Posted on 11/16/2005 11:22:36 AM PST by parnasokan
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Rather difficult to fight the enemy whilst your kith and kin are stabbing you in the back, correct?
I hear ya Fred...
Power Corp. has had a lot to do with Canadian foreign policy in this war, in that it is entwined with some of the power brokers. Have a look at this Western Standard article:
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2005/cover030505.htm
How Montreal's Power Corp. found itself caught up in the biggest fiasco in UN history
by Kevin Steel, The Western Standard
Saturday, March 5, 2005
Most Canadian companies look forward to the day they earn themselves a mention on the prime-time news. They hire PR firms and spend thousands to harass news editors with press releases to tout their latest acquisition, invention or foreign venture in hopes of convincing someone to give them even a passing mention on the national news–never mind the nearly unimaginable publicity of being plugged on a U.S. newscast.
But when Montreal-based Power Corporation of Canada found itself, in late January, the topic of a news story on America’s top-rated Fox News Channel, which draws millions of U.S. and international viewers, executives there probably weren’t thrilled. Unlike most publicly traded firms looking to build their brand on Wall Street, Power Corp. is, at the best of times, a quiet, often obscured company (in the past year it’s issued a total of five news releases). That might seem strange, given the massive size and, well, power wielded by the holding company. Power controls some of Canada’s biggest blue-chip companies, including the Investors Group, the country’s largest mutual fund dealer, and investment firm Mackenzie Financial. It owns insurers Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life and London Life. Power owns several Quebec newspapers, including La Presse. It also holds substantial positions in Chinese airlines and telecom firms and has large stakes in the world’s leading entertainment company, Bertelsmann, as well as a big piece of one of Europe’s largest oil producers. In 2003, Power Corp. reported annual revenues of $16 billion.
But the Fox News story wasn’t prompted by an announcement from Power of some billion-dollar takeover or the appointment of a new senior executive. It was something altogether different: the revelation that the man handpicked by the UN secretary general last April to probe the UN’s scandalized Oil-for-Food program, Paul Volcker, had not disclosed to the UN that he was a paid adviser to Power Corp., a story which had originally been broken by a small, independent Toronto newspaper, the Canada Free Press. Why did the highest-rated cable channel in the U.S. care? Because the more that Americans came to know about Oil-for-Food, which has been called the largest corruption scandal in history, the more the name of this little-known Montreal firm kept popping up. And the more links that seemed to emerge between Power Corp. and individuals or organizations involved in the Oil-for-Food scandal, the more Fox News and other news outlets sniffing around this story began to ask questions about who, exactly, this Power Corp. is. And, they wanted to know, what, if anything, did Power have to do with a scandal in which companies around the world took bribes to help a murderous dictator scam billions of dollars in humanitarian aid out of the UN while his people suffered and starved?
Just a month before the Canada Free Press revealed that Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, is a member of Power Corp.’s international advisory board–and a close friend and personal adviser to Power’s owner, Paul Desmarais Sr.–a U.S. congressional investigation into the UN scandal discovered that Power Corp. had extensive connections to BNP Paribas, a French bank that had been handpicked by the UN in 1996 to broker the Oil-for-Food program. In fact, Power actually once owned a stake in Paribas through its subsidiary, Pargesa Holding SA. The bank also purchased a stake in Power Corp. in the mid-seventies and, as recently as 2003, BNP Paribas had a 14.7 per cent equity and 21.3 per cent voting stake in Pargesa, company records show. John Rae, a director and former executive at Power (brother of former Ontario premier Bob Rae), was president and a director of the Paribas Bank of Canada until 2000. And Power Corp. director Michel François-Poncet, who was, in 2001, the vice-chairman of Pargesa, also sat on Paribas’s board, though he died Feb. 10, at the age of 70. A former chair of Paribas’s management board, André Levy-Lang, is currently a member of Power’s international advisory council. And Amaury-Daniel de Seze, a member of BNP Paribas’s executive council, also sat on Pargesa’s administrative council in 2002.
In September, the U.S. Congress–conducting one of seven U.S. government investigations into Oil-for-Food, in addition to the UN probe–subpoenaed crates of documents from the bank, which earned $700 million for its work, ostensibly to investigate the companies that had been doing business through Paribas that may have ripped off Oil-for-Food. But Capitol Hill insiders say that Paribas itself is of interest to congressional investigators, in particular whether Paribas violated "know your client"—style banking regulations, which require banks to be vigilant in watching for money laundering and other criminal activities being conducted through their bank. In February, Congress subpoenaed more documents from the bank, looking for very specific information. "The international program was managed through the escrow accounts of BNP maintained in New York and we have pretty strict banking laws, pretty strict disclosure laws and have gotten even more so with the passage of the Patriot Act," says one aide to a senior Republican working for the House International Relations Committee, one of the bodies investigating the Oil-for-Food program. "There are some doubts as to the veracity of BNP’s compliance with the more stringent rules that are contained in the Patriot Act that were law by the end of ‘01."
The reason investigators are interested in Power’s possible links to the bank that acted as a clearing house for Oil-for-Food is because the firm also appears to have had a stake in an oil firm that had been working out lucrative contracts with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Subsidiary Pargesa owns the largest single stake in Total Group Inc. (a Belgian-French petroleum multi-national corporation formed from the merger of Total, Petrofina and Elf Aquitaine), which reportedly had been negotiating, prior to the U.S. invasion in March 2003, rich contracts with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to develop and exploit the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq. Those regions are estimated to contain roughly a quarter of Iraq’s reserves. The contracts were on the verge of being signed in 1997, one year after the beginning of the UN’s Oil-for-Food program replaced U.S. sanctions on Iraq, when the French government intervened and stopped the deal. Paul Desmarais Jr., now chairman of Power Corp. (Paul Sr. retired in 1996, but is said to be active in the firm), sits on the board of Total, and Power director, François-Poncet, also sat on the board of Total’s predecessor firm, Totalfina Elf. Paribas also owned shares in Total as recently as 2000, records show.
Add up the facts that Power Corp. appears to be connected to an oil company that would benefit extensively if Saddam remained in power, with the bank appointed by the UN to help broker an Oil-for-Food program that appears to have been directly enriching Saddam, and which is being investigated for irregularities that may have abetted the wholesale corruption that eventually engulfed Oil-for-Food, and that Power’s owners have a professional and personal relationship with the man hired by the UN to investigate the corruption, and it’s no wonder that more and more questions are being asked about the firm.
