Posted on 01/12/2002 9:29:12 PM PST by oioiman
ON JULY 5, 1995, Enron Corporation donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee. Six days later, Enron executives were on a trade mission with Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor to Bosnia and Croatia. With Kantor's support, Enron signed a $100 million contract to build a 150-megawatt power plant.
Enron, then a growing giant in energy trading, practically had a reserved seat on Clinton administration trade junkets. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who egregiously linked political donations to government assistance, accompanied Enron chairman Ken Lay on a mission to India. Enron president Joseph Sutton was on the trip to Bosnia during which Brown lost his life in a plane crash (Sutton was not on Brown's plane at the time). After Brown's death, Enron's Terence Thorn, a $1,000 donor to the Clinton-Gore campaign, traveled with Commerce Secretary William Daley to South Africa. Ken Lay also traveled with Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary on her trade trips.
There were other contacts between Enron and the Clinton administration. Ken Lay was a close friend of Mack McLarty, Clinton's first chief of staff. In his 1993 disclosure statement, Robert Rubin listed Enron as one of the firms with which he had had "significant contact" while at Goldman Sachs. Enron was represented by the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, the firm where Clinton advisers Robert Strauss and Vernon Jordan worked.
And Enron benefited from its government contacts during the Clinton years. After Lay's trip to India with Ron Brown, Enron received nearly $400 million in U.S. government assistance so that it could build a power plant south of Bombay. According to reports in the Houston Chronicle at the time, the Export-Import Bank kicked in $298 million, while another federal agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, put up $100 million.
In February 1995, David Sanger of the New York Times wrote a fascinating insider account of how the deal had been consummated. Enron had been the lead bidder to build the new power plant. Jeff Garten, then undersecretary of commerce for international trade, created what he called "our economic war room" to push the American firm's interests. The State and Energy departments were enlisted to press Enron's case. According to Sanger, the U.S. ambassador to India, Frank Wisner, "constantly cajoled Indian officials." The CIA performed some risk analysis and investigated rival British companies.
Clinton himself was involved in starting the India effort for Enron. According to Michael Weisskopf of Time, Clinton scrawled a note to McLarty telling him to help with the project. Support for the Bombay power plant was just a small part of the help Enron received from the Clinton administration. All told, Enron received over $4 billion from OPIC and the Export-Import Bank for projects in Turkey, Bolivia, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Under Clinton, the Commerce Department was proud that it was finally using the might of the U.S. government to assist favored firms. But the enterprise was plagued by constant criticism that somehow it always seemed to be big political donors that got most of the help. According to the Boston Globe, all but three of the recipients of OPIC aid during Brown's tenure were substantial Democratic donors. According to a study by the Center for Public Integrity, Enron, U.S. West, GTE, McDonnell Douglas, and Fluor donated a combined $563,000 to the Democratic party during 1993 and 1994 and received $2.6 billion in foreign contracts secured with government help. The Globe found that during the first Clinton term, 27 firms had donated $2.3 million to the Democrats and received nearly $5.5 billion in federal support.
All of this is not to deny that Enron was primarily a Republican donor. Nor is it to minimize the connections between Enron and the Bush administration. Rather, the connections between the Clintonites and Enron remind us that the scandal is not the donations. The scandal is what gets done by federal officials in return for the donations. And while the Clintonites received less money from Enron than the Republicans, the evidence thus far suggests that Democrats extended more favors to Enron than Republicans. That suggests that the nascent Enron scandal may not end up helping Democrats as much as they now think.
Make no mistake, though: The press corps is in full frenzy over what the Bush administration may or may not have done to help Enron as it was going down the tubes--though there is no evidence the Bush administration did anything beyond take phone calls from desperate Enron executives. But the real story here is not about lawbreaking or extraordinary behavior. It is about what has become standard practice in Washington every day.
