The Gupta Connections and the influence it buys

Another day, another Hillary Clinton donor scandal! These poor things just keep cropping up through their history, don't they?

To do a quick review: you can connect Hillary Clinton to the Red Chinese acquisition of the partially completed CV Varyag with just one intermediate hop! That hop goes through Triad member Chen Kai-kit and his connections to folks working with Red China, North Korea and enterprises less savory really do make you wonder such folks get around in the world with so little notice paid to them. Just one of those things, I guess, but that was an 'old' scandal!

Another 'old' scandal is the involvement of a close Clinton associate in trying to get a couple of thousand AK-47s smuggled into Los Angeles to sell to gang members there, which goes through Johnny Huang, and he was personally given an OK to look at classified documents by the Clintons. Or Johnny Chung's connection with moving US satellite and missile guidance technology to China with President Clinton's over-riding DoD worries about same. Yes those are such old things, with China now being able to deploy far more reliable missiles and warheads for their nuclear devices. Even simple drug smugglers found a home with the Clinton's and personal cards for them while they were in jail, such caring folks they are!

Or the 'old' scandal that featured ex-con Peter Paul running from prosecution in Brazil to fight extradition and then having Interpol put a warrant out for his arrest via the Clintons, which wound him up in one of Brazil's hell-hole prisons. Mind you she was willing to send a naive advisor to work with the Hollywood sharks, and then get him stabbed in the back, too. Still the Hollywood tribute gala to the Clinton's was a hit, as witness the money laundered through it Hillary refuses to account for. All is fair when you are looking to woo a billionaire Japanese businessman away from Stan Lee Media and undercut them and then try to keep it quiet.

Then there is the 'old' connection that shows up between disgraced Congresscritter David Duke and Hillary Clinton, which takes the form of the son of a Red Mafia man, Arik Kislin. Of course digging into that finds all the connections the Red Mafia were able to establish in US banks, use them for money laundering, and to advance the concept that 200 people could run 300 companies, with one man holding all of that in his head as a past-time. That points up the stalwart safety of the US banking system under the Clintons... or lack thereof, in any event.

There are others like pro-Iranian Hassan Nemazee, wooing the Clintons and others at a White House 'coffee', so as to get the Ambassador's position to Argentina, which got him entry into the world of high-rolling wheelers and dealers. Or having Ms. Clinton being designated as the Senator from Punjab, due to her ties with Sant Singh Chatwal. Or with the straw-man donation schemes of Abdul Rehman Jinnah from Pakistan, whom she has known for awhile, to say the least.

Nor to even begin speaking of ponzi-fraudster with the light touch, Norman Hsu, who, apparently, was a mover and shaker in the garment business without ever having moved, bought or sold garments or influenced the industry. No matter how you do the math, I am coming up about $40-$60 million short between the swindlees and the donations. But maybe I've missed a second class action suit starting up...

No, this one revolves around Vinod Gupta and infoUSA. Now to familiarize yourself with just what infoUSA *is*, all you have to do is go to your mailbox and get a piece of junk mail with your name on it. Your name, address, possible phone number, spending habits, political affiliation and any other things of commercial interest to major companies to sell to you get swept up by companies like infoUSA, including email addresses. Got spam? You got Gupta. His company SELLS those lists for marketing, advertising, sales pushes, political parties, 'activist' groups, and anyone looking to convince you to part with some of your money for their product/service/cause.

Hey, put down the torches and pitchforks! That is *legal* in the US!!

So for an executive summary of where Mr. Gupta is coming from, lets get a thumbnail from the SEC which was part of one of the acquisition documents that infoUSA would generate:

Vinod Gupta founded info USA in February 1972 and has been Chairman of the Board of Directors since its incorporation. Mr. Gupta served as Chief Executive Officer of info USA from the time of its incorporation in 1972 until September 1997 and since August 1998. Mr. Gupta holds a B.S. in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, and an M.S. in Engineering and an M.B.A. from the University of Nebraska. Mr. Gupta also was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Nebraska and an Honorary Doctorate from the Indian Institute of Technology. Mr. Gupta was nominated and confirmed to be the United States Consul General to Bermuda. Then, the President nominated him to be the United States Ambassador to Fiji. Due to business commitments, he withdrew his name from consideration. He was appointed by President Clinton to serve as a Trustee of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Mr. Gupta is also a director of a mutual fund in the Everest mutual fund family, located at 5805 South 86 th Circle, Omaha, Nebraska.

So that does help to place the man, a bit. Have to love that bit of Consul General to Bermuda! What a vacation and resume enhancer! Too bad about Fiji, though, I'm sure that would have been a prime vacation spot, too, but President Clinton made up for that by getting him the perpetual vacation in the Kennedy Center. That Everest bit is interesting, and will crop up later...

Really, no matter how much you detest junk mail (paper/plastic/electronic) those lists are perfectly legal. And form, of course, one of the easiest to get to collection of individuals who are gullible the world has ever seen. 60 Minutes II had a lovely little look into how those looking to swindle the sick and elderly got specially made lists of same that were also identified as gamblers, worry warts and chronically unable to tell a good investment from a bad one.

And Mr. Gupta tries to make up for that with charitable works, such as advertising for Bill and Hillary Clinton by slathering their names all over things he is doing like "Bill Clinton Science and Technology Center" and "The Hillary Rodham Clinton Mass Communication Center". All to help young folks from India learn good skills and come to America to donate to their benefactors Bill and Hillary Clinton! The SEC is looking into Mr. Gupta's works because, to put it mildly, he appears to be skimming some money off the top for himself and his political activism.

Now, before going into the interesting buying sprees of Mr. Gupta and infoUSA, here is another one of those questions that really just does stick out: Outside of the Clinton's what is the connection between Norman Hsu and Vinod Gupta? On the surface, of course, there is nothing, but in the Friend Of A Friend network concept there is one prime connection between them. This from 13 FEB 2001 DM News article by Scott Hovanyetz:

Also, InfoUSA has elected former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey and Rob Chandra, venture partner at Trust Company of the West, Los Angeles, to its board of directors. They replace Ben Nelson, who was required to resign because of his election as senator from Nebraska, and Charlie Fote, who resigned because of his recent promotion to CEO of First Data Resources, Omaha, NE.

And Sen. Bob Kerrey would be the head of The New School in NYC which had, as one of its prime associates, Norman Hsu! What a lovely rolodex that must be on Mr. Kerrey's desk, chock-a-block with businessmen, shady characters and Clinton political contacts... but I repeat myself multiple times.

To get to such lofty heights, Mr. Gupta took on American Business Information, Inc. and put it on a buying spree of companies to expand database driven market share for such associations. It became infoUSA and would start selling to nearly everyone, including the folks handing out free 3.5" floppies, AOL. One of the first forays into direct politics was when infoUSA CFO Stormy Dean would run for the Governorship of Nebraska. After leaving office, President Clinton would address a part of infoUSA bought out by them earlier, the Donnelly Group, with, I'm sure, large fees to go with it. At about the same time they were expanding into email work in a big way, and continuing to gobble up smaller companies in the market.

Part of the problem with all of this, as a publicly traded company, is that it was seen as expanding too quickly to properly absorb the components it had bought out. Mr. Gupta found a great way to change that around: announce he was taking the company private and about what he expected to pay for shares which was *more* than they were going for. Of course retired President Clinton would show up for another little talk, and I'm sure that a high fee was included. Soon after Mr. Gupta would announce that he had *changed his mind* after seeing a stock price recovery.

But the buying up continued apace, but a bit of an oddity showed up when Mr. Gupta put forward that he, and his family, had invested in a hedge fund that was, basically, in control of their assets, the Everest family of funds dedicated to the select clientele of the Gupta family. Something smelled fishy to Dolphin Limited Partnership, who also had a large share of infoUSA, and they wanted things looked into. In 2006 he was supposed to stop buying securities, but that didn't seem to stop him from getting his hands on more companies. This would start a battle with the board of directors and shareholders of infoUSA. That would be rejected by a shareholders meeting, however, and the purchasing of companies would continue apace. But that initial work went to the courts which upheld the lawsuit, in the main

It was just around this time that the lawsuit by shareholders was making headlines, and with that was the view that infoUSA was selling specialized lists to companies and individuals looking to defraud seniors with Alzheimers, gambling problems and and other such things, and having labels attached to them saying 'These people are gullible.' With those revelations came ones that Mr. Gupta was flying the Clintons to prime vacation spots, for at least four years, with itineraries including: Acapulco multiple times, Switzerland, Hawaii and Jamaica. That on top of a $250,000 donation to the Clinton library and $200,000 in soft money to Hillary's Senate campaign in 2000, and pay Bill Clinton in the neighborhood of $3 million in consulting fees. There are also trips for Oklahoma City for Bill and shuttling Hillary to New Mexico for campaign needs, all of which is covered by first class fare on a commercial jet while getting to travel in style and luxury on a private jet, that will meet schedules far better than a commercial airline could ever hope to do. Isn't it wonderful how hundreds of thousands of dollars in actual cost can be reimbursed for pennies on the dollar because those who make the law feel they should be exempt from paying for such things?

Additionally Mr. Gupta was a golfing buddy of Bill Clinton , including a trip to Scotland for same, and had one of the lucrative 'paid for' stays in the Lincoln Bedroom in the Whitehouse. Basically a 'key donor' to them over the years. He would also help form up the Indo American Leadership Council that was created by the DNC, and to get on it one really did have to pack in the money, just for a membership role, not to speak of 'leadership' of the Leadership, which has been a long-term goal of the Clintons for years.

One of the major acquisitions was Opinion Research which is a polling firm, that works with CNN. An Australian firm, Newton Wayman Chong & Associates, would also be bundled into that organizational unit. This causes troubles as CNN has been running a number of Presidential debates and has been depending on Opinion Research Corporation to do its polling for it.

This connection with the Clintons would also lead to infoUSA getting its hands on the donor list to the Clinton library, which would include all of the high rollers that are backing it. It was a pretty simple deal, actually: infoUSA just bought the list.

That brings us full around to the SEC investigation, but there are also charges of improperly giving money to Hillary's 2000 campaign fund, personally, by Mr. Gupta. And even *more* flights provided to Hillary Clinton in her current bid for the Whitehouse. Also providing things like $7,000 treadmills to the Clintons in NY, which they were obliged to give back due to FEC regulations. This voyage of discovery is from disgruntled shareholders giving the leads for others to search for the strangenesses going on with one of the largest information brokerages on the planet. infoUSA, itself, does give money to both parties, although as of the 2002 records that comes in at $285,000 to the D party and $50,000 to the R party. Alexander Gupta, however, would be a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton and the DNC, all the while remaining as a student or unemployed/student for 12 years, but that is what you get when your father is Vinod Gupta and you are 11 years old, as seen from Ariannaonline, of all places, (26 MAY 1997):

In fact, the number of student contributions of $1,000 or more quadrupled between 1990 and 1996. Take 8-year-old Jason Corcoran -- a high roller barely out of his highchair -- who plunked down $1,000 for a seat at a Clinton fund-raising luncheon in October 1995. Or 10-year-old Emily Gartner, a ponytailed influence peddler who ponied up $250 for the president. Or 11-year-old Alexander Gupta, whose largesse keeps both Clinton and Nebraska Gov. Ben Nelson crammed in the hip pocket of his Toughskins.

[..]

Alexander Gupta's brothers Ben and Jess are also frequent campaign contributors, although not so frequent as their father Vinod, who gave $53,000 in the last election cycle, including a $40,000 gift to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Little Emily Gartner's story is similar. She, brother Jeremy, sister Jennie and mom Sandra all gave $250 apiece on the same day that her father, Vermont businessman Allen Gartner, gave $1,000 to the Clinton campaign.

So what we have here is a form of kiddie money-laundering. Is it legal? Not if the money doesn't actually belong to the kids or if it wasn't their decision to contribute it.

Many donor parents evade the first requirement by raiding their children's trust funds. But proving that it wasn't the kids' decision to give the money should hardly be difficult, especially in cases as brazen as the Guptas'. The eldest Gupta brother, 17-year-old Jess, told a reporter last year, "Truthfully, I'm not really associated with the donations. I'm not involved in a big way. Dad makes those donations in my name."

Isn't that sweet? Contributing for the kids in their name! What a deal!

You know, of all the drug dealing, arms trafficking, prostitute pimping and human trafficking money being laundered into US political campaigns from abroad, at least that is *honest* crookedness trying to get money into the system by adults. This sort of stuff really is galling, particularly when President Clinton would garner over $217,000 from these 'child donations'.... only by 1997, of course. Makes you kind of wonder just how much is being filtered through such donations and why parents can't just leave money that is putatively for their children *alone* so that it can gain in size and give their children greater wealth when they are adults and wise enough to spend it themselves.

So the next time you are fishing through the contribution lists, remember that if you see someone being a 'student' for over a decade, they have a parent who really believes that current and ephemeral politics is more important than letting their child grow up with wealth to make their own damned fool decisions.

And if you ever corner a politician, you should ask them how much of that sort of stuff they have received... and if they have given any of it back because their conscience bothers them about it. Things like this really do turn me off to politics and politicians in this modern era. I don't intend to vote for anyone who actually accepts such money, which may leave me high and dry when election time rolls around, to only vote against the absolutely detestable and for the merely unconscienable.

If you ever hear 'its for the children' ask them if they take money that parents steal from their children's future to give to politicians now. To me that is what it is: stealing from children's future.

Sphere: Related Content

Those other 'libertarians' that just aren't defined by libertarianism

As someone who routinely called myself a libertarian prior to 9/11, here’s how I would square the circle: Absolute freedom within our borders, for our own citizens; eternal vigilance and (when necessary) ruthlessness abroad. For libertarian ideals to survive, they must be relentlessly defended against the likes of Islamic extremists. Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s writing right after 9/11 to see this ideal in its purest form; far from a religious crusade, ours was a war for secularism, tolerance, and free societies where gays don’t get stoned to death.

The key principle is one of reciprocity. If you behave peacefully and embrace the norms of a libertarian society, we leave you alone. If you seek to destroy a free society, we will destroy you.