The United Nations has refused to co-operate with the U.S. Congress investigations into the US$67-billion Oil-for-Food program and Security Council members Russia and France have refused to give Volcker the right to subpoena witnesses in the internal UN probe. But the way the scam appears to have worked is that Saddam was permitted to sell oil to customers he selected himself (he favoured French and Russian companies) at below-market prices, by allocating them oil vouchers. The customers could resell the oil at market prices and make a large profit, provided they kicked back a portion of the money to Saddam, who used the money for everything but badly needed food and medicine (the program came to be known by critics as Oil-for-Palaces). It is estimated that Saddam may have skimmed as much as US$2 billion from the aid program. And the fact that Iraqis were suffering while Saddam built up weapons and enriched his own personal wealth, obviously makes this scandal not only bigger, but more heinous than any run-of-the-mill Wall Street book-cooking. Companies implicated in what effectively amounts to crimes against humanity may never recover. And, to be clear, Power Corp. has not been linked in any direct way to the con. As for the fact that Power’s name has come up several times in the investigation, Power’s vice-president, general counsel and secretary Ted Johnson believes the news reports to be inaccurate and irresponsible. Says Johnson: "The stories coming out of the United States are a bunch of misinformation based on innuendo and half-truths."
There’s a tale they used to tell on Parliament Hill about a president, a billionaire, an ambassador and a prime minister. The four of them got into an elevator one day at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, when Jim Blanchard, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, began ribbing the billionaire, Paul Desmarais’s son André, about his recent marriage to France Chrétien, the daughter of then prime minister Jean Chrétien, as then U.S. president Bill Clinton listened in. "France certainly married well," Blanchard reportedly said to the prime minister. To which Chrétien replied, smugly: "André married well."
In reality, the wedding of France and André, in 1981, had only formalized the marriage between the Canadian government to the Desmaraises. While the family, worth an estimated US$4 billion and ranked the sixth richest in Canada, has always kept a fairly low profile, they have been in the news for decades--even if most Canadians never really noticed. The fact that the family happens to be friendly with the man who once ran the U.S. federal reserve won’t surprise those who know them: the Desmaraises are as well connected politically as they are corporately. And it’s arguable, based on the circumstantial evidence anyway, that nothing happens on Parliament Hill that isn’t, in some way, a product of the Desmarais family’s design. Prime Minister Paul Martin and former PMs Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau have all been close, personal friends of Paul Desmarais Sr. The story on Parliament Hill was that Trudeau’s leadership bid was cooked up in Power headquarters in Victoria Square in Montreal. In the hiatus of his political career in the 1980s, Chrétien cooled his heels sitting on the board of a Power Corp. subsidiary, Consolidated Bathurst, and Power executive John Rae ran Chrétien’s leadership campaigns in 1984 and 1990, as well as the 1993 election campaign that brought Chrétien to office. Martin got his start in the business world in the early sixties, working for then Power Corp. president Maurice Strong, and was made a millionaire, thanks to an undisclosed 1981 deal in which Desmarais sold him Canada Steamship Lines. Strong continues to act as one of Martin’s senior advisors.
But the connections don’t end there. Ted Johnson, the Power vice-president, is a former assistant to Trudeau. Paul Desmarais Sr. has long been a mentor of former prime minister Brian Mulroney. Don Mazankowski, a former Mulroney cabinet minister, sits on Power Corp.’s board. Bill Davis, former premier of Ontario, is on Power Corp.’s international advisory council. Daniel Johnson Jr., Quebec Liberal leader and briefly premier, worked for Power from 1973 to 1981. In fact, the political connections really don’t stop at all. You could spend days trying to trace the connections that Paul Desmarais Sr. has not only with Canadian politicians, but in nearly every western capital in the world. Not bad for a guy from Sudbury, Ont., who started out fixing buses to save a nearly bankrupt transport company, inherited from his father. Desmarais’s friends have joked that he "collects politicians."
And he has been doing it for a long time. Thirty years ago, in his 1976 book,
The Canadian Establishment, Peter C. Newman wrote, "It seemed to those who knew him best that Desmarais sometimes treated politicians with the deference due to sleepwalkers: men who must be led, but ever so gently, lest they wake up to the fact."
If there’s one government in which Power has as much interest as it does in Canada, it’s the UN. Maurice Strong, president of Power from 1964 to 1966–who went on to run Ontario Hydro and Petro-Canada–is not only a member of the Privy Council for Canada and a direct adviser to Paul Martin, he’s also a senior adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Appointed by Annan in 1997, after he took over the general secretariat, Strong’s specific role was "to assist planning and executing a far-reaching reform of the world body." Since Annan’s son, Kojo, has been implicated in the Oil-for-Food scandal, having accepted money from a Swiss firm, Cotecna, which was in charge of overseeing the shipments of food and medicine to Iraqis, Strong’s presence at Annan’s side provides yet more ammunition to those looking to link Power to this terrible tale of corruption and mismanagement (no direct links have been established). In fact, Strong had been an undersecretary general of the United Nations since 1985. He once told Toronto journalist Elaine Dewar that he liked working for the UN specifically because of its undemocratic nature. "He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda," wrote Dewar in her 1995 book, Cloak of Green. "He told me he had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: no voters had put him in office, he didn’t have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect many lives."
How close Strong is with Power Corp. these days isn’t clear. But what is clear is that certain UN policies have been a boost to the value of the conglomerate. For one thing, the UN-created Kyoto Protocol–which was spearheaded by none other than Strong himself, born of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which he chaired–could have significant potential benefits for Power’s holdings in China. Through their subsidiary, CITIC Pacific Ltd., the Desmaraises own power-generating facilities, automobile concerns and myriad other industrial interests throughout the Communist nation. The fact that Kyoto’s framers deliberately created regulations that will hamstring exactly those sorts of businesses in the West by imposing limits on greenhouse gas production, but exempt China from those same limits, gives Power a competitive international advantage. Meanwhile, under the protocol, Chinese power plants will be able to sell clean air "credits," or allowances, to Western producers for cash. Some economists have predicted that Ottawa will buy credits as a way of meeting their Kyoto emissions targets.