When corporations make political donations, the money is generally not used to lobby for free market reforms--although Enron did some of that. Rather, the money is used to encourage French-style dirigisme. It is used to lure government into bed with private commercial interests. That's not an effect conservatives should cheer.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
GENEVA, May 27 All 230 people aboard were killed. |
It also said that Ferrat's credit card had been used after the explosion.
Those suing him fear he ammassed a fortune, faked his death and disappeared with the money, the program said. Another theory is the Algerian was the victim of an attack or committed suicide. Lawyers for the Ferrat family could not be immediately reached for comment. |
As many as 12 other top executives may have been traveling with the secretary but their whereabouts could not be determined. Officials from five companies confirmed that executives that had been slated to travel with Mr. Brown were safe."RON BROWN'S PLANE CRASHES IN CROATIA NO SURVIVORS FOUND NO SIGNS OF FOUL PLAY " JOURNAL OF COMMERCE," Journal of Commerce April 4, 1996, Pg. 1A .A spokesman at Parson Corp., of Pasadena, Calif., said the group was supposed to break up into two traveling parties. He said he didn't know if Leonard Pieroni, the company's chairman, was aboard the plane that crashed.
Four executives scheduled to join the trip were not on board. Joseph Sutton, president of Enron Development Corp., Houston, Texas, was not on the plane. A company spokeswoman said he is in the Balkans looking at company projects.
Alfred Checchi, Northwest Airlines co-chairman, and Ronald B. Woodard, Boeing Commercial Airplane Group president, were scheduled to join the group later on Wednesday in Bosnia. And Daniel Bannister, president of Dyncorp, decided at the last minute to cancel the trip.
POLICE were today investigating the possibility that insurance fraud by a Swiss resident listed among the 230 killed in the TWA Flight 800 explosion may have been behind the disaster.":POLICE PROBE JET CRASH THEORY ," Birmingham Evening Mail; May 27, 1998.Swiss police, citing suspicion of fraud, have searched a chateau rented by Algerian-born Mohammmed Samir Ferrat. A week after Mr Ferrat was listed as dying in the crash his credit card was used to buy pounds 430-worth of goods.
Lawyer Gerald Page said the businessman took out life insurance policies worth several million pounds in the weeks before the July 1996 crash near New York. Investigation
Swiss authorities have been investigating Mr Ferrat for 18 months, Swiss TV said. French authorities are also conducting their own investigation.
Mr Page, who said he represented a shipping firm in the Ivory Coast with claims against Mr Ferrat, advised Swiss insurer Winterthur about his suspicions.
Werner Rast, a spokesman for the insurance company, said that it had held up payment of a policy worth pounds 420,000 to Mr Ferrat's family.
French firms have paid out claims on similar policies held by Mr Ferrat, however.
Mr Page said Mr Ferrat's company was deep in debt and that he had made transfers of millions of pounds into family and ofhore accounts in the weeks before the explosion.