If they’re serious about defending their ideals and seeing to it that libertarianism survives more than a generation in actual practice, I don’t see any reason why libertarians couldn’t embrace a more conservative positioning on national security.

- Patrick Ruffini, Hugh Hewitt's blog, 26 NOV 2007, speaking of Ron Paul's influence on Republican politics.

And just who are these folks? Very much for personal liberty but pro-defense, and an active stance that America actually represents something good for the world? Actually, if Mr. Ruffini had read some of the works by one of Hugh's recent guests, he would *know* their name.

His political movement—or, more accurately, the community of political feeling that he wielded into an instrument of power—remains in many ways the most important in American politics. Solidly Democratic through the Truman administration (a tradition commemorated in the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners that are still the high points on Democratic Party calendars in many cities and states), Jacksonian America shifted toward the Republican Party under Richard Nixon—the most important political change in American life since the Second World War. The future of Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century.

Suspicious of untrammeled federal power (Waco), skeptical about the prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign aid abroad), opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies), Jacksonians constitute a large political interest.

In some ways Jacksonians resemble the Jeffersonians, with whom their political fortunes were linked for so many decades. Like Jeffersonians, Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites. They generally prefer a loose federal structure with as much power as possible retained by states and local governments. But the differences between the two movements run very deep—so deep that during the Cold War they were on dead opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions. To use the language of the Vietnam era, a time when Jeffersonians and Jacksonians were fighting in the streets over foreign policy, the former were the most dovish current in mainstream political thought during the Cold War, while the latter were the most consistently hawkish.

One way to grasp the difference between the two schools is to see that both Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are civil libertarians, passionately attached to the Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights, and deeply concerned to preserve the liberties of ordinary Americans. But while the Jeffersonians are most profoundly devoted to the First Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech and prohibiting a federal establishment of religion, Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty. Jeffersonians join the American Civil Liberties Union; Jacksonians join the National Rifle Association. In so doing, both are convinced that they are standing at the barricades of freedom.

- From Walter Russell Mead, The Jacksonian Tradition, The National Interest, Winter, 1999, (via FindArticles).

Dear me!

And then from one of the Four Horsemen of the Blogaclypse:

Jacksonians don't have any interest in spreading their philosophy around the world. It isn't evangelistic; indeed, the entire concept of trying to actively spread that or any other philosophy around the world is deeply repugnant to pure Jacksonians. Jacksonians are anti-imperialistic.

The whole point of Jacksonianism is "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. You play fair with me and I'll play fair with you. But if you fuck with me, I'll kill you."

To Jacksonians, it is entirely possible to create an adequate world framework of consistent and fair behavior, sufficient to support trade, through vigilance and the threat of reprisal (military or otherwise). Going beyond that to a world government as such is neither necessary, desirable nor even possible, and the best case is where there is as little international framework and governance as can be: only the bare minimum required but no more. Anything beyond that will eventually be abused by someone, so it's better to do without it.

Wilsonians want a world government. Jacksonians think that's a fool's quest. And contrary to your supposition that world government is required for successful international trade, the reality is that the last fifty years of international trade were managed under Jacksonian principles, and quite successfully too.

Free trade inside the US works because of the threat of force implicit in the police and the courts. Free trade works internationally because we are strong, alert and willing to retaliate against those who cross us. To Jacksonians, that is sufficient. Nothing else is needed, and nothing else can work.

- Steven den Beste, USS Clueless, 11 AUG 2002.

There you go, the type of reciprocity that Jacksonians like and where the 'libertarian' view comes in. You will get the idea that Jacksonians let families tend to church and religion, while supporting the right of each individual to have whatever religious belief that suits them.

You would be correct in that.

Social conservatism has been seen as an attempt to legislate morality and that has, plainly, not worked without some overarching National religion that agrees on all the main points of what morality actually *is*. Common laws of agreed-upon restrictions and the punishments to fit the crime are cross-religion: they are good things for individuals of all religions in a common culture where it is that culture that is put in the role of upholding the Nation. While Andrew Jackson would indeed state:

The Bible is the rock on which this Republic rests.
- Andrew Jackson

notice that he is not talking about law, here. Where does he go to look for law and government? That is something missed by most, and is more than telling:

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.
- Andrew Jackson

That is in keeping with the founding of the Nation. Our ability to craft intelligent decisions based on firm backing also means that interpretation of the Word of God is left up to each and every one of us. Personally, being of no known religious type, use the Bible as a founding concept, but find much in it that has been passed over by time regarding slavery, the rights of women, and such simple things as usuary and consumption of alcohol... wait a second, Jesus turned water into wine! Scratch that last, he was the perfect party guest, able to keep a party going at a wave of a hand towards some jars of water. I do wish the religious folks of the late 19th and early 20th century would have remembered that, which points out to the strange idea that religion remains static in its interpretation over time. It does not, but acts, instead, as guideposts to us and when differing views happen we are to solve them in the neutral ground of the common society based on reason.

This view would be given by Nicholas Collin in A Foreign Spectator I, 06 AUG 1787, (and even moreso in XXVIII on 28 SEP 1787) also in Atticus I, 09 AUG 1787, in shearing the law from royalty so as to bring in to the common fold, by Noah Webster in A Citizen of America, 17 OCT 1787, amongst many, many others. While christians were founders in America, there was an overarching view to keep the Peace of Westphalia and found a Nation that would adhere to the Law of Nations as grown up from the thoughts of Grotius and Vattel amongst many, and that view was also supported in the English common law. Unless folks missed some reading of their history books, the concept of religious outcasts finding a new life in peace amongst each other because they WERE different and differed on their views of christ, divinity and morality. What would happen is the boiling away of differences to get to things held in common, and there were some handfuls of those.

When one considers bedrock for supporting a structure, be it a house of the tallest of skyscrapers, the #1 thing you do not want to do with it is start to *mine* it for a nice facade to the building. In no time at all the footing of the building is gone and you have a pile of rubble. Bedrock is supportive and foundational and allows things to be built *on it*. The Bible was a book amongst the sects of christianity but it was and *is* not the only book OF christianity. The respect that christians gave to other sects as the Peace of Westphalia spread was still not well enforced by the time of the Puritans, Quakers and other sects that were excluded socially and, often, economically, from public life in European nations. They came here to END that by creating their own communities and those would grow together. It is telling that those ethnically based religious factions would grow together even *before* the Revolution, which is what Tomas Paine would see in writing Common Sense (via The Gutenberg Project):

Not one third of the inhabitants, even of this province, are of English descent.
Wherefore I reprobate the phrase of parent or mother country applied
to England only, as being false, selfish, narrow and ungenerous.

Americans were already become tolerant, and highly so, of other religious views and traditions because there were quite a few of them. Within a few decades after the Constitution in the Antebellum era, we would get the first great explosion of new christian religions that would found America as a leading place to come and found religions. The Bible is still there as bedrock, joined with such fine things as The Black Book of the Admiralty, Law of Nations, views on the English Common Law given by Blackstone (amongst others), and such trivial things as the Peace of Westphalia. While the Bible does intertwine with these views, especially Westphalia and the *limits* of religion inside Nations, there were other traditions represented by these works. The Black Book grew out of Roman Imperial trade law and was modified by European nations but would represent an understanding of trade that not only pre-existed christianity but remained unchanged by it. The Law of Nations would grow out of the views after Westphalia on how Nations operated internally and externally, and Vattel would point out that the operational parameters are called into being by the Nation State as a concept and that the work of Nations grows out of that framework. He would point out that the Ancients had not well defined Nation States, but that they still operated in the framework of them even without knowing it as the rules become ones that develop from that type of relationship. That reference to the Ancients means it pre-dates Judaism, also, and goes far back to the first City States to show how these parameters would come into being and work. The English common law would grow out of not only indigenous tribal views, but Nordic ones in which the King is accountable to the People, and that common men deserved local justice administered by those they knew. No one was above the law, not even royalty.

These are not 'optional' parts of looking at America: they are a whole. The Bible gives moral and ethical preceptual ideas, but those can only be instantiated via the understanding of the Peace of Westphalia so as to not infringe on other practices and it existed after the concept of Nations and trade law, while growing up simultaneously, but geographically far from, the common law. The strength of these things coming together is something that Jacksonians identify with and dearly: they set a way to operate amongst ourselves that is honorable and scalable from the individual to the Nation State. While the 'Golden Rule' is not only a good idea, it is represented in how Jacksonians see Nations operate as well as interpersonal relationships. Beyond that, coming from the Scots-Irish traditions of supporting society via martial means, Jacksonians fully realize that the objects of government need to be defended and that government, itself, is accountable to society. Individuals get the greatest leeway in operating so long as they do not degrade the common society nor government to their own ends.

This makes them different from the Republican Party on some few areas, that Ron Paul only touches on here and there. Jacksonians are tradesmen, tinkerers, creators of things that support life and family, and give support to local charities that do good so that society can do well. Jacksonians recognize the military tradecraft *as* a tradecraft, and give it special honor in upholding the Nation and protecting her people. You do not go to war lightly and when you do go to war, you go to *win it*. Whatever great thinkers purport, Jacksonians try out and if it is found wanting they say so... which is why the bending of the political parties to pure ideology turns off Jacksonians in droves: the theories of both parties have proven to be unworkable in many instances and it is those instances they keep on pushing while ignoring the facts before their eyes.

Being nice to terrorists has just gotten Americans killed and we should stop being nice to them. They have come to America and killed us and declared personal and private war upon us, and so we should reciprocate with open and public announcement of who they are, civil justice for those that will repudiate past works and hold themselves accountable and a 'no holds barred' fight to remove the rest of these barbarians from the planet until they are convinced that society is a good thing to uphold OPENLY and that when it disagrees with you, you are not to make private war upon ANYONE. Steven den Beste put it best with this:

Will we forgive the Islamic nations, and work to remove the source of their anger? Will the United States begin to address "root causes" and work to remove them? You betcha, but only after the war has been won. Jacksonians remove the danger first, and only then work to make sure the danger never arises again. But a Jacksonian never rewards an enemy, never ever appeases one. Until the war has been won, "root causes" are a distraction. This is the reason why "if you kill Americans, you're dead meat."

Jacksonians understand that view because 'root causes' as purported by the Left are not the source of the problem: those seeking to destroy civil society ARE the problem, and that attack isn't just upon the US but upon civilization in the form it has taken. Even as the Cold War was dragging on, we saw not only Americans but our Friends and Allies being blown up, shot, assassinated, kidnapped and 'disappeared' by terror groups and for over 30 years and well going on 40 years the government would say NOTHING about that. Police work obviously didn't work as 9/11 would tell us explicitly and in large, black letters written in the dust of our fellow Americans in the NYC air and the fire and smoke of our soldiers attacked by these barbarians.

Also note that the 'root cause' of lacking free trade or, indeed, hearty trade with America, was not a factor here: America since the time of Woodrow Wilson implemented a 'trade to change society' concept in the Middle East. Looking at that 90 years later, it doesn't appear to have worked out too well. This upsets the digestion of Republicans and many, many libertarians, that 'free trade' is predicated on the strength to back it up, and when that strength and will is lacking it tends to empower our enemies and give them cheaper weapons to kill us. Mind you the Leftist version of trade is worse, but that does not mean that 'free trade' is a great and winning concept without societal control. It is that which Jacksonians look at, and trade is a part of helping the Nation to defend itself and is fully accountable to society not only by tariffs and taxation, but to actually interdicting trade with uncivilized, non-Nation State killers who are outlaw.

While this has, in the past, led to military views, which are supported by Jacksonians, it also means the entire and full panoply of National power can be deployed against it. Ron Paul actually is quite attractive on that front while being not so attractive on his isolationist conception of the world. Because Jacksonians see tradecraft as a good thing, and selling things as a good thing, the view of a global market is something that is understood, meaning that the full concept of how a Nation operates amongst Nations comes into play. For us to understand what is allowable and what is not, we look to the Constitution and the bedrock documents under it, and understand that the Nation can and *should* empower citizens with the right to operate in that terrorism venue but fully accountable to the rules of war by having requirements for uniform and accountability to military justice. That is easy to understand as societal backing is paramount to keeping the Nation whole and its governing institutions are reflective of that greater will. That does not obviate the need for the regular armed forces, but is an asymmetrical tool that is deployed as an adjunct to the regular armed forces. The over-reliance upon National military as the *only* way to go after foes is misguided and there are many that are not fit enough for the military but well nigh fit enough for private military ventures with Congressional imprimatur.

These areas of social conservatism, free trade, foreign policy and military policy, that the Republican Party holds that are at variance with Jacksonians means that Jacksonians do not see a home there for them. By seeing government as a restriction on our wickedness, to give it Tom Paine's view, it must be *limited* as it is not a promoter of the good which is the function of society. Jacksonians see no *good* in pushing morals, unaccountable trade, foreign policy that supports tyrants and dictators, and a military policy only to support trade and not invest in liberty and freedom for those who were under dictators and despots of all stripes. National Security is an area of common agreement and lower taxes are good only if it comes with much, much smaller government. There is commonality amongst many Republicans and Libertarians with Jacksonians on that.

By not following through on the promises of President Reagan, the Republican Party is seen as 'not serious' on those issues and, in fact, counter-productive to them as 'compassionate conservatism' has meant bigger government that is more intrusive in private affairs. In featuring abortion as a semi-'litmus test', and locking that 'debate' into glacial stillness for decades, the view that the common society is to make its best adjustment and then seek better ways forward is NOT being achieved. That is not an either/or decision process, but one that is open to other views of the public and society upon it, but that has been locked out by the loud and well funded 'sides' that have removed all middle ground on that issue. The concept of 'States Rights' plays its role there, as well as defining who, when born in a State, is a 'citizen'. Notice that you get your birth certificate from the State not the federal government, which indicates the role the States play. Getting the federal government *out* of the 'debate' is paramount to unlocking the glaciers, and stepping back we can ask: just what can we do on the State level?