And few companies stood to benefit from the UN’s resistance to the invasion of Iraq to the same extent that Total might have, had Saddam made good on promised resource development deals with the oil giant. Since the early nineties, Total and Elf had been jointly negotiating with Hussein to develop the Majnoon oilfields north of Basra. In 2000, Total’s president of Middle East exploration and production, had publicly suggested, on several occasions, that the Oil-for-Food sanctions were hurting Iraqi oil development. Shortly afterward, the two companies merged, with Power Corp. owning the biggest stake. According to Power’s official history, "When . . . Totalfina proceeded to take over Elf Aquitaine, the Pargesa group emerged as the largest shareholder, with 3.4 per cent of the shares and three seats on the board of what was to become TotalFina Elf, the fourth largest integrated petroleum company in the world."
Last year, the New York Post interviewed prominent Wall Street figure Gerald Hillman, managing partner of Trireme Investments in New York, who had seen and analyzed the contract. He called the deal "highly unusual" and "very one-sided," as it permitted Total to keep 75 per cent of total production, whereas most deals with foreign partners top out at 50 per cent. It seems that the longer Saddam stayed in power, the better it was for the Total Group and its shareholders in Montreal.
The fact that sustaining Saddam directly could have potentially benefitted a family connected to so many Canadian mandarins and politicians–and married into the family of the prime minister–led some Canadians to raise questions about the motivations behind the Liberal party’s decision to refuse to support the invasion of Iraq and Saddam’s ouster. When Chrétien announced that decision in early 2003, Opposition foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day asked in the House of Commons, "I do not fault the prime minister’s family ties with his nephew [Raymond Chrétien], our ambassador to France or with Paul Desmarais Sr., who is the largest individual shareholder of France’s largest corporation, TotalFina Elf, which has billions of dollars of contracts with Saddam’s former regime. With this valuable source of information and experience at his fingertips, has the prime minister ever discussed Iraq or France with his family or friends in the Desmarais empire?"
Chrétien responded by defending his nephew first and, with regard to Power, added: "I hope the attack against the people who have invested money in something, that he will repeat it outside and he will face the consequences." Power’s general counsel, Johnson, told reporters at the time that TotalFina Elf "had no contracts in Iraq . . . Hasn’t. Doesn’t. Nothing with Saddam." Just a few months earlier, The New York Times reported that "The French oil giant TotalFina Elf has the largest position in Iraq, with exclusive negotiating rights to develop Majnoon, a field on the Iranian border with estimated reserves of 10 billion barrels, and Bin Umar, with an estimated production potential of 440,000 barrels a day, according to oil industry executives."John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based security think-tank, says that Power Corp. directors were probably not thinking about foreign policy implications when they invested in TotalFina Elf. "They probably thought–and a lot of people thought like this–there would eventually be a reopened Iraq, probably under Saddam but not necessarily, and they would like to be in position when it did," Thompson says. "Part of this whole thing was the Europeans bidding to have control of Iraqi oil and afraid that the Americans would be there instead. For the Americans, it was all about not having weapons of mass destruction coming out of the area, but for the Europeans it was all about oil."
Jason Kenney, a Conservative MP, says the questions being raised about Power’s possible connection to Oil-for-Food are worth asking. But he’s quick to point out that if the Liberals guided the country’s foreign policy based on their connections to Power, then we should be asking questions about the Canadian government, too. "I am not the least bit critical of the Desmarais family for being rational actors in a free marketplace and pursuing their advantage," says Kenney. "I am, however, somewhat disquieted by the degree to which Power Corp.’s corporate interest seems to influence Canadian foreign policy. Obviously, every company seeks to influence government policy–regulatory, taxation or otherwise–but Power Corp. seems to have a particularly unique influence over Canadian foreign policy."
That’s something that hasn’t been proven. But in addition to Power’s connection to Total, there’s the connection to Paribas, the bank selected to be in charge of the Oil-for-Food money. According to Power Corp.’s official history, produced in 2000, in 1981 it "made a $20-million investment in Pargesa Holding SA, a Swiss corporation that owned a major interest in Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas (Suisse). The Swiss bank had been a subsidiary of Compagnie Financière de Paris et des Pays-Bas, the French banking organization commonly known as Paribas, with which Power had enjoyed a close association for several years."
Nadhmi Auchi, who has been identified as a cousin of Saddam Hussein, was a significant shareholder in BNP Paribas at least until 2001. Auchi, who resides in London and owns a company called General Mediterranean Holdings, was ranked by London’s Sunday Times in 2003 as England’s thirty-fourth richest person, with some estimates putting his net worth at US$3 billion. In its 2001 annual report, General Mediterranean Holdings described itself as the largest single shareholder in BNP Paribas.
Auchi is a former member of Saddam’s Baathist party. In 1959, he was tried, along with Saddam Hussein, in an attempted assassination plot. He eventually fled Iraq and publicly distanced himself from Saddam after the dictator murdered his two brothers. Time magazine reported in 2003 that Auchi maintained deep connections to Iraq and built much of his fortune selling them armaments. He has been fingered as a key figure in the Oil-for-Food scandal, with accusations that he acted as one of Saddam’s brokers. He certainly is no stranger to shady deals: in 2003, Auchi was convicted in France of bribery charges, along with a raft of Elf oil executives, in a scandal dating back to 1990 involving the sale of a Spanish oil refinery.
Power also has indirect connections to Iraq through one of its directors, Laurent Dassault, managing director of Dassault Investissements, the parent company of Dassault Aviation, a French-based weapons and aeronautics manufacturer that sells, among other things, the Mirage jet. During Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran in the eighties, Dassault Aviation was a major supplier of aircraft to the Hussein regime and it has been alleged that the firm continued illegal weapon sales to Iraq during the embargo period, using intermediaries and a complex system of money laundering set up by the Hussein regime.
Meanwhile, the UN had its own reasons for wanting to keep Oil-for-Food in business. For some strange reason, the aid program had been set up so that the UN would keep a portion of all oil sold through the program–compensation for the costs of overseeing the aid initiative–three per cent of every barrel sold. Aid programs usually use money from contributing members to finance their administration. Recipients of previous UN aid programs had not been forced to pay the overhead of the programs. And since the fee paid to the UN was variable, the longer Oil-for-Food went on and the more oil that was sold through it, the more money the world body would earn.
That was not enough, however, for Benon Sevan, the man appointed by Annan to oversee the Oil-for-Food program. An interim report issued by Volcker in February found that Sevan–who has since retired from the UN–had personally requested that Iraq allocate some of its oil vouchers (with which companies could resell Iraqi oil at a lucrative profit) to a company with which he was affiliated. Documents uncovered by investigators indicate that Sevan may have directly been the beneficiary of oil allocations. Volcker told reporters that Sevan’s conduct was "ethically improper" and that he had "created a grave and continuing conflict of interest."