Just as investigators looking at the physical evidence started with theories about the cause of the crash and then began knocking them down one by one as parts were recovered from the ocean, their work on the human side of their investigation is not closing in on a theory so much as eliminating possibilities. The process will intensify as the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducts a thorough examination of the passengers while continuing to look at those with access to the plane. Investigators said they have already followed these trails without coming any closer to real clues. They have: *Taken a closer look at an Algerian passenger identified on T.W.A.'s list only by his last name. The 1985 explosion of an Air-India flight off the coast of Ireland was traced to a bomb packed in a suitcase that was checked by a "Mr. Singh," someone who never boarded the flight. *Checked out the personal life of a New York City flight attendant who was estranged from her husband and who had a generous life insurance policy. *Questioned associates of a Sri Lankan airport employee with a background in chemical engineering who tried and failed to get a job with T.W.A. shortly before the crash, and who quit his job and abruptly moved to Angola a few days after the explosion. Investigators say that not one of these people is now viewed as a potential suspect or target of a bomb attack. But the scope of the investigation is no more focused. Could someone on the plane's previous flight from Athens to New York have hidden explosives in a seat cushion? Was a passenger the victim of an insurance scam, an enemy or an estranged spouse? The process of closely studying the backgrounds of passengers and others is part of every investigation into terrorist bombings of commercial jetliners. After the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, investigators chased down dozens of innocent details from passengers' lives that, when viewed suspiciously, made them seem like plausible suspects or targets. "Almost everyone on the plane, almost everyone you ever met, has something that can get your imagination going," said an F.B.I. agent who worked on the Flight 103 case and who spoke on condition of anonymity. "A recent fight, a divorce, a business deal, an overseas connection -- when you don't know what you're looking for, it's easy to see all kinds of possibilities." In the end, no suspicions were confirmed. A Federal indictment charges that the bomb had been in a bag checked by a terrorist who never boarded the plane. In the Pan Am case, the agents' task was eased when forensic experts determined that the blast occurred in a specific cargo bin containing checked luggage belonging to a small number of passengers. Those investigating the T.W.A. crash have no such advantage. The debris from Flight 800 was spread over a miles-long stretch of ocean off Long Island. "I have great sympathy for the people running this investigation," said Morris D. Busby, who was the coordinator of counterterrorism for the State Department during the Flight 103 investigation. "Right now, the investigation is by nature unfocused, and until they find a forensic clue they're going to have to run down every lead no matter where it takes them." Investigators have not declared that Flight 800 was brought down by a bomb, but that is their leading theory. They have so far been able to determine that the explosion did not occur in the cargo hold, the cockpit or the galley and now suspect it occurred in or under a passenger's seat or in a bathroom, food cart or overhead luggage bin. The search for possible human clues is in its earliest phases. But already, agents have searched the jail cell and telephone records of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man the F.B.I. calls the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who is on trial on charges that he planned to bomb United States airliners in Asia.
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They have examined some passengers' tax returns, credit records, insurance policies and employment histories. They have searched court records for divorce proceedings or other legal problems and have questioned hundreds of eyewitnesses to the crash, as well as baggage handlers, mechanics and others with access to the plane. They have conducted inventories at local military bases to determine whether missiles or explosives were missing. They are also attempting to question the 349 passengers who were on the Boeing 747 during its Athens-to-New York flight to see whether they saw anything suspicious, such as someone briefly on board in Athens who got off the plane before takeoff. None of these lines of inquiry has produced a strong theory or even the kind of solid evidence that would focus the investigation on a particular suspect. And in the absence of such evidence, the investigators have withheld questioning of the passengers' families. "I've made a decision not to go out there and interview all these victims' families at this point on anything," said James K. Kallstrom, the head of the F.B.I. office in New York. "We know who they are. We have their addresses and names. Some have come forward to us, but we've put off going out there and interviewing because, quite frankly, we have other things that are, in my view, more important to do." The F.B.I. and local law enforcement agencies have already begun to trace some tips about possible suspects or targets. One passenger's landlord, for example, telephoned investigators to say that the tenant had a psychiatric history. Investigators say they searched his home and found nothing to suggest the man would blow up an airliner. Another passenger who drew investigators' initial curiosity as a possible target was