Libertarians and their semi-cohort of Liberaltarians and Libertines have hard and fast problems with putting society in the driver's seat. And yet that is exactly what the founding of the Nation points to, requiring each member of society to come together to 'form a more perfect Union' and settle differences amongst ourselves in civil fasion. That means there are needs for safeguards not only against government, but against private individuals who do such things as take up weapons of war without accountability. Liberty must actually be DEFENDED and not just verbally or in the courts, but on the bloody battlefields of mankind so that those wishing to bring it to an end are brought to heel and made to understand that attack free people comes with a nasty price tag to it.

As one cartoon had it, with survivors of a shipwreck floating in the open ocean: "Watch out for hungry sharks!" And then: "Watch out for sharks." That is a lesson of history not lost on Jacksonians and we take it to heart, so that when we make agreements they are backed to the hilt and when they are transgressed we say so and end them. Cease-fires are a case in point and when Saddam would not adhere to his, and two Presidents did NOTHING, it was wondered when the man would be held accountable to his word for his Nation. This also goes for treaties, in general, so that with something like NAFTA, where Mexico agreed not to export its unemployed northwards, and they have DONE SO, they must be seen as not upholding their part of the treaty. That will, indeed, make Republican hearts flutter, as well as pointing out all this lovely trade with China has gotten us toxic goods in return and exploitation of our political system so that they can become more of a military threat.

Perhaps free trade should be withheld to Friends and Allies?

Just a thought.

Basically, when something doesn't work a Jacksonian wants to know *why* and then see if it can be fixed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

When it does need to be fixed, especially in the areas of Nations, stepping back and looking to some of the fundamental things Nations do is required, and then casting our own aspirations against that and seeing what is left that can be done. This requires holding other Nations accountable, and that is how treaties work. And keep the damned things to a minimum so that we are not tripping over them every which way, to the point where more bureaucrats are needed. If it needs more bureaucrats, it will have a hard time working. Some things are necessary, but others are not and Washington's view on entangling alliances is well heeded to this day. Note that the UN is put together by treaty and has a huge staff with little to show for it, and epitomizes what *not* to do.

Walter Russell Mead would describe Jacksonianism as the 'crab grass' of American Politics, and it is: the hardy weed that keeps on breaking up the concrete of set ideologies because those ideologies do not shift with society over time. You can't get rid of it, can't fix it, can't eliminate it forever, save by paving over everything. It is sad that the latter course has been taken, which means Jacksonians see no reason to vote for parties looking to invest more in government and remove liberty and freedom from the People. The terrorists hit hard on that concrete and, suddenly, the crab grass re-appears as Jacksonians volunteer for the armed forces so that it has met every quota since 9/11. And we push hard to victory and justice afterwards so that we are never attacked again.

That will take some doing.

It would be handy if there was a political will to do it in either of the two parties. Since there isn't, I expect the crab grass to keep on growing and shifting the internal structures of both further apart. Something will give, but Jacksonians love their Nation and we will not see it fall due to a mere break-up of ideologies... because it is in the holding of liberty and freedom and using them that one helps their neighbors and society to be free. Not just individuals, but everyone. And that really isn't pushed hard by anyone, these days, those concepts of the Revolution.

I guess they are still Revolutionary, then.

Sphere: Related Content

The Responsibilities of those running for President

The following is a cross-posting from The Jacksonian Party.

The following is a personal outlook paper of The Jacksonian Party.

Every four years America gets a look at the political class' aspirants for the office of President of the United States. This office has a heavy load to it for one individual, and has far and wide ranging powers in foreign affairs, military deployments, choosing who will be giving oversight to the federal government and nominating Judges to the federal courts. There is also the power to pardon and the more general 'head of state' concept for all things external to the Nation. These powers are vast, but closely delimited and stringently scoped so as to give the office checks and balances with the other branches of the federal system (Legislative and Judicial), plus requiring some ability to work with the States and address subjects to the People about how government is being run.

Thus, every four years these are not the things that are talked about!

While certain candidates will talk about one thing or another off of the list, very few will tackle the entire concept of the Executive branch in-full. Mostly this is due either to inexperience (even for incumbents there is much that is never learned about the Presidency) or to being familiar with a more limited scope of responsibilities and powers. Those coming from the Legislative branch have some belief they actually know what the Executive power actually *is* but only see it from their legislative perspective, often in the negative and do not realize that there is very little positive on the legislative side for the Executive.

Presidents can, for example, send a budget for the Federal Government to Congress. Congress then, using its authority to start all appropriations in the House, tosses that document to the side and makes up its own budget. That is an over-simplification, of course, and many budgetary items get shifted directly over, but Congress feels impelled to micro-manage by adding staff, items, budget and so on to areas of the government and often removing Executive items. That is part of the job of Congress, but that micro-management outlook means that they are stepping into the Executive area and trying to have a direct hand on the course of government instead of *its* negative duty to stop the Executive from abusing its control. Together these form a shiftless bureaucracy that then plays Executive against Legislative to meet bureaucratic needs set by that bureaucracy, and not by the political will of the Nation via the Executive and Legislative branches.

So, whenever you hear a Presidential candidate put forth that they will 'trim or cut back' government, realize that they have no ability to do so beyond very, very limited terms. That size is set by Congress and the Executive has the job of carrying out the functions of what government is to do and does so within the confines set by the Legislative branch. And as Congress has seen fit to manage all the way down to the individual program level, the actual ability of a President to change outlook within government is encroached upon by the Legislative branch. That is a 'soft' usurpation of power by Congress believing that it can manage government at the finest detail level, while it has no actual capability to do so as management is on the Executive side. By trying to add in more and more organizations for 'oversight', Congress is basically saying: ignore the Executive, do as we say, report to us.

It is in that tension between Executive and Legislative branches that increases 'oversight' but decreases accountability of government to the Executive to report to the American People. Congress does, yeah and verily, point to its role in mandating, funding and obligating the government, but to then try and manage such things via additional organizations with less Executive control and accountability, the Federal structure, internally, is weakened.

The result of that weakening is plain: runaway expenses, programs that cannot be killed, heightening of inter-agency and even intra-agency fighting and turf wars. By creating a Director of National Intelligence, the various parts of existing 'turf' that were threatened then responded by increased intransigence, less cooperation and a feeling that their expertise was being questioned. Well, it was, and for good reason, but the standing up of a wholly separate organization for 'oversight' added a new layer in bureaucracy, added overhead, reduced efficiency, decreased timeliness of information and, generally, made the problem worse.

To get more efficient cross-specialty Intelligence work done, a framework that crosses all of the Intel Community needed to be established that was: organic, cooperative, and shared resources and removed 'turf'. That did not happen, and so the already watered down National Intelligence Estimate now gets further dilution by the DNI. Dots not only don't get connected, they are now further away from each other by the separation of the 'oversight' provided by DNI: to this day there is no organic IC solution that crosses civilian and military needs together into a common IC framework. Oversight has increased, accountability has decreased and what little knowledge there is gets further separated by the higher level of bureaucracy involved.

The Executive power over the Civil Service is limited, with the laws and regulations set up to support the employees over doing a good job. Even at places like the CIA, where your pay grade could vary greatly depending on performance, the actual utility of that didn't allow flexibility in outlook to enter into the place. With mid-1980's predictions the USSR and Soviet Bloc would be around at least until past 2010 and probably past 2030, the actual collapse of it was a stunning slap on the face to the entire IC. No better has been the Dept. of Agriculture in supporting the concept of 'family farms' with payments mandated by Congress going to folks who farm so very little or none at all, that the utility of the Department is called into question.

If you can't support citizen farming could you at least stop supporting Big Agribusiness? Well, not if Congress has a say in that, which it does. Problems in the IRS and FBI with automation, and the inability of either to adapt readily to the modern world, has led to antiquated systems or, even worse, multiple non-integrated systems that house different data sets being unavailable to one person at one place at one time. That is the IC problem, written on the domestic side. And as the system is not set up to change, and is defended by partisans for their 'turf' and budget, the ability *to* change decreases. Firing is a help, but not a remedy so long as the office structures exist across government.

The thing the Executive does have is, in its own way, extremely powerful: mandating work rules, grading systems for work and, at the highest end, the ability to fire the civilian hired interface between Agencies and the rest of government. That last part is a key understanding of the power of the President, beyond just appointing cabinet level officers, judges and such. The hired Senior Service comes on with *contracts*, typically for a base year and up to four option years. A federal government power is the ability to do something with a contract called T4C: Terminate for Convenience of the government.

T4C is the instant firing power the President has over the Senior Executive (or Intelligence) Service. Those individuals tend to be long-term ones, eve with the 1 + 4 arrangement, as they come out of the Civil Service or are brought in from other parts of government or the private sector. In many Agencies the SES/SIS goes down to the Directorate level of government, which is usually a major sub-component of the Agency. The head of a Personnel Directorate would be SES/SIS, and would have senior Civil Service employees as Department heads under the Directorate. In some few Agencies that Department level is becoming an SES/SIS one, which means the direct power of the President reaches very, very far into the government. To express displeasure with an Agency that purposefully will not supply information or offer its obedience to the President, the folks heading up Directorates and on upwards can all be *fired*. This has so rarely been exercised it has almost been forgotten, but the laws of the 1970's make that clear. Such individuals serve at the convenience of the President to help run the Civil Service.

Any President who was *serious* about dissolving an Agency, could tell the SES for it to start the plans to scope it out, what can be dropped completely and what few parts need to go to a different part of government. If the Civil Service will not carry out this task, the President can weight it to be a primary one for all ratings - don't do the work, and your rating drops. Do that for a couple of years and the wheels could be started to actually try and get rid of a civil service employee... don't bet on that, though. Any member of the SES who can't carry out such directives can also be fired via a T4C. In short, no matter what Congress *does*, this is an exercise of Executive Power by the Executive saying: this part of government is useless to the Nation and does not need to exist in the federal government. Getting any work done in such an environment would be difficult, at best, and the more intransigent the civil service gets, the worse in looks. Congress can step in to say *why* it thinks an Agency is needed, mandate it and fund it. The Executive can flip that around and tell such Agencies to demonstrate how little they do for the American People as compared to State or Private concerns, and to be put on life support while the President asks for a plan to dissolve the thing.

I don't hear much about that from candidates on the trail, as they are not *used* to having such power. Very few individuals *are* used to that, and most of those were the business tycoons of the 19th century. Such work can and should spark National debate on the utility and function of such things, beyond the payment transfers that go on... or maybe *because* of such transfers. It is a valid stance for a Presidential candidate to say: 'This boat needs rocking and I intend to rock the excess overboard.'

That is just one of the Head of Government powers the President gets, and it is a tool to enact policy by the elected President upon the government of the People. Congress gets its say for funding and support, but basic needs and oversight is the Executive purview, and calling waste and suspect parts of government into question for dissolving them is a major duty of the President... not that you will ever hear that on the campaign trail, either.

As Head of State, beyond appointing Ambassadors and having the foreign policy of the Nation, outside of Treaty approval and regularization, the President gets a sole power which is another of the negative powers of the Office: revoke a Treaty.

The US is part of the UN... by Treaty.
The US is part of NAFTA... by Treaty.
The US has troops deployed in Germany... by Treaty.

Basically, all of how regular functions of the US with foreign Nations is given by Treaty and then supported by enacting legislation. Remove the Treaty, the legislation goes with it. Presidents can and have removed Treaties from their support, most recently the ABM Treaty, which was seen as a detriment to National Defense, but slews of Treaties with Nations that attacked their own people, went totalitarian or started in on open warfare with its neighbors, have also seen this. Any time you hear anything about problems with foreign Nations with regard to trade, illegal immigration, and terrorism spread to the US, the concept of revoking Treaties is one to express the displeasure of the Executive and change the course of the Nation.

Even if immediately impeached (and this is a purely Executive power properly used) the revocation of the Treaty would still *stand*. To get it back would take a willing President with a Senate able to sign-off on the new agreement, which might take *years* to get back as it is starting from *scratch*. A quick-and-easy 'lets just re-instate it' might work... but with so many treaties having problems to them, particularly trade and immigration, the ability to do that may be limited. It is not the easiest of things to revoke a Treaty that has been in place for decades but once done the change in course is nearly impossible to stop. The power of a Treaty is to add a regular function between Nations and to regularize it on a set framework. Remove that and the benefit to both Nations also goes with it. Often that is seen as no loss and of some gain, particularly if things are not working out so well with a Treaty.

Presidents must look at Treaties and their impact on the Nation and decide the utility of such things. Any Treaty that is abrogated by the other side, or that harmfully affects the Nation with little benefit, or NO benefit, needs to be ended. That is a signature to do so and requires no help from the Senate. Both must agree to get a Treaty in place, but that is not required on the ending side of things as that is a regular power of a Head of State. This is a Law of Nations view and President Washington used just that in The Proclamation of Neutrality, to forbid US Citizens from doing *anything* to contravene his foreign policy. Under force of law. And when it pertains to other Nations at war (even with each other without US involvement) the President has the power to tell the Nation to have NOTHING to do with such things.

This Law of Nations view pre-dates the US Constitution and was incorporated into how England worked not only at the National level but the internal legal level, as well. The United States would form a federal republic which is covered under Law of Nations in Book I, paragraph 10:

§ 10. Of states forming a federal republic.

Finally, several sovereign and independent states may unite themselves together by a perpetual confederacy, without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect state. They will together constitute a federal republic: their joint deliberations will not impair the sovereignty of each member, though they may, in certain respects, put some restraint on the exercise of it, in virtue of voluntary engagements. A person does not cease to be free and independent, when he is obliged to fulfil engagements which he has voluntarily contracted.

Such were formerly the cities of Greece; such are at present the Seven United Provinces of the Netherlands, (13) and such the members of the Helvetic body.

Yes, there were other republics and federal republics before the US and beyond confederation is a strong federation of delegating duties to the federal republic by the States. It is interesting that the concepts from the Declaration of Independence are put forth in Law of Nations, especially not changing the constitution of a nation without great cause and with great caution (paras 32-36). In the US we instantiate the sovereign, or individual leading the Nation, to be the President, although the power division between the President and the Legislature is somewhat differently defined than for other forms of Nation (paras 38-55 and electives states 56-71 ).