Now, Volcker himself is the one facing allegations of conflict. In addition to his connections to Power Corp., which he did not disclose upon being appointed head of the UN probe, Volcker has also been linked to a pro-UN lobby group, the United Nations Association of the United States (which happens to receive generous support from BNP Paribas). Critics are suggesting that the final report, expected in June, could end up being a whitewash.
Oil-for-Food has certainly put the UN’s credibility at stake in a way that no other incident has before. The world body has already demonstrated an inability to deal effectively with rogue dictators, such as Hussein and North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, and has proven impotent to end genocides, like Rwanda in 1994 and Darfur today. But if the world discovers that the UN cannot even run a basic aid program, then there isn’t much left for it to do. "The liberals are having a harder time asserting that what the conservatives want is to get the U.S. out of the UN," says the Republican aide. "They can say that, but it’s not true. We need international mediating organizations like the UN. But you know what? We need them to work. And if they are not working, we are either going to make them work or we are going to find substitutes," he says. Increasingly, he reports, both Republicans and Democrats are open to finding alternatives to the UN for handling international affairs. "Maybe that model is NATO," says the aide. "If the UN is unreformable, then it will begin to shrink in its importance. Certainly in the United States it is already shrinking. That can be good or that can be bad. It is what it is. We do need these international mediating institutions and if the UN cannot step up to the plate and do it, then you are going to see a U.S. push in the next generation to get something else to do it," the aide says.
And certainly that has broad implications for Canada, whose government invested heavily in the UN when it stood by the world body’s plan to keep Oil-for-Food in place, rather than stand by the U.S. in putting an end to a containment program that wasn’t really containing Saddam at all. Whether Canada’s foreign policy–given the government’s connection to Power–was "all about the oil," as some have theorized, however, may never be determined. Or, it likely won’t be determined here: while there are six probes being conducted into the Oil-for-Food scandal in the U.S., and one through the UN, there is no investigation underway in this country into any involvement by Canadian companies. And, with few exceptions, the Canadian mainstream media seems to have largely ignored the story linking Volcker to Power Corp. The firm itself has issued no official statement on the accusations.
One press release did come across the wires on Jan. 27 with good news about Power Corp. Not from the normally quiet Power itself, mind you, but from KPMG, an accounting firm that works for Power (and, coincidentally, did audit work on the Oil-for-Food program). The news? A survey conducted in conjunction with pollsters Ipsos-Reid and the Globe and Mail found that Power Corp. is considered the most respected business in Quebec, as ranked by its peers. Hopefully, when all the smoke clears on Oil-for-Food, that will still be the case.
Here's an(other) excellent article by Mark Steyn on Power Corp.
http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=542
Monday, 14 February 2005
Mark Steyn
I always love the bit on the big international news story where they try to find the Canadian angle. A couple of months back, every time I switched on The National, there seemed to be no news at all and Peter Mansbridge was in the middle of some 133-part series of reports on “Canadians making a difference in the world,” which at least three nights a week seemed to be an “encore presentation” of the same worthy soft-focus featurette about some guy helping with an irrigation project in Sudan.
Once upon a time, it didn’t seem such an effort to find “Canadians making a difference in the world”--D-Day, say, or even the early years of Pearsonian peacekeeping. But it’s a stretch nowadays. In the maple-free zone of the Afghan campaign in fall 2001, several desperate media outlets were driven to rhapsodizing over my old chum from Fleet Street days, Alex Renton, spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam--or to give him his full honorific, as the Sun chain’s Greg Weston liked to put it, “the Toronto-born spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam.” The Toronto-born Alex spent his formative years at Eton--not Eton, Ontario, the agreeable municipality a scenic one-day drive from Sault Ste. Marie, but Eton College, the swanky boys’ school for Brit toffs. His father is Lord Renton, a cabinet minister under Mrs. Thatcher. I’m all for celebrating the rich diversity of the Canadian mosaic, but we haven’t had a Canuck like this since Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, checked out of Rideau Hall. Still, any oasis in a desert. When I made a couple of cracks about Alex being the designated Billy Bishop of the new world war, I got a huffy e-mail from the Hindu Kush protesting that it wasn’t his fault the likes of Greg Weston had decided to anoint him as the Great White Hope of Canadian Global Relevance.
And yet, throughout this period, there has indeed been a Canadian making a difference in the world-and if The National wanted to do a 133-part special report on him, for once they’d have enough material. Most of us know Paul Desmarais as the . . . well, let’s hold it there: most Canadians don’t know Paul Desmarais at all. You could stop the first thousand people walking down Yonge Street and I’ll bet no one would know who he is. But the few who do know him know him as the kingmaker behind Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin. Jean Chrétien’s daughter is married to Paul Desmarais’s son. Paul Martin was an employee of M. Desmarais’s Power Corp., and his Canada Steamship Lines was originally a subsidiary of Power Corp. that M. Desmarais put Mr. Martin in charge of. In other words, Paul Martin’s public identity--successful self-made businessman, not just a career pol, knows how to meet payroll, etc.--is entirely derived from the patronage of M. Desmarais.
That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Imagine if Jenna Bush married the chairman of Halliburton’s son, and then George W. Bush was succeeded by a president who’d been an employee of Halliburton: Michael Moore’s next documentary would be buried under wall-to-wall Oscars and Palmes d’Or. But M. Desmarais has managed to turn Ottawa into a company town without anyone being aware of the company. We’re a G8 economy; it would be reasonable to expect a prominent British or American businessman to number prominent political figures among his friends, but to have brought so many of them into his company and even family would surely excite some comment. Power Corp.’s other alumni range from Quebec premiers to Canada’s most prominent international diplomat, Maurice Strong. In fairness, you don’t have to work for M. Desmarais to reach the top of the greasy pole-Kim Campbell managed it, for about a week and a half.
But this is just the hicksville stuff. What’s really impressive is that, when one considers the epic events of the last three years, the truly Canadian content is not Toronto-born aid spokespersons, but the ubiquitous presence of M. Desmarais.
