BTTT
one way to ensure that a story never gets mainstream is to have WND feature it.
Fox News to Report on Ties Between Bin Laden Family & JIMMY CARTER! (5-31-06)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1641410/posts
Maybe this will get me flamed... but didn't OBL's family disown him some years back? I heard OBL isn't even in his parents' will.
Might even be true but coming from the "Censure Carter" committee, who would take it seriously.
I gave the Bin Laden family more credit then getting involved with Jimmy Carter. I guess I will have to revaluate my opinion of them.
Funny how this WND piece fails to mention that the bin Laden family long ago disowned their psycho black sheep Osama. When "the bin Laden family" gives money to US political figures, it is in the interest of undermining, not advancing, Osama's aims. Osama, as people who live in the real world (i.e. not people who rely on WND for their news) may recall, is bitterly opposed to any sort of friendly relations with the US.
Since the source is the "Censure Carter Committee" and WND, I take it all with a grain of salt. OTOH, if there is some objective evidence (receipts, scans of correspondence, etc.), I'd be more than happy to look at it for myself. Otherwise, sounds like more conspiracy to me.
Alex, I'll take, "News stories that will NEVER EVER be on tha whirld newz tanite," for $5,000.
Jimmy Carter = Historical Father of the Culture of Corruption.
Paging Michael "Fat Boy" Moore. We have a storyline for you.
I hope one day we see Carter in leg chains....
Jul 5, 2004
The Big Guys Work For the Carlyle Group
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,370593,00.html
CARLYLE GROUP
What exactly does it do? To find out, we peeked down the rabbit hole.
By Melanie Warner
Are you the sort of person who believes in conspiracies--the Trilateral Commission secretly runs the world, that sort of thing? Well, then, here's a company for you. The Carlyle Group, a Washington, D.C., buyout firm, is one of the nation's largest defense contractors. It has billions of dollars at its disposal and employs a few important people. Maybe you've heard of them: former Secretary of State Jim Baker, former Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, and former White House budget director Dick Darman. Wait, we're just getting warmed up. William Kennard, who recently headed the FCC, and Arthur Levitt, who just left the SEC, also work for Carlyle. As do former British Prime Minister John Major and former Philippines President Fidel Ramos. Let's see, are we forgetting anyone? Oh, right, former President George Herbert Walker Bush is on the payroll too.
The firm also has about a dozen investors from Saudi Arabia, including, until recently, the bin Laden family. Yes, those bin Ladens. Is it any wonder that Internet sites with names like paranoiamagazine.com are rife with stories about Carlyle's shadowy, corrupt global network? And it's not just wackos. "Be careful," a tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley wrote in an e-mail when he learned I was doing a story on Carlyle. "The rabbit hole runs really deep on this one.''
Leaving aside the conspiracies for a moment, what exactly does the Carlyle Group do? Start with the basics: It's one of the world's largest and most powerful private-equity investment firms, meaning it buys and sells privately held companies and divisions of large public companies for big profits. Founded in 1987 (and named after the favorite New York hotel of the firm's first investors, the Mellon family), Carlyle has raised a total of $14 billion from investors in just the past five years--more than any other private-equity firm has attracted in the same period, except the Blackstone Group and CSFB Private Equity.
Profits, too, have been pretty terrific. Not counting the standard 20% cut that goes to Carlyle's partners and managing directors, the firm's average annual rate of return has been 36%.
It's quite a success story, and to understand how Carlyle pulled it off, FORTUNE spent a month and a half peeking down that rabbit hole. One conclusion seems clear: While most of the conspiracy theories are amusingly overblown, this is a firm that's been built on the backs of Bush and other big shots who have lent Carlyle their names, their golden networks of friends in high places, and their insights into how government works. It wasn't until Carlucci joined, for instance, that Carlyle really took off. Founded by David Rubenstein, a lawyer who worked as an aide in the Carter White House, Bill Conway, a former CFO at MCI, and Dan D'Aniello, a former finance executive for Marriott, Carlyle early on invested in a motley assortment of deals--buying an airline-catering business, a health- food chain, and a biotech firm, for example. In 1990, Carlucci got the trio interested in the $150-billion-a-year U.S. defense industry, making introductions to companies that would turn into some of Carlyle's most lucrative investments. Rubenstein quickly realized the wisdom of recruiting a former Secretary of Defense and followed it up with a former Secretary of State, then a former White House budget director, and on and on.
The revolving door has long been a fact of life in Washington, but Carlyle has given it a new spin. Instead of toiling away for a trade organization or consulting firm for a measly $250,000 a year, former government officials can rake in serious cash by getting equity cuts on corporate deals. Several of the onetime government officials who have hooked up with Carlyle--Carlucci, Baker, and Darman, in particular--have made millions. Carlyle isn't the only organization doing it: Metropolitan West Financial in Los Angeles recently hired Al Gore to help with tech deals and make introductions overseas, for example. But Carlyle, which pioneered the idea, seems more adept at it than any other firm.
Unlike other private-equity groups, Carlyle concentrates on companies funded by the government, such as defense contractors, or those affected by government regulation, such as telecommunications firms, and then hires people with relevant government experience. As the company once put it in a brochure, "We invest in niche opportunities created in industries heavily affected by changes in governmental policies." Doing so, of course, raises the ultimate rabbit-hole question: Is Carlyle's approach just a smart twist on good old business networking or a step over the line into an ethical twilight zone in which the public trust is broken?
Half a mile from the White House, inside nondescript offices sparsely adorned with generic depictions of ships and ducks, co- founder Rubenstein sits with his hands folded on a table so shiny you can see your reflection. Next to him sits Chris Ullman, Carlyle's first-ever full-time PR person. Habitually wary of media attention, Rubenstein and his partners agreed to rare interviews with FORTUNE. That's because since Sept. 11 the firm has been under unusual fire. First there was the bin Laden thing. Shafig bin Laden, one of Osama's many brothers and a Carlyle investor, was in attendance at a Carlyle conference at a Washington hotel on that infamous day. As the media were quick to point out, this meant that George H.W. Bush was working for a firm that was helping to make the bin Ladens money. Even though the wealthy Saudi family has reportedly cut all ties to Osama, the press lambasted Carlyle.
Will Michael Moore make a movie about Carter's connections to Bin Laden?
Bin Laden family gave $1 million to Carter Ex-president reportedly met with terror leader's brothers in 2000
No one can claim that the enemies of Israel are underpaid.
A younger brother, Abdullah M. bin Laden, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1993. That same year the Saudi Bin Laden Group gave $1 million to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, and another $1 million in 1994 to Harvard Law School, for visiting professors to study subjects pegged to Islam, school spokesman Andy Tiedemann said.
http://tinyurl.com/ljpve
Columnist Julia Gorin says an arms dealer is another questionable supporter of the Carter Center. We'll have to look into this as we continue the investigation!