That is part of the Law of Nations, and the respected differences between Nations is acknowledged while the general outlook of the actual framework of the Laws are respected. Of note for modern times are paragraph 53, on the obedience due a sovereign, and paragraph 54 in what cases they may resist the sovereign. It is a long section (actually in two paragraphs), and puts forth that the actions of a sovereign must be truly odious, of the 'execution unjustly' form of odious not the 'trample on the Constitution but unable to show where and how' form, for such obedience to be resisted. By Book III the right of the sovereign to prevent citizens from taking part in a conflict not of the Nation would be founded. It is of note that it is an explicit view of the sovereign to do that, and President Washington as part of the foreign policy powers exercises that right as Head of State for the Nation. In Book III this is gone over on the question of Neutrality (paras 103-135).

The rights of private persons during time of war are put down in paras 223-232, with 223 reinforcing that citizens may not take up war making on their own, as that is handed only to Nations and the sovereign of a Nation, which President Washington re-iterates on the Neutrality of the US. Foreign recruiters should well be made aware via this that paragraph 15 is also in play, and that those recruiting in the US, when found, are treated thusly: "Foreign recruiters are hanged without mercy, and with great justice." Nor should a citizen join or obey a foreign recruiter in any way, shape or form. This is not only kidnapping, or 'man-stealing', but also a direct contravention of the directive of the sovereign and can, in and of itself, lead directly to war.

That is the power we hand to the federal government and the Executive branch of it: the ability to determine what raises to the level of being something that could involve us in war. When attacked, of course, we are at war with no need to declare it, save as a perfunctory statement (Vattel, Law of Nations, Book III, para 57) to inform the population. In the US system it is only when needing to go on offensive war, or war against enemies that have taken hostile positions and arms or having caused casus belli to us by its actions. In the role of commanding the Armies and the Navies of the Union, the President gains not only the power of field command and disposition of the troops, along with ensuring orderly procedures being followed, but also gains the entire purview over US ships at sea, plus crews.

This is the wartime assurance for US shipping, and neutral shipping to the US, that it shall be unimpeded by war. This is an ancient concept going far beyond the regularized Law of Nations (Vattel, Book I, paras 279-295), and deep into the English common law (as seen in US vs. Wilberger, 1820) all the way to the Black Book of the Admiralty which is a collection of post-Roman trade laws as instantiated in European nations in the 14th century. That power of being the Commander of the Navy allows for such things as piracy to be dealt with along with any external threats to trade for the Nation via the High Seas. Additionally as Commander of the Armies and Head of State, the President gets to set how those overseas activities that are *not* on the high seas, but conducted by means of war are addressed. The Congress may make law on the civil side according to the Law of Nations (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8), but cannot address things outside of the High Seas power (also in Art. I, Section 8) and signed treaties. It may set up justice practices within the Army, but those are only in accordance with regular Nations and treaties, not with those falling outside that framework.

It is this basic dichotomy of power directives that the next President has to deal with and they are ones that have vexed sovereigns back to the 14th century, when parliaments and kings had different areas of concern and the sovereign ruler would see problems outside the realm and other Nations that needed to be dealt with and the parliament would have no ability to enact anything in that realm as it was outside the Nation. Government for a Nation, however, is given the responsibility to protect the Nation and its citizenry first and foremost (Vattel, Law of Nations, Book I, paras 16-21) and to avoid things that would be contrary to that survival (para 22) and then gains the right that derives from the responsibilities to do seek survival and to advance its internal understandings *both* (para 25).

In this era of rights without responsibilities and trying to understand 'why they hate us' we come to a dilemma: a Nation need not care about *why* it is disliked, so long as it is *true to its own nature*. That is the responsibility of government to assure that both can be done simultaneously, and understanding hatred comes a bit after those two things and are not predicated on the understanding first. Even then it is not up to the population to, necessarily, understand 'why someone hates us', but for the government to deal with that. The power of the President in crafting foreign policy is to find a way to enhance the Nation, ensure that it survives and keep us true to our ideals, first and foremost. At no time do we put any other people or Nations ahead of our own needs and outlooks because we would no longer be the United States or *any Nation* if we did that. That is the responsibility given to the President and the rights that grow from that are also in that office.

I am afraid you won't hear much of that on the campaign trail, either.

As of late the right of the other branches of government to impeach a President also comes up, under the high crimes and misdemeanors concept. This, also, is given statement in Law of Nations, with regards to the prince being subject to the law (paras 48-49) and yet the dignity of office making the prince sacred and untouchable (para 50). Yet the population may undo a tyrant (para 51) or seek arbitration with such (para 52). In all cases beyond that, or in which resistance to a barbarous leader (para 54) the public is to show obedience and deference to the orders of that sovereign in his areas of power (para 53). Today we see so many looking at expanding the idea of 'barbarous' and 'tyrant' to include mere political differences, which is not the case with a National sovereign, be he President, King or simple Prime Minister who is also Head of State. A President who shows fidelity to the laws, however, can have indiscretions of them and it is there that we place the Impeachment power, most particularly is paragraph 49 in this instance:

§ 49. In what sense he is subject to the laws.

But it is necessary to explain this submission of the prince to the laws. First, he ought, as we have just seen, to follow their regulations in all the acts of his administration. In the second place, he is himself subject, in his private affairs, to all the laws that relate to property. I say, "in his private affairs;" for when he acts as a sovereign prince, and in the name of the state, he is subject only to the fundamental laws, and the law of nations. In the third place, the prince is subject to certain regulations of general polity, considered by the state as inviolable, unless he be excepted in express terms by the law, or tacitly by a necessary consequence of his dignity. I here speak of the laws that relate to the situation of individuals, and particularly of those that regulate the validity of marriages. These laws are established to ascertain the state of families: now the royal family is that of all others the most important to be certainly known. But, fourthly, we shall observe in general, with respect to this question, that, if the prince is invested with a full, absolute, and unlimited sovereignty, he is above the laws, which derive from him all their force; and he may dispense with his own observance of them, whenever natural justice and equity will permit him. Fifthly, as to the laws relative to morals and good order, the prince ought doubtless to respect them, and to support them by his example. But, sixthly, he is certainly above all civil penal laws, The majesty of a sovereign will not admit of his being punished like a private person; and his functions are too exalted to allow of his being molested under pretence of a fault that does not directly concern the government of the state.

In a federal republic with representative democracy in which a citizen is given the powers of sovereign, we do not see the person of the sovereign as above the civil law, nor is any prince seen likewise - even royalty is accountable to their own law. Civil penal laws, however, of actions by individuals against the individual who is President do have a problem and only for high crimes and misdemeanors should a President be subject to such. The US permits otherwise at its peril, and thus puts pure personal accountability ahead of National needs, when an individual who is President does have a date certain they will no longer be President and such suits may then happen.

This problem of the Presidency shown up in President Clinton was his perjury in a civil matter which many saw as a prosecution that should not have been happening until after he left office. There were many other, and larger problems that got put aside for this, and while none condone his action, the ability of the court to put the Nation into such peril in the FIRST PLACE was and is questionable. Congress adding on to that did not help things, and even guilty of having done such activity, it should never have arisen in the first place. Unconscionable to commit perjury in a private matter? Yes, and definitely. But that is seen in a different light under the Law of Nations and is to be handled *after* the President leaves office as it is associated with a purely personal matter.

That is part of the distrust of the American Public with its government: the Courts have ruled foolishly, individuals out to seek satisfaction put the Nation at risk and then Congress adds to that by increasing risk either via countenancing such activity or actively aiding it. This is a problem in America and the Nation needs to see that a Chief Law Enforcement Officer will also stick to the laws and enforce them, even upon himself. These, too, trace back to Law of Nations (paras 160-163, 166-170, 173-4, 176) which also includes the sovereign pardon power (173). Causing legal mischief in private concerns with a President should be beyond the pale and a firm stance taken against that by all political factions in the Nation: this puts us all at risk.

And I am pretty certain *this* does not get talked about on the campaign trail, either, especially the use of the pardon power. That has been highly individual to each President, with some dispensing very few and others, apparently, going on sprees to pardon or commute sentences, or even to pre-pardon individuals who may have gotten into trouble.

This upholding of the law is not only the civil law of the US, but our ability to be a sovereign nation and govern ourselves. Citizens have not only the right, but the obligation to uphold their own laws and obey them (Law of Nations Book I, para 30), respect and obey the sovereign who administers the law (para 53), obey the treaties between nations (para 96), work to ensure the prosperity of the nation (para 76, 81, 118) and to love his country (paras 119-120). The sovereign must ensure that the useful arts are protected for the Nation and that there is accord between government and the citizenry on these things. That is the job of any Nation state leader, and falls to the President, also. The power to list those skills necessary for the Nation that we will encourage immigration to the Nation and restrict emigration *from* the Nation also holds true. While Congress holds the immigration to the Nation power, the President oversees the emigration part via passports and such things. In this day and age very few are ever refused passports, but that is the mechanism for the Executive to not only ensure those that may harm other Nations are kept in check, but that those who are of great use to the Nation are retained.

The President gets this from the Head of State and Head of Government power, along with the foreign policy area, but has so become a non-issue in modern America that we may not recognize the right to refuse emigration as one held by the President, and yet that is the case with these cumulative powers.

This is not even a complete listing of the powers the President gets via how nation states work. The Law of Nations set out to regularize that understanding as the ancient civilizations had never done so. By examining all the cases of how a nation works, and properly defining what is held by a nation state and what is *not* and *why*, the founders of the Republic of the United States utilized this framework, along with others so as to create an understanding of what powers rest in government so that the common will of the People could be accurately expressed. These are not the written parts of the Constitution, but the basis for which a Constitution makes sense: without such things as the Law of Nations, understanding of the English common law and how trade developed from the Black Book of the Admiralty and through the Law of Nations, the actual Nation of the United States would not exist.

We live out these ideals and outlooks and yet they are rarely given to us in school or even in advanced studies any more. The modern era takes so much for granted that the concept of a 'post-Westphalian State' is talked about, but it cannot be given meaning as the framework of Nation states by the Law of Nations IS post-Westphalian and developed FROM the Peace of Westphalia. What those talking about a 'post-Westphalian State' are doing are talking about removing the concept of Nation State amongst mankind and imposing something *else* which they dare not define as it would not allow people to secure rights separate from the Nation State. The Law of Nations allows for either view of the source of rights to exist: rights handed down from the State and rights granted to the State by the People. In that flexibility comes wide variation of views and outlooks, so that cultures may find what is best for themselves in governing. It does not ensure liberty or freedom, although that becomes a major point between Nations in their activities, but for the individual it is up to the actual form of government to represent what is needed.

Strange that we will not hear of these basic concepts in times grown rough with outlaws spanning the globe to attack civilization. We need this understanding now more than ever in our history, because such lawless concepts have arisen before and were understood by our very own fore bearers in America. In our ignorance of the past we are dooming ourselves to a less well understood future, and a less safe one. Winning military victories only has meaning if the order and accountability amongst Nations is also restored, and that now slips through our grasp as we cannot figure out how to apply it to ourselves. Because those seeking high office take things for granted and leave unsaid. That, too, is a responsibility of the sovereign of a Nation, as seen in Book I:

§ 111. Instruction.

To succeed in this, it is necessary to instruct the people to seek felicity where it is to be found; that is, in their own perfection, — and to teach them the means of obtaining it. The sovereign cannot, then, take too much pains in instructing and enlightening his people, and in forming them to useful knowledge and wise discipline. Let us leave a hatred of the sciences to the despotic tyrants of the east: they are afraid of having their people instructed, because they choose to rule over slaves. But though they are obeyed with the most abject submission, they frequently experience the effects of disobedience and revolt. A just and wise prince feels no apprehensions from the light of knowledge: he knows that it is ever advantageous to a good government. If men of learning know that liberty is the natural inheritance of mankind; on the other hand they are more fully sensible than their neighbours, how necessary it is, for their own advantage, that this liberty should be subject to a lawful authority: — incapable of being slaves, they are faithful subjects.

We could use some of this in our views on the sciences to this day, lest we become ignorant of them and enslaved to that ignorance. That does require an understanding of what science *is* and how it functions as a body of knowledge. Unfortunately that is beyond what is spoken of by those seeking higher office and so we now seek ignorance. Because if they don't understand it we will become slaves once more in our ignorance of those things that are worthy of free men to think and speak about. Instead we have a quest for power and that, in the end, will leave us poorer and enslaved to ignorance if not countered.

I wonder why that is not talked about on the campaign trail by those seeking such power?

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Giving Thanks

To the men and women of the Armed Forces: my eternal thanks to you for defending the Nation.

May you have a blessed holiday and safety in our troubled times.

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Just what have I been up to?

For those that may pass by, that question may arise, as my posting rate has gone downwards. I had predicted such, but for other reasons. Namely - moving. That got put off due to the health concerns of a loved one and that has kept me in the environs of NoVA that I do not adore, climate-wise. Along with those concerns comes having to get a bit more done around here, due to the problems of said loved one. Ahhhh... if only I were healthy, I wouldn't be blogging!

After that comes the lovely task of 'digital equipment refresh'. What is that, you may wonder? Well, due to the pace of change for computer equipment, the good things put in 3 or more years ago start to show their age as software and time start to take their toll. Beyond defragmenting hard-drives and such nice things, also updating of drivers may point to a BIOS needing upgraded which then ensues that overhead. When that is done you find that the system sub-components may have garnered some system overhead... which slows things down. And then there are the add-ons, 'neat things to try out', software updates (in which the software itself runs just a bit slower to be more 'secure'), and all the various little things that begin to encrust an operating system. This stuff is known as 'cruft' and after 3 years you either need to scrub it all down to the bare essentials and start over... which entails ensuring that re-installed software can, actually, re-install properly.... or... yes, starting over with a new system and moving data files over.

Another family member needed a new system for basic gaming, word processing, and such, plus net surfing, so I started out a few weeks back on that. In doing so I got refreshed on the current state of the art technology, which I had let slide since 2004. Before 2004 the entire PC industry had shifted from 'business' support to 'gaming support' for platforms with 'multimedia' growing up around *that*. Any system that could reliably handle games, would also have enough power to run any business application for the desktop AND have multimedia horsepower to spare. Gaming drove the PC industry on innovation, and still does to a large extent. The minimal necessary computing platform for all desktop business applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, desktop database work) was basically met in or around 2000 by the PC industry. By 2003 the force of innovation and change moved from those apps to games, and that would then meld with things like HDTV and wanting to watch hours of video driven by a computer, and that got added into gaming specs.