During the Iraq war, for example, I mentioned en passant that Power Corp. is the biggest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, the western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein (it has since changed its name to the Total Group). Total had secured development rights to 25 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves, a transformative deal that would catapult the company from a second-rank player into the big leagues with Exxon and British Petroleum. For a year, the antiwar crowd had told us it was “all about oil”--that the only reason Iraq was being “liberated” was so Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the rest of the gang could annex in perpetuity the second biggest oil reserves in the world. But, if it was all about oil, then the fact--fact--is that the only Western leader with a direct stake in the issue was not the Texas oilpatch stooge in Washington, but Jean Chrétien: his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren stood to be massively enriched by the Total-Saddam agreement. It depended on two factors: Saddam remaining in power, and the feeble UN sanctions being either weakened into meaninglessness or quietly dropped. M. Chrétien may have refused to join the Iraq war on “principle,” but fortunately his principles happened to coincide with the business interests of both TotalFinaElf and the Baath party.
As I said, I mentioned this curious footnote at the time. Stockwell Day picked up on it. The CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and all the rest steered clear. A bland perfunctory 200-word CP story reporting M. Desmarais’s denial--“Power Financial Head Refutes Saddam Link”--was carried by far more media outlets than had bothered going anywhere near Day’s original remarks.
Well, okay. Let’s take M. Desmarais’s word for it. But, getting on for two years later, we’re in the middle of the UN Oil-for-Fraud investigation, the all-time biggest scam, bigger than Enron and Worldcom and all the rest added together. And whaddaya know? The bank that handled all the money from the program turns out to be BNP Paribas, which tends to get designated by Associated Press and co. as a “French bank” but is, as it happens, controlled by one of M. Desmarais’s holding companies. That alone should cause even the droopiest bloodhound to pick up a scent: the UN’s banker for its Iraqi “humanitarian” program turns out to be (to all intents) Saddam’s favourite oilman.
I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, and, if I were, I’d look for a sinister global organization with a less obvious name. If “Power Corp.” was the moniker given to the sinister front operation for the latest Bond villain, critics would bemoan how crass the 007 franchise had become. And a “Power Corp.” that controlled the “Total Group” would have them hooting with derision. But it’s nevertheless the case that M. Desmarais’s bank functioned as the cashier for Saddam’s gaming of the global-compassion crowd: if a company agreed to sell Iraq some children’s medicine for $100 million, Iraq would invoice BNP Paribas for $110 million, pay the supplier and divert the skim-off into other areas. Everyone knew this was happening. It seems impossible, even with the minimal auditing, that BNP Paribas did not.
So here is a Canadian “making a difference in the world.” Suppose Conrad Black controlled a bank that had enriched a brutal dictator with a fortune intended to go to starving children, and that he also had an oil company that had cooked up an arrangement to make billions from the same dictator’s oil resources. Think Maude Barlow and the CBC might show an interest? But Paul Desmarais’s no-publicity clause is apparently enshrined in the Charter of Rights. So on it goes. Only the other week, M. Desmarais was hosting at his home in Quebec Nicholas Sarkozy, very likely the next president of France. Even after they’d become heads of government, neither Bush nor Blair could be bothered swinging by Ottawa to look in on Chrétien; not for years. But an invitation from M. Desmarais, and France’s coming man can’t wait to hop on the plane.
M. Desmarais’s spectacular rise from an obscure Quebec bus company operator to an obscure global colossus is an amazing story. Instead of struggling to find a local angle on the international scene, why doesn’t the CBC just start from the basic premise that whatever the subject--Iraq, oil-for-food, the European Union--somewhere at the heart of it will be the world’s least famous Canadian.
Instead, not a whisper. The good news is it’s not because Robert Rabinovitch, president of the CBC, is another discreet Power Corp. alumnus. He’s not. Rabinovitch’s close buddy, John Rae, who ran Chrétien’s campaigns, is. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old colleague Joel Bell, who was Trudeau’s chief economic adviser. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old boss, Senator Michael Pitfield. And so’s . . .
P.S. If, by the time of publication, Power Corp. has bought the Western Standard, please disregard all of the above.
"Where does Wilson fit in that matrix? He's gotta be there somewhere."
And where does Paddy Buchanan and his ilk fit into here, too? Where exactly does their loyalties lie? Old Europe?
Here's an(other) excellent article by Mark Steyn on Power Corp.
http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=542
Monday, 14 February 2005
Mark Steyn
I always love the bit on the big international news story where they try to find the Canadian angle. A couple of months back, every time I switched on The National, there seemed to be no news at all and Peter Mansbridge was in the middle of some 133-part series of reports on “Canadians making a difference in the world,” which at least three nights a week seemed to be an “encore presentation” of the same worthy soft-focus featurette about some guy helping with an irrigation project in Sudan.
Once upon a time, it didn’t seem such an effort to find “Canadians making a difference in the world”--D-Day, say, or even the early years of Pearsonian peacekeeping. But it’s a stretch nowadays. In the maple-free zone of the Afghan campaign in fall 2001, several desperate media outlets were driven to rhapsodizing over my old chum from Fleet Street days, Alex Renton, spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam--or to give him his full honorific, as the Sun chain’s Greg Weston liked to put it, “the Toronto-born spokesman for the international aid agency Oxfam.” The Toronto-born Alex spent his formative years at Eton--not Eton, Ontario, the agreeable municipality a scenic one-day drive from Sault Ste. Marie, but Eton College, the swanky boys’ school for Brit toffs. His father is Lord Renton, a cabinet minister under Mrs. Thatcher. I’m all for celebrating the rich diversity of the Canadian mosaic, but we haven’t had a Canuck like this since Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, checked out of Rideau Hall. Still, any oasis in a desert. When I made a couple of cracks about Alex being the designated Billy Bishop of the new world war, I got a huffy e-mail from the Hindu Kush protesting that it wasn’t his fault the likes of Greg Weston had decided to anoint him as the Great White Hope of Canadian Global Relevance.
And yet, throughout this period, there has indeed been a Canadian making a difference in the world-and if The National wanted to do a 133-part special report on him, for once they’d have enough material. Most of us know Paul Desmarais as the . . . well, let’s hold it there: most Canadians don’t know Paul Desmarais at all. You could stop the first thousand people walking down Yonge Street and I’ll bet no one would know who he is. But the few who do know him know him as the kingmaker behind Trudeau, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin. Jean Chrétien’s daughter is married to Paul Desmarais’s son. Paul Martin was an employee of M. Desmarais’s Power Corp., and his Canada Steamship Lines was originally a subsidiary of Power Corp. that M. Desmarais put Mr. Martin in charge of. In other words, Paul Martin’s public identity--successful self-made businessman, not just a career pol, knows how to meet payroll, etc.--is entirely derived from the patronage of M. Desmarais.
