30, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union arrived in Washington for his second summit meeting with President George Bush. The Cold War was over, and the publicly announced agenda reflected that fact: the two world leaders would concentrate their talks on the future of unified Germany and on renewed negotiations to reduce long-range nuclear weapons. Most Americans were increasingly upbeat about the prospects for world peace. A Times/CBS public-opinion poll of more than eleven hundred Americans taken a week before the summit showed that fewer than one in five believed nuclear war to be likely by the year 2000—far fewer than those interviewed in earlier polls.

There was a fearful irony in the poll, because in the days before Gorbachev’s visit the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, as both nations continued their tug-of-war over control of the state of Kashmir, on India’s northern border, whose status has been in dispute since the collapse of the British Empire in India, in 1947. During months of increasing tension, India had massed two hundred thousand troops, including paramilitary forces, in Kashmir, and had deployed five brigades of its most sophisticated attack unit, the Indian Army Strike Corps, fifty miles from the Pakistani border in the south. Pakistan, against which the much larger India had fought—and won—three wars since 1947, openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert. There would be no repeat of the disastrous two-week war of December, 1971, when Pakistan, outgunned and outgeneraled, was dismembered by an Indian blitzkrieg and lost what is now Bangladesh.

The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan’s American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of—or had chosen to remove herself from—the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation’s avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02

[blm]

9. That just gave me a thought, Octafish....

DrBB is a very good writer, and knows how to make a point quickly and precisely. If he has a clear view of these connections, maybe he's the one to give the rest of us the talking points to use in LTTE, emails to media and on other boards.

[Octafish]

10. Great idea, blm!

The stuff's too dense for writers of lesser talents -- cough.
DrBB's the man.



Uh. You ask him, though. I t'ink he's mad at me because of
something I said about Ant Man Bee.

[blm]

12. sorry...he doesn't know me from Adam

or Adam Ant Man Bee?