So, distracted from the rest of the world by computing happened with that system buy (which someone *else* gets to troubleshoot!), but that brought to my attention another problem that had been getting to me for the last couple of years: my sluggish Desknote. The Desknote concept is: there are a class of travelers who need a light, portable, all-in-one PC that is not a laptop or notebook. By eliminating 'on the run' usage and targeting 'in your hotel room' and presentation use, the Desknote came in handy for mobile computing with fixed point use. I got one of those to supplement my working life and it transformed into my 'kitchen table computer' for tracking my needs while my health severely deteriorated. By shifting my tracking of insulin use and such to a spreadsheet, with formulas used to balance blood glucase, carbohydrate intake and insulin use, even during the worse of my catalepsy, I had a good and solid way to maintain my health in that area. Without that, I would probably not be here as my ability to track much of anything during those dark days was minimal.

Realizing the good that the device did me, its ability to actually do simple things like switch between tasks, was becoming a problem. Additionally some applications that used to run on that older computing platform had met their end-of-lifecycle-support for it. As I still face moving in the near future, I needed something reliable, capable and able to stay more or less 'as-is' once it got put down. After looking at scads of options, I was faced with either a more expensive system from a Build-To-Order dealer or something like a refurbished Dell.

Now, as a DIY builder of PCs, I had experienced a Dell *once* back in the late 1990's and that entailed: removing every bit of Dell software put on the poor thing so that it could operate well. I looked at a neat and clean list from the BTO shop and the list from Dell...spec to spec equivalent (although pluses and minuses) both sides, but a refurbished Dell looked good and so I purchased that. An Inspiron 1721, with extra hard drive and a few options I didn't want but had no choice on with a refurb unit. I thought I knew what I was getting into....

The plus side is excellent: good, integrated set-up for updating drivers, BIOS (Wow! the world *has* changed as that used to be a boot to floppy with updates and pray that it worked sort of deal before things way back pre-2004), software... excellent work. Kudos for Dell on that, and for keeping up with the industry to do that.

The negative of that: the software is damned intrusive, constantly pestering, eats up processing time and deserves to be shot. I do *not* want to pay for an upgrade to ANYTHING, nor do I want my problems tracked or my location, or a myriad of other things to give me a 'Dell Experience'. After getting everything up-to-date, the good went out with the bad, and I un-installed the stuff. It still sits on their 'emergency recovery disk area' which I will look at ways to reclaim once it is out of warranty.

The ugly: McAfee Anti-Virus. Seven or so years ago I could recommend it, as it was relatively efficient compared to its competitors. Back around 2004-05 I could not recommend it as it became a resource pig and I sent it squealing from my main system and put in Avast!, as seen in my sidebar. Free for personal use, always hitting in the top 5 of AV systems and often #1 or 2, it is a proven winner. It has relatively low overhead compared to McAfee, and the slow-down of McAfee on my system took what should have been, at most, an hour's work to remove the unwanted Dell software to something like 2 days. Getting rid of IT took another hour. Banished and gone, save the recovery area, and I now know what to get rid of *first* if some strange disaster strikes to wipe out my OS.

The truly awful: Windows Vista. As a refurb I couldn't get a nice, old copy of XP on it and, as previously put forth by me, I will not be switching Operating System bases anytime soon. When Windows 2000 came out, I spent time turning off a few bells and whistles to make it a nice WinNT upgrade. When WinXP came out, I saw that the amount of pre-loaded cruft on the OS was large and installed that on exactly *one* computer and then removed the cruft, disabled the bells and whistles, and got it down to something closer to Win2K which I wanted to be more like WinNT. Windows Vista is the Phyllis Diller of Operating Systems: no matter how much lipstick you put on it, it will never be beautiful. Getting those things found, disabled, turned off, muted, or sidetracked to never open has taken more than two days.

A note to the computer industry: the Personal Computer should meet personal needs. No matter how *nice* a special effect is, it eats up processor time, and I say to thee NAY! If Microsoft wanted to *really* impress me, it would allow the individual to select an absolutely stripped down GUI with the ability to add on a function here or there. Let me decide on the level of glitz as your idea of glitz and mine are absolutely different things. Whatever you do, do *not* have them all enabled as a standard distribution setting: they eat up enough processor time to make a decent and capable system (if not speedy) no better than its compatriot that I am replacing with a technology benchmark that was middling in 2003... running Win2K.

Ditto that to Dell - if I want obtrusive hand-holding, let me decide on the service package, ok? And on the pre-installed junk so that at first-time start-up I can be given a choice of installing stuff or *not*. As you already dictate a section of memory for it to 'recover' a system, just leave it there if I don't want it.

After that getting software installed (almost all of it FREE!) was just time net downloading, installing and running. Transfer a few files to a little key disk and shut the Desknote down and put the Inspiron up only took a bit to figure out wireless networking...

That I am addressing *next* as the ancient Linksys wireless router has always (and I do mean always) keeping a decent signal in my townhome. I get a better ability to hold a signal from the guy next door on the other side of his place. The ancient Linksys, bought way back when 802.11g was new (and I have updated its firmware) has never been satisfactory and becomes less so over time. After years of buying Linksys (now part of Cisco), I will give their competitor a try and see how a brand new D-Link gaming wireless router works out.

As sidelights other equipment has come in for home needs for ease of access to sitting in the bathtub and to dehumidify the main floor on the house. Plus minor computer problems I have addressed previously.

A new thing to go after the remains of my treatment for the skin infection I had, I started to use Defense Soap. Normally I'm not so hot on 'all natural' deals, but for anti-fungal needs I had enough of the high end and wanted to try a different method. So far, so good! Along most of the area where the small amounts of intractable fungal infection have not left, they are going away. Plus I got the travel kit from the Defense Soap folks and will be using their products for the next few months and, at this rate, my guess is that it will do better than all the high priced skin stuff I have used for the last year or so. The only downside: you are left smelling like an aggressive herb salad. Also it is slightly soporific but I have been dealing with *that* since 2004.

Through all of that I was able to put up that piece on the Red Mafia, which you would not want to hear me bitch about the time *that* took, and a few other posts and scattered commentary. Yes I am rolling up another couple of posts... but they are still in the 'research and input' stage.

I have been massively impressed by the US Armed Forces in Iraq, and they are bringing about the fastest change-over in a COIN operation on record. The folks in Iraq will have Iran, Syria and various Islamic terror groups to deal with for the forseeable future...but that is their National problem, not ours. If the can get the violence down to levels seen in Turkey, then that will be something that no naysayer could ever have predicted and which will be the start of a massive shift in the Middle East. Getting rid of al Qaeda and JaM (supported by Iran) in Iraq does not end their threats on a global basis... but it takes a lot of wind from their sails and makes them vulnerable on that same, global scale. We are still left with all other forms of illegitimate warfare that are getting more vitriolic and deadly over time, however, and ignoring *those* will get us in the exact, same sort of situation we were in on 9/10.

We must learn that in this new era, we must honor victory, not celebrate it as a final end save to major conflicts. The support of civilization and Nation States is the good in this fight and those to come down the pipeline for the next few decades, at least. It, like piracy, will always be with mankind so long as we are human. If we forget that, we will get killed by it.

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Not just potted plants

In the continuing saga of Hillary Clinton's quest for royalty, she has deployed the potted plant brigade! Yes, these individuals are ones that are pre-selected, pre-coached, pre-determined to infest 'town hall' meetings and give her questions that she is, actually, prepared to answer. No more of this messy business of actually having a 'discussion with the people', as they have turned out to be just a bunch of rabble. Not worth time hearing a question that might put you on the spot, when you can get a lovely and easy to answer question from someone your very own staff has picked out.

One of the first to be noticed was a plant at a 'energy town hall' run by Hillary Clinton, in which the prescripted nature of the question led to questions, and the final revealing that the questioner was, indeed, given a question to asked based on the campaign's decision that she fit the demographic type they were aiming at (Major Garrett, FNC 10 NOV 2007). Of course the Hillary campaign would first deny then admit and then say 'well everyone is doing it', which does point out that if everyone is engaging in non-public 'public' townhall discussions, then the entire system is a sham, with Hillary's campaign just being extremely INEPT in hiding it. Ah, the joys of admitting how deceitful you are: if you are alone in doing it you look like a power hungry group willing to do anything to sway public opinion, and if you are caught and all others are doing it so well as to not be found out then you are miserably incompetent.

Such CHOICES presented by the Hillary campaign! Deceitful OR Incompetent, the choice is yours.

So, surely, once caught they wouldn't do this again, right?

Ah, you do not understand the 'Will to Power' of Hillary Rodham Clinton! It turns out that this was just the LATEST plant in the hothouse of same, and that ABC News (10 NOV 2007) reported that an earlier incident had taken place which it had NOT TOLD YOU ABOUT. Amazing, a news organization covering up that it had suspected such activity was going on by an individual campaigning to be President. So, is this just keeping quiet to help a candidate or incompetence?

Such decisions we get from the MSM these days!

Surely CNN could take the hint when it was rolling out the welcome mat, no?

Ahh, little did we suspect that this welcome mat would hide a larger message...


Not that we would ever get that entire message until *after* the debate.

Instead we would get the 'drip, drip, drip' of first one plant being discovered, then another, and another...

It turns out that instead of an audience of interested student and others, the entire process would weed out the students at UNLV by limiting them to only 100 tickets of the 2000, and what would be put into their place...well... professors or whoever they wanted to buy tickets for... and...

The entire auditorium was turned into a greenhouse for the event. Not that we would hear from Wolf Blitzer about that.

CNN has rolled out the Astroturf Campaign by putting pro-Hillary commentators onto its post-debate panel. Not that keeping out the demographic that would support other candidates, namely college students, planting questions, biasing the post-debate coverage or just not coming clean about the scripting done by CNN on those plants doesn't mean that *others* don't do this.

So which are they?

Deceitful?

Or incompetent?

Decisions, decisions....

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The drive is there... you just can't use it

This is one of those rare technology posts that involves my recent experiences with what happens when something that has operated, heretofore, well on a computer system decides to not do so. In this case I will be blaming Microsoft as the culprit, but that is pretty much standards for a Windows based system.

To forestall every lover of every other Operating System on the planet Earth, and some others as yet less well recognized, let me say the following:

1) My active Unix life is two decades in the past, saw little use in my time on the job, and is pretty much gone. LINUX, requiring a level of Unix guruship that comes from having that knowledge, plus machine language capability, plus all sorts of other things is *not* an option. For some activities I have, indeed, tried the *nix areas and in a few desktop apps that I enjoy there is no LINUX counterpart. Nor does WINE, resting on LINUX, offer me what I need as that, too, requires a level of *nix guruship. Free requires a time investment I cannot afford and, so, is not 'free' for me.

2) Apple, now resting on BSD which is also a Unix formulation requires the above. Yes, the company has done much to make it graphical, hide the ugliness of the command line and all the rest of that. I also remember Steve Jobs putting forth in the 1980's that a 'command line would never be a part of a Macintosh product'. With the shift of platform to Unix the command line has magically reappeared... if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there, now, would it? Plus, even with all the cross-compatibility (say, why does the Mac need to be cross-compatible? wasn't it supposed to be the 'be-all, end-all' of user interfaces?) that headache is not one I will put up with as it requires having *multiple* OS capabilities available simultaneously so that I can use those apps not available via the Apple OS nameplated product du jour. Not gonna happen.

3) Other OS platforms - I have tried a few others, like Be, and it has gone to a virtual graveyard doing the open source development concept for awhile. There have been a smattering of others, just to try things out, but that was when I was healthy some years back. The lack of native apps and ease of understanding for use was not there.

4) The MotherShip - The worst set of operating systems to grace this planet has come out of Redmond. Their only saving grace is that they are 'just good enough' to get the work going at a decent price point. Also, they did this thing known as: give developer tools away for FREE when IBM, Apple and a number of other companies required payment for such. I am sure that at some time MS will redo its own conception of a *nix based OS, CF it enough to the average Joe/Jane can use it, hide some of the obvious blemishes and ingrain a number of others for 'backwards compatibility'. Then the hue and cry will go up, the threats of torches appear, and folks will just buy it because it, more or less, just works. If your OS of choice has been unable to crack into the backwards-compatibility upgrade cycle and steal that market from MS: don't complain to me, ok?

I have enough problems with this stuff, as-is, without *your* advocacy.

There, that should really tee-off a wide section of the tech population which, thankfully, will never read it.

My problem started with an 'upgrade' (don't they all?). In this case a piece of what I consider to be 'critical desktop apps for which the open source community is trying to replicate but can't figure out ease of use' had a pay-for upgrade which I paid for. Nice little box, that protected a smaller box, which, itself, protected the DVD case and 16 page manual, of which a few pages were -blank-. That says it all for software distribution these days, really.

Take out the DVD, put it in the drive, close the drive, and...

Hmmmmm.... well I did use the powertoy to turn off the 'automagic start' so, pull up the drive list and, say, where did the DVD drive go to? Uh-oh....

I have been here before with: modems, network interface cards, graphic cards (those are so *fun* to troubleshoot), RAM, hard drives, etc. I used to build my own systems when I had energy and this, being the last of my hand-built rigs, I ensured that with the last of my energy and mental capacity a couple of years ago that I troubleshot the thing to a 'fare-thee-well'. It would work, dammit!, because I was in bad straights and might not be well enough to ever troubleshoot the damned thing *again*.

Thus starts my trials and tribulations of tracking down LG Electronics Super Multi DVD drive GSA-4120B! In theory search engines are your friend in this, and I did, indeed, find all the old sites that had answers to my initial troubleshooting of the thing back when I was putting it together. But... for this? Try again, a few times, and get pointed to hacked drivers that did not work and, in general, spending two days trying to find the actual drivers to the thing which, it turns out, are already on-board from MicroSoft.