That in itself is a remarkable achievement. Imagine if Jenna Bush married the chairman of Halliburton’s son, and then George W. Bush was succeeded by a president who’d been an employee of Halliburton: Michael Moore’s next documentary would be buried under wall-to-wall Oscars and Palmes d’Or. But M. Desmarais has managed to turn Ottawa into a company town without anyone being aware of the company. We’re a G8 economy; it would be reasonable to expect a prominent British or American businessman to number prominent political figures among his friends, but to have brought so many of them into his company and even family would surely excite some comment. Power Corp.’s other alumni range from Quebec premiers to Canada’s most prominent international diplomat, Maurice Strong. In fairness, you don’t have to work for M. Desmarais to reach the top of the greasy pole-Kim Campbell managed it, for about a week and a half.
But this is just the hicksville stuff. What’s really impressive is that, when one considers the epic events of the last three years, the truly Canadian content is not Toronto-born aid spokespersons, but the ubiquitous presence of M. Desmarais.
During the Iraq war, for example, I mentioned en passant that Power Corp. is the biggest shareholder in TotalFinaElf, the western corporation closest to Saddam Hussein (it has since changed its name to the Total Group). Total had secured development rights to 25 per cent of Iraq’s oil reserves, a transformative deal that would catapult the company from a second-rank player into the big leagues with Exxon and British Petroleum. For a year, the antiwar crowd had told us it was “all about oil”--that the only reason Iraq was being “liberated” was so Bush, Cheney, Halliburton and the rest of the gang could annex in perpetuity the second biggest oil reserves in the world. But, if it was all about oil, then the fact--fact--is that the only Western leader with a direct stake in the issue was not the Texas oilpatch stooge in Washington, but Jean Chrétien: his daughter, his son-in-law and his grandchildren stood to be massively enriched by the Total-Saddam agreement. It depended on two factors: Saddam remaining in power, and the feeble UN sanctions being either weakened into meaninglessness or quietly dropped. M. Chrétien may have refused to join the Iraq war on “principle,” but fortunately his principles happened to coincide with the business interests of both TotalFinaElf and the Baath party.
As I said, I mentioned this curious footnote at the time. Stockwell Day picked up on it. The CBC, CTV, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s and all the rest steered clear. A bland perfunctory 200-word CP story reporting M. Desmarais’s denial--“Power Financial Head Refutes Saddam Link”--was carried by far more media outlets than had bothered going anywhere near Day’s original remarks.
Well, okay. Let’s take M. Desmarais’s word for it. But, getting on for two years later, we’re in the middle of the UN Oil-for-Fraud investigation, the all-time biggest scam, bigger than Enron and Worldcom and all the rest added together. And whaddaya know? The bank that handled all the money from the program turns out to be BNP Paribas, which tends to get designated by Associated Press and co. as a “French bank” but is, as it happens, controlled by one of M. Desmarais’s holding companies. That alone should cause even the droopiest bloodhound to pick up a scent: the UN’s banker for its Iraqi “humanitarian” program turns out to be (to all intents) Saddam’s favourite oilman.
I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, and, if I were, I’d look for a sinister global organization with a less obvious name. If “Power Corp.” was the moniker given to the sinister front operation for the latest Bond villain, critics would bemoan how crass the 007 franchise had become. And a “Power Corp.” that controlled the “Total Group” would have them hooting with derision. But it’s nevertheless the case that M. Desmarais’s bank functioned as the cashier for Saddam’s gaming of the global-compassion crowd: if a company agreed to sell Iraq some children’s medicine for $100 million, Iraq would invoice BNP Paribas for $110 million, pay the supplier and divert the skim-off into other areas. Everyone knew this was happening. It seems impossible, even with the minimal auditing, that BNP Paribas did not.
So here is a Canadian “making a difference in the world.” Suppose Conrad Black controlled a bank that had enriched a brutal dictator with a fortune intended to go to starving children, and that he also had an oil company that had cooked up an arrangement to make billions from the same dictator’s oil resources. Think Maude Barlow and the CBC might show an interest? But Paul Desmarais’s no-publicity clause is apparently enshrined in the Charter of Rights. So on it goes. Only the other week, M. Desmarais was hosting at his home in Quebec Nicholas Sarkozy, very likely the next president of France. Even after they’d become heads of government, neither Bush nor Blair could be bothered swinging by Ottawa to look in on Chrétien; not for years. But an invitation from M. Desmarais, and France’s coming man can’t wait to hop on the plane.
M. Desmarais’s spectacular rise from an obscure Quebec bus company operator to an obscure global colossus is an amazing story. Instead of struggling to find a local angle on the international scene, why doesn’t the CBC just start from the basic premise that whatever the subject--Iraq, oil-for-food, the European Union--somewhere at the heart of it will be the world’s least famous Canadian.
Instead, not a whisper. The good news is it’s not because Robert Rabinovitch, president of the CBC, is another discreet Power Corp. alumnus. He’s not. Rabinovitch’s close buddy, John Rae, who ran Chrétien’s campaigns, is. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old colleague Joel Bell, who was Trudeau’s chief economic adviser. And so’s Rabinovitch’s old boss, Senator Michael Pitfield. And so’s . . .
P.S. If, by the time of publication, Power Corp. has bought the Western Standard, please disregard all of the above.
Thanks for the info...
Need to add a fifth one:
A U.S. official said the money was wired to an account in the Rafaidan Bank of Jordan then transferred to the personal account of Iraq's ambassador to Jordan, who would then have the money delivered to the Palestinians.
As WorldNetDaily reported, remnants of Saddam's regime may still be funding terrorism against Israel by continuing the payments to families of Palestinian suicide bombers the dictator previously provided, according to a document recently seized in Iraq and obtained by WorldNetDaily .
The document, discovered by a U.S. military unit on the body of an Iraqi combatant in Northern Iraq in September, is a general "Certificate of Martyrdom" honoring a family member who carries out a suicide attack against Israelis.
According to documents captured in 2002 by Israel's Operation Defensive Shield, Saddam set up an "Arab Liberation Front" – a Ba'ath party department in the Palestinian areas used to encourage terrorism and issue checks, usually through the Palestine Investment Bank, to the families of suicide bombers.
The payments were $15,000 at the start of the intifada, and were later raised to $25,000.
Saddam would also issue checks of $10,000 to the families of "ordinary" Palestinians killed in the intifada by other means, such as "through the aggression of the Zionist army."