Detective Susan Hill, a 22-year veteran of the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon. Detective Hill, who had worked on more than 70 homicide cases, had recently ended her marriage to a corrections officer and had a brother on the department's bomb squad, said Lieut. Cliff Madison of the Portland Police Bureau. After the explosion, Lieutenant Madison said, Federal investigators called and asked "if we knew of anyone who was out to get her." But he said the Portland police considered that unlikely because "she's been a detective a long time; it's not like some street cop who just put someone in jail." The flight attendant the agents considered a possible target interested them, they said, in part because an altercation erupted among family members at her funeral. The investigators said they wondered whether such tension was indicative of problems that might have led someone to try to harm her. Investigators said they also looked more closely at a passenger identified on the manifest as "Mr. Ferrat," with no first name or initial. Mindful of the 1985 Air-India case and the pivotal discovery of Mr. Singh, the fictitious passenger with no first name, investigators initially delved a bit deeper, but determined that there was no connection. They learned from other T.W.A. records that the passenger's full name was Mohamed Samir Ferrat and that he had indeed boarded the plane. They also learned he was an Algerian native, a tie that sparked more questions, according to a senior law enforcement official. In recent years, a militant Algerian Islamic faction opposed to France's support of the Algerian Government has planted bombs, hijacked planes and committed other acts of terror. Investigators also learned that on July 16, the day before the T.W.A. explosion, the faction's leader was killed. For 48 hours after the T.W.A. crash, a senior law enforcement official said, F.B.I. agents looked at Mr. Ferrat's background. What they found reassured them that Mr. Ferrat was not at all the kind of person to take a bomb on a plane. Nor was he a likely target of a bomb plot. Mr. Ferrat, it turned out, was a wealthy and highly respected businessman, money manager and investor with offices and residences in the Ivory Coast, France and Switzerland. His story was poignant. He had been flying to Paris after celebrating the birthday of his mother, who has been receiving treatment for liver cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland, treatment Mr. Ferrat was paying for. He was 39, engaged to an employee in his Paris office and hoped to be married and give his mother a grandchild before cancer took her life. Investigators discovered one curious detail, that about a week after the crash, someone tried repeatedly to get a cash advance from Mr. Ferrat's credit card, which his business administrator in Switzerland had canceled after the explosion. Law enforcement officials said they believed that the credit card had probably washed up on the sand and was found by a beachcomber. Federal agents learned all of this without questioning Mr. Ferrat's family, friends or business associates, many of whom gathered in their grief at the family's hotel in Virginia, having no idea of investigators' questions. If they had talked to his relatives and friends, they might have picked up other details, like the fact that Mr. Ferrat's family had tried to persuade him to stay an extra day and take a direct flight from Washington to Paris. Or that a T.W.A. employee in the United States initially told his family he had not been on the plane. And they would have heard he was such a successful businessman that Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown witnessed the contract-signing of one of Mr. Ferrat's projects in the Ivory Coast in February, two months before Mr. Brown was killed in a plane crash in Croatia. The investigators might have been intrigued by these details, but would have discovered that they were significant only to family and friends clinging to every memory of Mr. Ferrat. "He was a real family guy, so devoted to his mother," said Ronald M. Nocera, a business associate and friend whose company was involved in the Ivory Coast project. "He made friends very quickly." Still, like the friends and relatives of several passengers, Mr. Nocera said he would not be offended if investigators wanted to talk to him about Mr. Ferrat. "My colleagues and I are surprised that they haven't called us," he said. |
On August 19, a month after the crash, the local medical examiner in Suffolk County - in whose jurisdiction the disaster occurred - declared that Mohammed Ferrat had been positively identified as a dead passenger from TWA Flight 800."Swiss link insurance fraud to TWA 800 crash; TV report says police investigating businessman killed on jet ," The Guardian Foreign Page; May 27, 1998; Pg. 19US investigators counted him out as a suspect early. They examined his luggage but found no sign of an explosive - and uncovered nothing to link him to a terrorist act or to show he had been used to unknowingly carry an explosive on board.
Mr Page, who said he represents a shipping firm in the Ivory Coast with claims against Ferrat, advised the Swiss insurer Winterthur about his suspicions.
Werner Rast, a spokesman for the insurance company, said in the report that his firm had decided to hold up payment of a policy worth pounds 437,500 to Ferrat's family. The report said French firms, by contrast, paid out claims on similar policies held by Ferrat.
Ferrat's finance firm, Sofin SA, mainly conducted business in the Ivory Coast, it said. It quoted Mr Page as saying Sofin was deeply indebted and that Ferrat had made transfers of millions into family and offshore accounts in the weeks before the explosion.