Not good!

Then it is entry through the dark doors of MicroSoft's website and into the dungeons of the knowledgebase where, held prisoner, rank upon rank, file upon file, row upon row, are the tortured answers to every damned piece of asinine 'fixing' MS has ever done with their software.

And the interface sucks, too.

But such would not stop the intrepid adventurer, trying to wrest the secrets of how to fix the fabled LG GSA-4120B so that it would WORK PROPERLY WITH THE MS DRIVERS on his system. Ah the hours spent and even the fun of answering a questionnaire about how bad the site is so that MS can ignore it. Those things are expected.

A day of fruitless searching and despondancy hits: the answer is not apparent.

With heavy *sigh* the adventurer notices that MS has put out 'security updates' du jour and downloads same, and does some general updating of drivers for the trackball, graphics card and whatnot as he will be spending time frustrated otherwise, it might as well be productive frustration. For ONCE all of that installs well and easily and, wanting to check out a piece of software upgrading useless to his system, the hardy adventurer finds a knowledge base interface geared for his operating system which was NOT ON THE GENERAL KNOWLEDGE BASE SITE! With a thrust the virtual doorway opens to give way to more and darker dusty catacombs where the ranks of the particular prisoners holding answers has swollen so that more sub-basements were being built so far off you could not even identify where....

Another day of searching and no luck.

Back to the search engine and finding the Original Equipment Manufacturer of the LG DVD is Matshita, aka. Matsushita, aka. Panasonic. Now *that* is a name I know, although not love or adore, either, but that is another story to tell. The search engine reveals more of the same, but points out some of the things overlooked on the initial go-through: the adventurer had not spent enough time diagnosing the problem.

Cursing himself for a fool he heads off to do a further investigation, goes back to the specialized dusty catacombs and... de nada.

Life well, and truly, sucks.

The adventurer admits defeat and goes to his tech outlet of choice to order an *external* DVD drive with multi-function capacity so he, at least, can have that available for every other system in the house. Despondant, he heads off to do other things, has a poor night's rest and wakes up earlier than is wise and decides to do one last look at the problem and search into the Event Viewer. Scrolling back he sees something a bit anomolous... one driver function is complaining. The driver can't load, due to that... odd... the little library doing the complaining is not obvious in any way, shape or form.

Hmmmm....

With a search engine look at the driver name and something generic like *problem* the snippet line on the second line seems to directly address this. It is from an obscure camera messageboard. Deciding 'why the hell not, I'm not really awake', the author of the message describes the EXACT SAME PROBLEM with the DVD drive that is the EXACT SAME DRIVE! He points to a horrifically obscure Knowledge Base article in the catacombs of MicroSoft and gives direct linkage to it (thanks be praised!). In that tiny cell, in the midst of the hundreds of thousands of prisoner knowledge base articles this one EXACTLY describes the problem and the SOLUTION to it!

Using this trinket of knowledge, a tiny grain of diamond dust in catacombs littered with precious gems, gold, platinum but all of it kept under better obscurity than Fort Knox, the adventurer treads carefully into his Registry on his system, goes to the indicated hardware controls on the current set-up of his OS, finds the indicated key for the CD/DVD drive, and removes the Upper and Lower Filters.

With a Reboot to the system it does, indeed, find the DVD drive and properly adds it to the system and it is, indeed, fully functional.

The cause?

A freaking *update* to the Operating System a few weeks ago which sweetly ADJUSTED THE FILTER SETTINGS BY ADDING THEM.

Thusly the blame is given fully to MicroSoft on this battle and I will still need the external drive for use with other systems because one of them, at least, has a dodgy CD-ROM drive and another has no write capability for CDs or DVDs... no make that two that have no such capability.

Here ends the story of troubleshooting the LG Electronics GSA-4120B Super Multi drive OEM'd from Panasonic with drivers from MicroSoft.

There is no need to curse the Darkness so long as MicroSoft exists.

It makes a much better target for said cursing.

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Cold War, Long War, and Barbaric War

Today there are people putting forth that the fight against terrorism, as epitomized by the radical Islamic sort, is akin to the Cold War and needs similar response. Thus the old concept of investing heavily in National military means is seen as the front line against terrorism, save that this enemy is no Nation, has no regular order of battle, has no authority structure, has no accountability and is globally distributed. That does not sound like a proper comparison this 'Cold War' and Global War on Terror: there are far too few intersections between Nation state warfare and this irregular warfare waged by non-nations.

The intersection is one that cuts to the point, and that is the use of military arms. In the industrial era, starting with the US Civil War, the idea of 'set piece battles' being the course that would decide wars disappeared and the 'continuous front' appeared. The siege of Richmond, VA is an eerie precursor to the trenches of 1914-18. Industrial power, when applied to the production of war material and its supply makes the equipping and movement of vast armies possible. In any era before that of the Industrial age there were very few military organizations that could boast having a 'million man army'. Xerxes would boast that in 480 BC against the Greeks, but he came to recognize that supply and provision of such a force meant the need for constant movement for foraging and seaborne support for replacements and other supplies. Part of the genius of stopping such an army was to *hold* it down and force it to exist on its supply lines and then to attack those. While King Leonidas of Sparta held the line at Thermopylae, Themistocles the leader of Athens would wage a campaign against the supply fleet of Xerxes. Together they locked the huge army so that it could not forage, could not get easy supplies by sea and gave it a Pyrrhic victory: in winning battles that army lost its war as it could not maintain its supply lines. All the way to Napoleon and the need to invent a means of supply via canning, this was true, and even his armies foraged from the land.

When that line is backed by industrialized means of supply and no means of breakthrough, it spreads laterally, each side seeking its advantage on the wings. When a permanent obstacle is encountered with no means to extend the lines, they hold in place. World War I would see that happen and a huge death toll accumulate. With the invention of integrated armored assault via tanks and overhead surveillance and attack, those front lines would now *shift* over the countryside. While the trenches were locked in place, a few miles behind was relatively peaceful countryside. With Blitzkrieg warfare the front would shift rapidly so that *no place* was behind the lines and *any place* could be a breakthrough opportunity and have industrialized war visited upon it. Many parts of Eastern and Western Europe would see this happen not just once or twice, but up to a dozen or more times as entire armies shifted back and forth across cities, towns and villages. Million man armies were the norm starting in 1914, and at the end of that conflict the US had a million men under arms in Europe.

The Cold War changed that, so that warfare became comparative advantage via the swaying of Nations to 'one side or the other'. The bipolar world left little room for 'non-aligned Nations' and those movements quickly fell sway to one of the two sides and just became a part of the struggle they sought to avoid. The logic of industrialized warfare sees the means of production, factories and the civilian workforce, as part of the entire military supply operation. Attacks on civilian populations did happen as a part of warfare before the industrial era, and the accounts of rapine, looting and slavery follow battle after battle in history. With the advent of the Westphalian Nation State and the shifting to more regularized ways of viewing war, such was repudiated but would take international agreement based on the Law of Nations to instantiate. That conflict, that would in its own time consume lives and Nations, had few 'hot' conflicts for fear of igniting a global conflagration. For all the ideological differences between the West and Soviet powers, a basic lineage from the Westphalian Nation State ideal was kept: the rules that had become the norm in warfare were extended to cover this, as well. This was not done by open treaties, but tacit agreement between the sides, and generally kept, even when one side or the other would resort to encouraging those that were not Nations to pester the other side.

That, however, began to blur the lines of warfare and its legitimacy as the Treaty of Paris that had outlawed such amongst its signatories, was not enforced. While the use of mercenaries and irregular units has been seen throughout history, the Declaration of Paris sought to end that and make all forces taking part for a 'side' become accountable by means of uniform, leadership structure and accountability. Those called 'Pirates' were outlawed: those who fought for themselves, for money, for slaves, for power over people. The US would not sign this as Privateers, private citizens with ships (although some small amounts of land forces were seen now and again) were given Letters of Marque and Reprisal by Congress and HELD ACCOUNTABLE for their actions. This power of 'less than war but more than sanctions' was the traditional power of Nations when the US was formed and enshrined in the US Constitution, and the US would respect the Declaration by having Congress say if it would or would not use Privateers for a given time or conflict. Pirates, by practicing illegitimate war, could be attacked by all means: from private citizens bringing them in to Privateers going after their ships and bases to armies and navies being deployed to bring Nations harboring them to heel by force of arms. And the worse of the Barbary Pirates would only be ended once France defeated the areas and Nations supporting them in North Africa by force of arms.

Make no mistake about it: when Nations started to support terrorists, the Declaration of Paris was being abridged, along with the Hague and Geneva Conventions on who constituted legitimate armed forces. The US and USSR were not the only ones to do this, and both sides would arm factions that would not, necessarily, put on uniforms and be held accountable, but were utilizing same under different guises: various 'Red' groups (with 'Red' appearing before: Faction, Group, Army of xxx, etc.) would hold adherence and have some supplies from the USSR, while the US would support the Islamic fighters in Afghanistan against the USSR, the Contras and various actors less savory in Africa. Other groups were, of course, already growing or existing by the time those started to come about, including various Arab Nationalist, Islamic radicalist and a gamut of separatist groups. Outside of Nationalist ethnic populations supporting such (ex. IRAs, ETA, PLO) there would be those with distributed or Nation based but unattributed support (ex. HAMAS, Hezbollah, FARC, Shining Path). Of particular interest is the money paid by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to a student radical group in Egypt known as Muslim Brotherhood. MB, itself, would serve as a nucleating point for radical Islam, fostering first HAMAS and then a slew of other groups from Afghanistan to South America, and each of these loosely affiliated groups would then seek out its own funding sources, which even the homegrown HAMAS does. The funding for MB to do this came from Saudi Arabia to counter Abdul Nasser's view of Pan-Arabism, which was seen as anti-thetical to Wahabbist Islam.

Other terror organizations would do this, even such separatist/Nationalist groups as the PIRA ('Provos'), Tamil Tigers and various Kashmir groups not directly affiliated with MB, Iran, al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other organizations. The last three decades of the Cold War (1945-91) saw this start as nascent organizations (MB, PLO, IRA) and then flourish to multiple and widespread organizations as funding shifted to these irregular means of conflict and coercion. Of great note is that very few of these organizations outside of those with tight ties to a Nation (ex. Hezbollah) have sole Nation state support in their operations.

Most use a distributed support network and even Hezbollah utilizes criminal operations for funding of its more widespread overseas contingents outside of the Middle East. In such compromises, however, internal splinters in groups over the 'purity' of the 'cause' would form multiple organizations that would often be at odds with their parent organizations. The IRA was notorious for that with more IRA factions, splinters, front-groups and such, that an entire scorecard was needed to keep track of the 'Real' IRA, Provisional IRA, IRA, Original IRA, and so on. MB would see this, but try to keep some internal coherence of belief as a goal, even when factions went off at tangents, which would give linkage between HAMAS and al Qaeda and GIA: different organizations with more or less similar beliefs, but operating on different concepts within the belief structure.

It is this distributed support structure that is undirected by Nation states that makes puts terrorism out of the regular rules of warfare, that developed amongst Nations, and, instead, drops them into illegitimate warfare waged by individuals and groups with no accountability. Such use of them was made quite unavailable to signatories of the Declaration of Paris, and yet this is not held up for modern Nations that *did* sign that agreement. The US is in zero position to criticize this, but also is in prime position to help ensure that the Law of Nations understanding of what legitimacy *is* will be upheld.

Those, today, calling for a 'Long War' against radical Islamic groups, then, are placing the emphasis of such a thing in the wrong place: they are putting it against the groups and not *for* the sustainment of accountable Nation state organizations. Military might is used when Nations either help or supply such groups (as various island states did during the era of Piracy in the Caribbean and as the North African states did during the Barbary Pirate era), and to counter them whenever they can under legitimate auspices, as I wrote about in this piece. To end such activities direct force of arms is a necessary part of the toolkit, but it is not the toolkit *itself* and even in countering pirates and bandit armies of various sorts, entire National military means were NEVER directed solely at such eradication work, but was seen as 'another job to do'. The reason for Privateers is that utilization of military machines is very expensive and the bluntest instrument in the Nation state toolkit for going after unaccountable war making groups with military means. When Privateers would turn Pirate, it was due to the long distances involved and lack of accountable structure to adhere to, plus just being able to hightail it from the long reach of justice, be it military or civil.

Thus, when I hear politicians who seem to get most of this it is heartening. Take Sen. Thompson's latest speech on this at The Citadel, which hearkens to many of the same things I have written over the past year or so. A few key ideas on this score from him are necessary, so I will extract a bit from his speech:

This is true in our day as well. But in some ways it runs against our nature to accept and deal with the world we live in. We're a free society, and it's not really in the character of free people to seek conflict. We prefer to go about the business of life - to work and raise our families in the security of communities achieved by hard-won struggles. And though these traits speak well of us, they are now being used by our enemies against us.

We are a nation that haphazardly maintains its borders in the face of mounting evidence that such an approach is irresponsible. It is border insecurity that failed us on the morning of 9/11. Thus, when darkness fell that day, a more terrible prospect loomed into view - that unless we are vigilant and prepared, even small actors in the world can inflict catastrophic harm on the United States.

[..]

It turned out to be a New World, all right - with new threats rising up in place of the old. Chief among them the threat of violent Islamic radicals - men who make the Soviets of the past seem like the model of reason and moderation. Today's threat is complex, dispersed, and opportunistic. The enemy observes no rules and no restraints of conscience.

The threat takes different forms - as a terrorist cell within the United States ... or a network similar to al Qaeda with ties to a nation-state ... or a nation-state itself, with the infrastructure and wealth needed to develop the most horrible weapons known to mankind.

But whatever form it takes, the great danger is terrorists or terrorist states with these weapons of mass destruction. To overcome this danger, we need a clear and consistent strategy, and the means to achieve it.

Whether we act in time to prevent the worst from happening will be the final measure of America's leadership in the world for years to come. With 9/11 still fresh in memory, it is for America to shape events, and not be left at their mercy. Wherever dangers appear, we must be prepared to meet them with clarity and resolve.

[..]