A $25,000 check and martyrdom certificate, for example, was transferred June 23, 2002, to Khaldiya Isma'il Abd Al-Aziz Al-Hurani, mother of the Hamas terrorist Fuad Isma'il Ahmad Al-Hurani, who carried out a suicide attack on March 19 of that year in Jerusalem's Moment Cafe. Eleven Israelis were killed and 16 wounded in the attack.
Wilson's wife Jacqueline was also apparently a lobbyist for Bongo and it seems Wilson was pretty chummy with Saddam's weapons buyer, having dinner with him on the eve that Kuwait was invaded in 1990. She is now an advisor to Bongo, her picture from a 2005 conference can be found here That makes it very clear that there are connections to oil-for-food. No wonder Wilson can afford his lifestyle.
Thankx for the link. Why do we have to fish this crap from the bowl? Why can't the LSM do it..or Fitz..or the RNC..or the White House? (rolling eyes) Every time you hear a Dem scream about the Whitehouse, you can be assured that they are hiding something THEY DID!! Happens everytime!
My theory (#42)is that this was a collaborative effort by the French and CIA coordinated by Wilson. Jacqueline, (Joe's his second wife), was a French diplomat and may have provided the connections for Wilson to see the forged documents that were supplied by the French through the Italians. In other words it is possible that Wilson knew that the docs were forged because he was privy to the information that French wanted to discredit the British info on Saddam shopping for yellowcake and that Wilson's objective was the same. The French just happen to manage the yellowcake production in Niger.
Therefore, Wilson did not lie when he said he saw the documents.
Per a thread by Fedora:
French intelligence soon began a campaign to discredit the US case for war against Iraq. In 1999, French intelligence had begun investigating the security of uranium supplies in Niger, where uranium production was controlled by a consortium led by the French mining company COGEMA, a division of the French state-owned nuclear energy firm AREVA. At that time, Italian businessman Rocco Martino provided French intelligence with genuine documents revealing that Iraq was planning to expand trade with Niger. French intelligence took an interest in the documents and asked Martino to provide more information. In 2000 he used a contact in the Niger embassy in Rome to provide French intelligence with documents purporting that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger. These documents were later exposed as forgeries;
< snip >
Since it is now also known that French intelligence was trying to push Martino’s forgeries on US and British intelligence, as simultaneously the Democratic National Committee was planning to discredit President Bush’s Iraq policy by accusing his administration of manufacturing evidence against Hussein’s regime, heightened suspicion is cast on Wilson’s use of the Niger investigation to discredit the Bush administration’s case for war.
What Wilson Didn’t Say About Africa
Also, Rocco only "procured" the documents, he did not forge them. Fitzgerald went to Italy to investigate the Niger Embassy (in Rome) burglary...where the letterhead and seals for the forgeries were stolen. Ex-CIA agent (and coincidentally, an advisor to the Vatican in Rome),Vincent Cannistraro has stated that Alan Wolf and Duane Clarridge were the actual forgers, but his account is the only one available that I can find on the subject. He has also pointed the finger at Michael Ledeen, but Ledeen has publicly made a statement that he had nothing to do with it and demanded an apology from Cannistraro.
In addition, despite what the MSM is reporting, the Italians released a press report yesterday saying they had nothing to do with the forgeries:
Italy denies role in fake documents on Iraq
This was also backed up by Rocco here
Cannistraro's "theory" falls apart when you consider that he:
1) blamed SISME (the Italians), which has proven to be wrong
2) bases his assumptions on a Dec 2001 Ledeen meeting, when Cannistraro himself was in Rome in Nov 2001, which would make him just as suspect.
I also discovered that Cannistraro worked directly with Clarridge during Iran Contra, so he has alot of nerve bringing that up in connection to Ledeen. Another interesting tidbit (#47) that I discovered is that Wolf and Clarridge worked with Aldrich Ames, who outed Plame to the Russians in the 90's. Coincidence? I think not. Cannistraro trying to kill two birds with one stone to cover his own carcass seems to be the more likely answer. Equally suspicious is the Hersch article, where Cannistraro and another unnamed agent state the exact route the documents took and Cannistraro actually admits that he called the CIA about the documents before they were proven to be false. This begs the question...just how did Cannistraro know about the documents before they were vetted? Sounds a whole lot like Wilson's slip-up about seeing the documents.
Hersch also claims in the above linked article:
Another explanation was provided by a former senior C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the forgery, and said, “Somebody deliberately let something false get in there.” He became more forthcoming in subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.A more reliable source, Joe diGenova claims it was a possible CIA coup as well. As does James Lewis in two articles, here and here
Two other names just crept into this...Niger Ambassador Adamou Chekou, who was in charge at the Embassy when the break-in and forgeries occurred and Wissam al-Zahawiah, Iraqi Ambassador to the Holy See. Seems Italian Intelligence was eavesdropping on these two and discovered their "hotline".
Did you read that carefully. Holy See? As in Vatican? Where Vincent Cannistraro is the security advisor?
"Did you read that carefully. Holy See? As in Vatican? Where Vincent Cannistraro is the security advisor?"
Yes, I saw that. Wasn't he the one that spoke out early and often against the war in Iraq? It will take me a bit to follow all of the links you have provided. Very good work there! I will get back to you after reading it all.
Amazing! Thanks. I'm going to keep this article for future posterity because we haven't heard the last of this.
Speaking of Gabon :
France has realised - and instrumentalised - the key fact about modern Africa, which is that the nationalist elites have failed to build modern states, and mainly aspire to get money offshore and bring up their children in Paris, Geneva or New York. In the world of the dissolving African state, an arms shipment here or there, two hundred well-trained mercenaries or a million dollars for this or that politician can tip the balance in territories rich in gold, diamonds, oil or uranium. It's absurdly cheap.Everyone knows that Gaullist Presidential campaigns over the last thirty years have benefited greatly from donations from Gabon, Cote d'Ivoire and the two Congo states (Kinshasa and Brazzaville). It will doubtless be the same in 2002 - which is why Chirac receives Robert Mugabe in such splendour at the Elysee, conscious that Zimbabwe's 14,000 troops in the Congo make him a key player in such marchandise. Not that France has a monopoly on playing Machiavelli in Africa: Herman Cohen, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for Africa, who was so busy in Rwanda in 1994, today has a multi-million contract to tart up the image of Mugabe. Cohen has also had contracts to promote Zaire's Mobutu, Gabon's Omar Bongo (whose government the state department reports is guilty of a routine use of torture), and Liberia's Charles Taylor - an adept in the use of child soldiers and the lopping off of hands, legs, ears and lips.