The report showed footage of the late US commerce secretary, Ron Brown, at the Washington signing with Ferrat of a pounds 62.5 million contract between Sofin and the US construction firm Chatwick Inc, which was to build residences in the Ivory Coast. Chatwick spent pounds 2.5 million on the project before halting it, the television said.
The report interviewed a Chatwick official, Djaffar Abdelouahab, who said he saw Ferrat off on a flight from Washington that connected with TWA Flight 800. Mr Abdelouahab said he appeared unusually preoccupied.
Ferrat had been in Baltimore to visit his mother, who was in Johns Hopkins Hospital with terminal cancer. The television report showed Ferrat's tombstone on a grave he shares with his mother, who died of cancer later in 1996, in a Paris Muslim cemetery.
The authorities' suspicions were initially prompted, Swiss television said, when Ferrat's credit card was charged with purchases totalling pounds 440 in the weeks after the TWA crash. But US investigators later learned the cards were used by family members.
It certainly seems that the Clinton CIA was involved in Commerce activity - and certain key (globalism type) money people were not on the Brown flight, people who perhaps share a pattern of troubling financial transactions, golden parachutes, etc. Very interesting indeed!!!
Rater than being boastful, shouldn't you know either apologize for the " corrupyion " that YOU have been responsible for ? You can't have it both ways ! Perchance YOU are the one , who needs to " grow up ", BTW !
If you would kindly reread my posts, nowhere did I state that money didn't / couldn't buy influence. Nowhere did I ever state, catagorically, that large political contributions / old, close ties, didn't / couldn't buy an " ear " , or more. What I DID state, is that thus far, President Bush and the members of his administration have done NOTHING at all, to bail out ENRON .
I do so hope that that has now been cleared up for you.
Umlike YOU, I don't have the need, to flaunt my CV , on this forum; nor anywhere else. Now, you can either ignore this , or petulantly wonder , about that which I don't have to tell. Real ADULTS , don't have to tell all, to strangers, and they also know how easy and how often people lie / pad things on line. : - )
Rather than being boastful, shouldn't you now either apologize for the " corruption " that YOU have been responsible for , or have kept it quiet ? You can't have it both ways ! Don't yell CORRUPTION , and then brag about just how much of it YOU have been party to. Perchance YOU are the one , who needs to " grow up ", BTW !
If you would kindly reread my posts, nowhere did I state that money didn't / couldn't buy influence. Nowhere did I ever state, catagorically, that large political contributions / old, close ties, didn't / couldn't buy an " ear " , or more. What I DID state, is that thus far, President Bush and the members of his administration have done NOTHING at all, to bail out ENRON .
I do so hope that that has now been cleared up for you.
Umlike YOU, I don't have the need, to flaunt my CV , on this forum; nor anywhere else. Now, you can either ignore this , or petulantly wonder , about that which I don't have to tell. Real ADULTS , don't have to tell all, to strangers, and they also know how easy and how often people lie / pad things on line. : - )
. . . . All the barbarians, as we have already said, are pagans or heretics. The Saxon race is cruel, the Franks are faithless, the Gepidae are inhuman, the Huns are unchaste, in short, there is vice in the life of all the barbarian peoples.
Salvian uses the word race to differentiate the Saxons from the Franks. However, genetically both are caucasion and are, in fact, from the same race. It's just that the word is used differently. It's foolish to build an argument against jews on such a faulty foundation.
A recent interview with one of Vladmir Putin's Chief economic advisers, economist Dr. Tatyana Koryagina, reveals that, from her research, those who manipulate events and markets are not a single entity (i.e., the jews, the masons, the bildebergers, the CFR, the communists etc.) but, are a crossection of a number of these entitites and if they have any religious commonality it is neo-paganism (I'm talking about serious darkness here). Do a search on Bohemian Grove (The Bohemian Club); see who goes there and what they do.
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