This radical threat we face today is committed to a hundred year war, and has been waging one against us for decades ... in Beirut, Somalia, embassies in Africa, Saudi Arabia, on the USS Cole. Each time Americans were killed. Yet each time our response sent the wrong signals. This is an enemy that understands only the language of power. Today, the focus of this war is Afghanistan and Iraq, but it is clear that this struggle and our enemies extend far beyond those borders. To defend ourselves, we in the democratic world must assert our intentions in the clearest possible terms.

Diplomacy, economic influence, and other means of persuasion are always to be preferred in our dealings with dangerous regimes and rival states. But the words of our leaders command much closer attention from adversaries when it is understood that we are prepared to use force when force is necessary. And for that deterrent to exist, the will of our people and the strength of our military must be unquestionable.

[..]

In my view, the first priority of the federal government is the defense and security of its citizens and should be reflected in everything we do in government. We must begin by rebuilding our military with the full recognition that national security comes at a price. It is measured in many ways. The most common is the amount of money we spend--indeed, the priority we make of it--as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product.

The U.S. has historically spent well over 5 percent of GDP on defense. During the Gulf War it was at 5.1%; during the Reagan build up it was over 6%; in 1968 it was over 8%; and during the Korean War it was well over 11%. However, defense spending declined significantly at the end of the Cold War to levels approaching 3% as we cashed in our so-called "peace dividend."

• Our military forces were cut 30% on average.


• The Army alone went from 18 active duty divisions to 10.


• Our Air Force was drastically down-sized and it became difficult to even maintain a 300-ship Navy, much less the 600-ship Navy that Reagan once envisioned.


• Our Research and Development programs were reduced, and we lost some of the world's best innovators.


• And worse, we asked our young men and women to do more with less--less training dollars, less equipment, and less time at home with their families.

So close and yet so far away. From a man who quotes Grotius, I am sure he would recognize this from On the Law of War and Peace, translated 1814 original 1625, Chapter 2:

IV. From the law of nature then which may also be called he law of nations, it is evident that all kinds of war are not to be condemned. In the same manner, all history and the laws of manners of every people sufficiently inform us, that war is not condemned by the voluntary law of nations. Indeed Hermogenianus has said, that wars were introduced by the law of nations, a passage which aught to be explained somewhat differently from the general interpretation given to it. The meaning of it is, that certain formalities, attending war, were introduced by the law of nations, which formalities were necessary to secure the peculiar privileges arising out of the law. From hence a distinction, which there will be occasion to use hereafter, between a war with the usual formalities of the law of nations, which is called just or perfect, and an informal war, which does not for that reason cease to be just, or agreeable to right. For some wars, when made upon just grounds, though not exactly conformable, yet are not repugnant to the law, as will be explained more fully hereafter. By the law of the nations, says Livy, provision is made to repel force by arms; and Florentinus declares, that the law of nations allows us to repel violence and injury, in order to protect our persons.

Grotius looks at what can be done with scripture and the law and sees that there is a difference between Nation state warfare and this other kind, that is done without formalities and without just cause arising from a Nation. This would be incorporated into Vattel's Law of Nations and into the English Common Law as seen by William Blackstone, each of which would give definition to those that wage illegitimate or, by Grotius, 'informal' war, as something that is outlaw - or 'outside the law'. There is no set law to go after outlaws, and their activity determines the level of effort needed to counter them: a few desperadoes in the wild west would only have 'Wanted Dead or Alive' posters put out, while the USSR would use the first paratroop drop to go after something it characterized as a 'Bandit Army' in 1929. From attacks by the US Navy and Marines against the Barbary Pirates to the hunting down of warlords across the world by regular armies to the 'reward if caught' deal, the Nation state has a wide variety of ways to counter those waging illegitimate war to their own ends. Pirates would be sunk, their land bases attacked and many given a single chance at pardon or punishment if pardon was ignored.

We are not used to this in the modern era: individuals and groups seeking sanction to go after such individuals or groups, or just being rewarded if they are lucky enough to give information to the capture of same. From strafing runs in Iraq to the seige of Masada, those seen as as 'outlaws' end up getting some form of justice that is long lasting and that makes an impression. The worst get full military treatment if they can be cornered in their hideouts, but groups of Bounty Hunters, law men deputized to go after such, Privateers sailing the seas to find those that have attacked their Nation and people just seeing a decent reward for high risk have ALL done their service, across the board, throughout history. We tend to record and remember the big and exciting battles, and not care as much about the individuals brought in by concerned citizens or bounty hunters as the 'onsey-twosey' just doesn't make much of an impression until you realize an organization has been whittled down to near nothing due to this form of activity. Unglamorous killers brought in by normal folks makes a bit of a sensation these days, but less so in times past and, from that, we forget the good of the common man in keeping society safe.

I actually do agree with Sen. Thompson on most of his outlook on a larger set of armed forces and revitalization of the military equipment base. I disagree that this needs to be utilized only against terrorist groups, mostly of the radical Islamic sort, but the increasing death toll due to others is also something that expands while we ignore it for the more flamboyant. My main disagreement comes in the National Security realm as the US armed forces depend heavily on satellite communications, imagery, data intercepts and other recon that it is now a single point of failure in everything from tracking and threat identification to GPS guided bombs. Nations like China and Russia have started to deploy ground and ballistic capability that can be turned against the suite of US satellites (and those of all other Nations) which would, at a single stroke, render our armed forces disorganized, disjointed, unable to easily track enemies or even find them for surveillance or bombing. The start of 21st century Nation state warfare now begins in space access and defense of that suite of high tech abilities without which the US armed forces would be impaired.

This re-orientation of threat assessment must go on continuously, but the lack of attention paid to this, and having a fast and easily deployable set of satellites to give a 'down and dirty' workable backup is a sore point for the US. While not something that terrorists can do much about (save for somehow getting a high orbital nuclear device for an EMP burst), it is something that Nations will have in their arsenal to use for their own, National, needs. A sudden removal of such systems by ground based laser over a period of a day could presage an invasion of Taiwan, or move by Russia on re-incorporating Republics that left it after the fall of the USSR into a larger Nation. Such an opportunity would leave our ability to track terrorist organizations at a standstill, although it would also put a large part of the air and sea transport capability at risk, also. The diminishment of global trade due to such a situation and the lack of ready back-up for cyber communications makes such a scenario as deadly, if not moreso, than that of nuclear terror attack on the US: the world plunged into a global depression due to over-reliance on single-point of failure communications systems would be as bad if not worse, not only in lives lost but in the sudden breakdown of integrated supply systems.

We may considers such a 'surprise attack' done by terrorists to be one of barbarism - that is their nature. When done by Nations, no good will come of *that* and the fabric of society will be put at risk when forced to use limited land and airborne communications modes to keep things running. Those older, wired systems are not set up for that sort of load and may, themselves, be rendered inoperative for a time by sudden overload of communications. Terrorism points out weak spots in how we perceive ourselves as part of a Nation. One job of the armed forces is to go after such miscreants, but the larger job is to protect us from the worse assaults that advanced Nations can muster to their own ends. Before the modern times we did not look ONLY to the military to protect us, and put in the Constitution the means for regular people to volunteer for nasty jobs the Nation needed done on a less than National level. Calling for an increase to Cold War era levels of spending does no good if it is spent only to go chasing after the hard to catch, and the back door to sudden collapse left open.

Perhaps we can look to our Western heritage where communities and Nations joined together and put forth a multiplicity of ways to deal with those endangering us with illegitimate war. Beyond diplomacy and warfare there are these 'other ways' that individuals have contributed to bringing down such predators that feasted on the civilized without warrant or accountability. We dare not invest all our defenses to the Nation, as any Nation that can perfectly defend its people without need for them to do so, can also serve to enslave its people in a perfect manner by not recognizing the power of the Nation is its people, not its defenses alone.

Sphere: Related Content

And now the view on the other side

For some reason most folks do tend to consider me to be 'conservative' when, really, I have little to do with that overall part of the spectrum in-depth or detail, just as I have little to do with the 'liberal' part of it. There are some good things in each side, but neither gives a good outlook to my view of the world. While I do castigate those on the Leftist side for being unable to stand up for liberty, freedom and democracy so as to build a better society and give demonstration of such to the world, so, too, does the Right not get free pass on their strange views on economics, trade and a variety of other topics.

As this Presidential season is coming hard upon the two parties, those on the D side of things I find wanting throughout: pacifist, negativist and transnationalist are the credos there. Anything to throw at the other side, no matter how vile you become in doing so! Thus associating with international organized crime, terrorists, and giving credence and legitimacy to 'armed political organizations' abroad turns the world into a worse place in such association and encouragement. On the R side I hear words from the free trade school of religion, that has yet to demonstrate its worth in over 90 years, plus strange ideas that government should step in where the States and the People have power and their rights and just let the federal government decide things for you. By that diminishment of the common good, removal of accountability to foreign Nations via the means of commerce and through this lovely concept of providing well to those picking up arms against liberty and democracy, the world, too, is not made a better place.

To be fair, I do pick overly much upon the D party, but they WERE the party of Jackson before they decided to go all out Socialist and pacifist and anti-West. There are still, to this day, stalwarts of Jackson soldiering on inside the D party, but the walk out of so many during the 1970's has left it threadbare. One man would cash in on that, who could, indeed, get a majority by being one, decent man... but his limits and that of his party left the without the ability to *keep* the disaffected and they wandered further off after him. That man, of course, is Ronald Reagan, and he would run a nearly perfect candidacy in 1980 to win the White House, and then dash the dreams of the disaffected he spoke to so well.

Those looking at the demographics of that era are startled by how quickly the D party went from iron control of both Houses of Congress to actually having them contested and well contested. Forty years of on-going majority rule were broken, but it was in the repudiation of a Democratic President that the disaffection spoke the loudest and clearest. In Congress it is not a factor of people turning from D to R but of individuals so turned off by the system that the D party was hurt worse than the R party, thus giving it parity. There were some cross-over voters, no doubt, and many today have just switched sides if not loyalties. Ronald Reagan would have the message for them of American strength and vitality, of less government and more opportunity: it was a message or Theodore Roosevelt or Andrew Jackson. That promise to halt and reverse the trends of over forty years were considered to be good ones, and the Democratic majority eroded, and even faded in the Senate.

When the R party wishes to put forth that a candidate is strong, they put forth Reagan. Unfortunately he was strong in the ways that those he attracted didn't care for on economic policy, although very vital on National Security and Defense. Make no doubt about it: Ronald Reagan's stalwart confrontation with the USSR and investment in the armed forces were winning cards he played. A pair beats nothing and the USSR had *nothing* when they left Afghanistan, and found that the world was not like chess, but poker. Ronald Reagan won a necessary hand for the survival of the US and mankind.

It was only one hand of many, and he lost the rest.

I do not idolize Ronald Reagan, and when I speak of his term in office it is those two achievements on National Defense and Security causing the final erosion of the USSR that I give him credit for. He kept to the Truman Doctrine when the D party was running from it. It worked! The Nation was not so lucky on other counts.

Consider the activity in Beirut in 1983-84, where the US Embassy was bombed as part of the civil war in Lebanon that was turbocharged by Iranian funds going into an exterior entity known as Hezbollah. With the aid of Syria, Hezbollah would start to kill its way to power not only by guns and bombs, but via kidnapping of nearly anyone that would get them headlines and cash. The USMC was sent in and, along with a contingent from France, they were blown up by simultaneous truck bombs one early morning. While promising to find the culprits and bring peace, President Reagan, instead, retreated and left more and worse conflict behind him. Our thanks would be a second bombing of the US Embassy, to let us know we were not well liked there.

To this day the miscreants have not been brought to any justice, although we know the name behind the immediate work is the terrorist Imad Mugniyah. This is a man who hates the West and the US, has no love for Israel and little love for much else beyond killing from what we have seen of his handiwork. With all the military might of the US available, and a leadership in the USSR that had problems with Syria already, the chances of starting a global confrontation there was *nil*. I have looked at that and marvel that for all the things that those who lionize Ronald Reagan, they cannot see this simple failing of actually understanding that protecting America means just that: protecting her from *all enemies* not just those of the red banner. While many berate the Left today for blindness of ideology, they do not like to look at the same blindness during the Cold War of the 'Cold Warriors'. America needed defenders who could stop her foes, not just those of the glacial sort, and we were and are left the poorer for not having that basic understanding which went and continues to go far past simplistic ideology.


Consider the Iran/Contra Affair, which would see rogue operatives in the White House help one of the most notorious criminals and terrorist supporters the world would ever know make the connections which would make America less well off and bring a high body toll in many lands: Monzer al-Kassar. It is a very strange thing that someone with the ties to Hezbollah, Iran and Syria is seen as someone that the US would want to *help* even after his antipathy of the US is known. Kassar had helped the French get some of their kidnap victims freed by sending cash and equipment payments to Iran, and he would do the same with the US and get roped in to helping expand the arming of the Contras! Just the thing you want to do with an individual with ties to organized crime, one of the highest opium export controlling groups and arms merchants of the world: introduce him to Central and South America with a gold plated 'trusted by America' card! Beyond the asinine and childish view of Ollie North & Co., so that funds could be laundered to hide the US involvement in the deal, the funding, equipment and narcotics trading avenues this would open up led directly to the sprawling narco-terrorist organizations that now infest S. America, Central America, Africa and SE Asia. They existed before, yes, but without operatives given legitimacy by the US, there would have been much slower growth of them over time.

That was starting to be seen even before the end of the Administration, with the Cali and Medellin cartels working out a trade system of cocaine exchanged to Syria for heroin and arms. By the time the Bush (41) Administration was in office, this had blossomed into a full-fledged form of Hezbollah taking root in Argentina and Imad Mugniyah showing up after Monzer al-Kassar had cemented ties with then President Carlos Menem. The Reagan Administration would get the trade between Syria and Argentina for nuclear equipment and long range missile development halted, but that would not have been necessary if Kassar was not already down there. It is a chilling thought to have that Syria could have gained both a good nuclear reactor and advanced long range missile technology if the Reagan and Bush Administrations were just a bit less attentive to things. Such is the fallout of having a 'neat idea' that puts America in such situations.