-------------------- "Disturbing article about Rwanda, France, UN, Belgium, Annan, and Clinton ," by RW Johnson, UCSB , Thursday June 24, 2001 "Laying the blame: the scandal of Rwanda and the west; RW Johnson unravels the web of culpability behind the failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in this exclusive online essay from the London Review of Books "
https://mail.lsit.ucsb.edu/pipermail/gordon-newspost/2001-June/001352.html Thursday June 14, 2001 Review of : "A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide," by Linda Melvern. Zed, 272 pp., £16.95, 5 September 2000, 1 85649 831 x
25 posted on 11/05/2005 10:25:14 PM PST by piasa
Did you read that carefully. Holy See? As in Vatican? Where Vincent Cannistraro is the security advisor?
I'm going to add another name, this one from the Food-for-Oil bribery lists:
Father Jean-Marie Benjamin. He's a French priest and sanctions-buster who organized flights into Iraq when Saddam opened the airport; he also did some Ritter-style documyths inside Iraq to help propagandize against sanctions; he's come up with a number of books to do the same; he also works out of the Vatican, and claims in the Vatican newspaper Zenit that just days before 9/11 he got wind of the 9/11 hijacking plot while attending a wedding. And he is still involved with European leftwing groups which are backing the insurgency.
Oh, yeah... he also worked for the UN at one time:
1983 - 1988 : (FATHER JEAN-MARIE BENJAMIN WORKS FOR THE UN) ([Fr. Jean-Marie Benjamin] Benjamin, by the way, is a remarkable Renaissance figure. A classical music composer, he worked for the United Nations from 1983 to 1988, and in 1983 composed the official UNESCO hymn. --- in "And tonight’s guest is … Vatican plays host to an uneasy world," Vatican Correspondent, John Allen, http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word0221.htm as retrieved on Jun 28, 2004
JUNE 25, 1998 : (BAGHDAD, IRAQ : IRAQI AMBASSADOR TO THE HOLY SEE WISSAM CHAWKET AL-ZAHAWIE ATTENDS SCREENING OF FATHER JEAN-MARIE BENJAMIN'S ANTI-SANCTIONS PROPAGANDA FILM "IRAQ SOLIDARITY ACTION" - THE FILM FEATURED A MESSAGE FROM VATICAN ENVOY TO IRAQ ARCHBISHOP GIUSEPPE LAZZAROTTO DENOUNCING EMBARGO ON IRAQ) The Vatican's envoy in Baghdad has once again lashed out against the international embargo on Iraq. In a video message, played at the screening of a new documentary on the effects of that embargo, Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto called upon Christian to show their solidarity with the people of Iraq.
The documentary film, "Iraq Solidarity Action," was produced by Father Jean-Marie Benjamin, a French-born priest serving the diocese of Rome. It was screened today in the presence of the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See, Wissam Chawket al-Zahawie.
In his video message to the film audience, Archbishop Lazzarotto urged all Christians to "multiple their gestures of solidarity," in order to break through "the isolation created by the embargo." Those who travel to Iraq, he said, would find their a rich culture which deserves understanding and preservation.
The practical effects of the embargo, the papal nuncio continued, have not been changes in government policy, but rather the death of the society's most vulnerable people. As a result, he reported, people are losing their confidence in the future. The best hope for the Iraqi people, he said, would lie in a return to the normal life they enjoyed before the Persian Gulf War. - "Vatican envoy in Iraq denounces embargo again," CWNews.com, June 25, 1998,
http://www.nonviolence.org/vitw/old_site/papalvisit2.html via 12 posted on 08/01/2003 1:28 PM PDT by Shermy
DECEMBER 1998 : (FATHER JEAN-MARIE BENJAMIN IS IN BAGHDAD, MAKES ANOTHER "DOCUMENTARY" CALLED "IRAQ : JOURNEY TO THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM," THIS ONE WHINING ABOUT DEPLETED URANIUM SHELLS) he [Jean-Marie Benjamin] was in Baghdad during the bombing and, after an international enquiry, made a new documentary entitled: "Iraq: journey to the forbidden kingdom" dedicated to the living conditions of the Iraqi population and the impact of radioactive contamination on the population and the environment due to the use of weapons containing depleted uranium.---- Source : http://www.benjaminforiraq.org/homeGB.htm
And one of Benjamin's associates, with whom he traveled the mideast and Iraq, is a Catholic archbishop who at one time was nailed by the Israelis for sneaking arms to the Palestinians- Hilarion Capucci.
And then in Italy is the Iraqi Patriotic Alliance led by a guy named Kubaisey; it is a leftwing group of Iraqis based in Europe with whom Benjamin is also associated. They supply the insurgency...
There is also another Iraqi official who worked out of Rome, teaching diplomat's kids or some such thing...disappeared right before 911. He had allegedly met with some of the hijackers and had been in Prague- and no, I'm not talking about the infamous Iraqi intel officer al Ani. Can't think of the name right now but maybe I will later.
And there is this bit o' information:
1997 - [2001] : (MEDIA : ABC NEWS'S COKIE ROBERT'S MOTHER CORRINE "LINDY" C. BOGGS IS APPOINTED US AMBASSADOR TO THE VATICAN BY CLINTON) http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a4ff9356402.htm
Interesting thread on Cokie/Clinton connection. Clinton drove Boggs to catch the fateful plane. Cokie's mother succeeded dad Bogg in 1973-90. In '97, Clinton appointed mom Amassador to Vatican. Interesting, today Kerry tells Pope to take a flying leap. DC is such a soap opera.-- 140 posted on 03/29/2004 11:52:13 AM PST by mtbopfuyn
***
Boggs may have been the father of Cokie Roberts, can't really remember. His aircraft was presumed to have gone down in Alaska, I think. He is Cokie's father, and his plane went down over Alaska October 16th, 1972, never found. I don't have a handle on his Vietnam War position. He was a member of the Waren Commission. 33 posted on 03/23/2004 11:59:33 PM PST by Sabertooth
***
Boggs was Cokie Robert's father. He has been mentioned as a "person of interest" by the VVAW. Cokie's brother now works in a big outfit PRing the Saudi royal family. Cokie's ABC-TV husband is often heard mornings giving left biased "news" on the WABC 770am NYC talk radio C&K between 5am-10am M-F. Know any VVAW pilots who would know about messing up an aircraft landing gear? 71 posted on 03/24/2004 10:41:04 PM PST by devolve
bump
Great thread!! Bookmarked. Thanks.
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