The actual effects of the expansion of the triangular trade and market sharing agreements between Syria, the S. American drug cartels, various East European Mafias and African organized crime outfits cannot be underestimated. That trade started the production of heroin in S. America and expanded the proliferation of explosives and automatic weapons not only in S. America but back into the Balkans. Kassar and his US based compatriot, Jean-Bernard Lasnaud (aka. Francois Lasnosky), would be happily shipping arms to the Balkans to supply Iran there by the time President Clinton was dithering on what to do about the area. From 1983 Hezbollah went from a near nothing as an organization, able to kidnap high profile Westerners (including the CIA bureau chief in Lebanon) and blowing up a few hundred US soldiers and their French compatriots to having attacked the Israeli Embassy in Argentina (1992), blown up the AMIA Jewish cultural center in Argentina (1994) to having a few thousand fighters down in Bosnia and other parts of the Balkans (1994). The very same organization that President Reagan promised to hold accountable. Remember that?

Worked so well that it would be a feature of Osama bin Laden's speeches against the West and how the US wouldn't stand up to anyone who confronted them.


Next up is the international bank of crime du jour: BCCI - Bank of Credit and Commerce International. What a laundry list of people that operation served! By the time it would be fully brought down in 1992, with the last part of it in Hong Kong finally going under, it would be responsible for billions of dollars laundered from tyrannical regimes, organized crime figures, narcotics organizations, arms dealers, gray market goods dealers, human traffickers and just plain, ordinary dictators. The Reagan Administration helped that entire thing along by trying to expand the farm credit program to allow Saddam Hussein to get his hands on commodities at less than market price, resell them at market price and pocket the difference. An entire swindling operation around BNL and its work to launder the funds going to and from Saddam and his attempts to buy arms, high tech goods and equipment would point out massive corruption in BNL and such lovely deals as entire, multi-million dollar shipments of 'farm equipment' just going missing and needing to be re-shipped to Saddam. All paid for with taxpayer funds!

All of that going on, mind you, while Ollie North & Co. were getting anti-tank and other weapons to Iran in exchange for hostages and some cash, and then taking other cash to buy overseas arms (or even US arms) to ship to the Contras. As Henry Kissinger said about the Iran/Iraq war, which all of this circled around: 'it is too bad both sides can't lose'. Well, not for lack of the Reagan Administration *trying* to achieve that! Really, instead of trying to do all of this under the table and through pork spending, if that had just been the stated objective of the Reagan Administration's foreign policy, we would have saved a LOT of heartache! A policy of: we aren't going to supply *new* weapons, but the ammunition market is open to *both*. That would have gotten the political cast going in a tizzy!

'Lets you and him fight!'

Instead we get the support of underworld arms dealers, terrorists, drug runners and money laundering... much of this going through BNL and BCCI. The rogue's gallery of BCCI is amazing: John Keating (of the S&L scandal and having John McCain helping that along), Saddam Hussein, billionaire Jackson Stephens (so helpful to both the R and D party over time that neither wants to talk about him and his connections to North, the Riady's, Hwang, Lippo Bank, Bert Lance, and even, if memory serves, a sports team in Texas and the current President), Monzer al-Kassar, the 'Ollie North Enterprise', Carlos Menem, the Cardoen company (which got advanced US cluster bomb technology that somehow wound up in Iraq way back in the 80's), Abu Nidal, Marc Rich (later to come to infamy in the wild, wild east of Russian industry and finance), Clark Clifford, Robert Altman, President Manuel Noriega (Panama), Pablo Escobar & Rodriguez Gacha & several members of the Ochoa family (Medellin drug cartel), General Zia (Pakistan), Carlos Andres Perez (Venezuela), President Jimmy Carter, Andrew Young, Bert Lance, British Prime Minister James Callahan, United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cueller, and Jesse Jackson. Really, anyone who was anyone had to have an account there and help in moving funds around through its various paper banks. The CIA would only have a little idea of what was going on in 1987 with BCCI, which was only the largest single money laundering and criminal funds transfer system on the planet having compromised First American Bank, BNL, a number of Central banks throughout Latin America, South America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency didn't have much intelligence about BCCI, either in the actual knowledge of it or in what it did.

It would take a decade until a more complex set-up run by Simon Reuben, Chernoy brothers, Semion Mogilevich and Vyacheslav Ivankov through the Bank of New York with the help of Peter Berlin and Lucy Edwards. That, too, would fly under the CIA radar screen.

Isn't it nice to know that US Federal Farm Credits were shifting into a system of illegal funds transfers, arms deals, equipment procurement, fraud and support of dictators and terrorists globally? Wouldn't an upfront foreign policy have stopped at least *that* part of the operation from prospering and gaining a blind eye from the Administration because of its apparent utility to do the one thing it wanted, while having to ignore the rest because of that and the Administration's own connections to said entity?


I haven't even *gotten* to domestic policy, tax policy and such, and already I see a number of major problems with the Reagan Administration and I *still* appreciate the couple of good things it did!

And since this heads us into domestic policy, lets start with the size of government that President Reagan promised to address on the campaign trail. Remember that? The nefarious octopus of government getting its tentacles into everything and doing so much with waste, fraud and abuse that simply cleaning *that* up would balance the budget? So, what, exactly happened?

Did President Reagan move hard and fast to get rid of the newly minted Dept. of Education?

No.

How about the Dept. of Energy, seen as superfluous?

No.

Was the Dept. of Agriculture cleaned up of Waste, Fraud and Abuse?

No, and just the opposite with the funds going through there to BNL, BCCI, Saddam Hussein and who knows where else. That Department was put on the multi-billion dollar feeding cycle for years, and anywhere Congress tried to stop it, funds got shifted to something else and more got fed into it. Taking a look at the historical US federal budget, in the year Ronald Reagan was elected, the outlays for the budget were roughly $591 billion, which would translate to $848.5 billion in 1988 if there were NO other growth to the federal budget and it is only adjusted for inflation and such. In 1988 the actual outlays were $1.064 trillion, or a 25% real growth in the size of the federal government just in cash spent *alone* and the federal deficit (the annual spending shortfall) doubled over that period, again not only outpacing inflation but expanding to cover the added girth put on by President Reagan.

So the talk of 'smaller government' and Ronald Reagan being a 'small government conservative' is, to put it bluntly, a lie. Those of us who understood that more would need to be spent on National Security and Defense expected that *other* parts of government, like those mentioned above, would take the hit and large sections of them if not entire Departments chopped off, permanently. That would not only reduce the size of government by shifting funds into areas of capital procurement (ships, aircraft, weapons systems) and away from those of high labor with no Constitutional mandate. That did not happen.


To put it very bluntly: Ronald Reagan talked deceitfully about 'small government' on the campaign trail, but governed as a Big Government Conservative.


For those leaving the D party over their inability to see any need to curb government, to get great talk and NO action from the R party really, and for true, puts one off of wanting to associate with them. The lovely 'Big Tent' also contains a huge wallet vacuum cleaner that one must open up and then have bureaucrats examine to make sure that no bills got stuck in the crevices. To get in the 'Big Tent' one has to have lots of wallets sitting around to be able to pay your way. And the expansion of federal government and debt only got a little bit of pay down when the largest bubble economy of the US ran through the high tech sector in the 1990's, actually allowing for taxes to be cut in a meaningful way. Those remain hard fought for cuts, as the D party shows, and is the LAST STAND of the R party to try and put any restraint, whatsoever, on government. Because they sure, as hell, were not put in under Ronald Reagan.

Then there is the expansion of the internal classification procedures for the government, particularly the Intelligence and Defense Communities. A thing that got so encompassing that the steering wheel specifications to the Jeep were classified. Along with the specifications for the $400 hammer which the D party would bash the R party with in the 1992 election. Coming from a part of the government under DoD, I can say that the time spent in reviewing, cataloging and tracking all that classified material cost untold man hours and billions of dollars. Which is why the declassification regulations got put in place to start automatically getting the less necessary *junk* taken out of that system and handed over to the National Archives. That expansion of the use of the classification stamp was, in and of itself, Waste, Fraud and Abuse - Waste of time to cover Fraudulent needs and Abused to cover anything else 'just in case'. The taxpayer pays for a secure government, not a paranoid one, and the paranoia to move nearly everything on the IC and DoD to the classified side was ludicrous. Entire systems were procured under the Black Budget that never got proper GAO or Congressional oversight, and expended billions of dollars in pure waste for systems and equipment that was outdated when it was delivered.

That paranoia was due to President Reagan and the urge to keep *anything* from the hands of the Soviet Union. Even what kind of hammers and toilet seats we bought.

It was also under President Reagan's term that the first analysis of the budget busting ability of Social Security due to demographics was put forth. Ever hear of that little 'entitlement'? The lovely concept of trying to retire out the older part of the workforce on government stipend paid for by the younger part of the workforce? Put in to try and do *something* with the economy during the Great Depression, but wouldn't actually take hold until we NEEDED an older work force to do this thing known as 'work' during WWII? The program with a huge demographic bubble that is caused by the 'baby boom' so that there will soon be very few folks working to pay for all the oldsters on the golf courses, sky diving, bungee jumping, skiing and riding their Harleys all over the place. The one that also gets a lovely medical benefit around the same age that allows for all sorts of extra and unnecessary medical work to be done 'just in case' something gets missed? Heard of them?

Did President Reagan propose ending the system?

Of course NOT, that is political suicide to cut off PAYMENTS to VOTERS. The D party thrashes that about the head and shoulders of the R party until NEITHER will practice any long-term fiscal oversight. This is not a 'social security' this is a BRIBE to get older folks to VOTE for YOUR PARTY. Because people feel ENTITLED to federal funds for their very own needs. That is why it is called an 'entitlement'. The Romans had a name for this: Breads and Circuses. Things to pay the masses that they don't deserve so that they keep docile. So we get a system where money is taken away from those that should be investing in their futures and handed to those who should have planned for their own futures. Many of them *have* done so and are quite well off.

Social Security is stealing from the poor and working and handing it to the well off and retired.

That does not sound like any form of 'conservative values' I have ever heard of, and yet it continues on to this day with lovely little 'tweaks' around the edges trying to get young folks to have money taken from the by the federal government and be GLAD that with any they have left they can invest it. Isn't that lovely? A ponzi scheme endorsed by the R party AND conservatives because they cannot find a good basis to argue against taking money from the poor and handing it to the wealthy by the fiat of Big Government. That is kind of the opposite of fiscal conservatism: take money from those who need it for the future, waste some of it on government overhead which turns out to be 35-45% overhead, and then take what is left to hand it to those who should have demonstrated some competence about planning for things in their lives.

Rewarding incompetence!

Such a grand thing for government to do, isn't it?

Then there is this entire 'free trade' religion that the R party has gotten. I will not get on that *again*, as I really have beaten that about a bit. To put it simply: having unencumbered trade with those under despotic regimes rewards those regimes with trinkets to keep their population docile while the regime holds all authority to take such away if the government needs it. This is NOT rewarding liberty or freedom, but giving bribes to keep tyranny and despotic governments in place without ANY cost to trading with the US. This 'free trade' allows the stuff that went on with BCCI to happen, so that terrorist organizations can be guaranteed to get as much as they can pay for in the way of arms and explosives anywhere on the planet. Part of the current fun in Iraq is seeing that al Qaeda had tens of millions to spend on such things, but couldn't find enough people to entice to GUARD the stuff. Apparently people are far more expensive than the equipment they use, which is a basic fact of life anyone running a business can tell you about. Human capital is far more expensive than goods, which is why 'free trade' should be kept to those who are free and restrained from those who are under tyrannical regimes to deprive those regimes of any advancement in their work force.

When the fruits of liberty are spent handing more chains to those that are not free, so that those who are can make a profit, then you are putting your own liberty at risk. That is why the Middle East, which has been exposed to 90 years of this doctrine, is in the state it is today: the trade has let the regimes go on unopposed save for those elements that have radicalized to make things worse and live on the lovely things we hand out cheaply to them. 30 years of that in China has only made them free in comparison to the absolute despotic state as it was under Mao, but the average liberty and freedom is no better than it was under an individual like Stalin in the USSR or places like Venezuela as of late. When will we stop making a profit off of the oppressed and start encouraging them to seek liberty so they can benefit from the fruits of freedom, rather than handing them those fruits and having us gain the benefit in cash, while paying for it in oppression?

President Reagan obviously had no qualms about US companies making money off of the oppressed. There is a difference between foreign aid to save lives and encourage folks to stand up on their own, and foreign trade meant to make a profit for companies while impoverishing those that have no liberty to *compete* so as to gain the full fruits of their labor without oppressive government to remove those from them. When the US would not cut off aid or trade to China when it spilled blood to end a student rebellion for freedom, we could see in the bloody streets just what the US supported in its foreign policy. It obviously wasn't freedom. And that, too, was a holdover of the Reagan Administration to the Bush follow-on. Today no one even thinks about that nor about the lack of freedom in China... they have so much to buy!!


Except their souls. We are getting paid to keep those right where they are.


Today when I hear someone from the Republican Party lauding this or that candidate as 'just like Reagan', I know what they are talking about... but this, apparently, has a different meaning to me than to them. Ronald Reagan was a good and big hearted fellow, really! I can easily imagine hiking with him or going fishing and having a great time under the sun, and chatting around a campfire. It is not the goodness of the spirit I have problems with.

It is the results of his handiwork that trouble me the most.

He did get a few things *right* and was the final one to help end the USSR and remove the threat of sudden, global, thermonuclear war.

He also started a process of erosion of support for Western values by not confronting lesser evils so that they would grow stronger and bolder as time went on. So that sudden immolation would look *good* compared to eternal enslavement under those that would bring an age of barbarism back to us, by making unaccountable war upon civilization with the help of our system of trade. I would prefer that we not hand over the easy power of weapons at low cost to those seeking to impose their will upon the world and shift it to their views.

President Reagan could have gone after them and hard in 1983, and start forcing that back even before it found a hard foothold in the world.

He did not do that.

And I sincerely hope we never see his likes again in the Oval Office as the world cannot afford an America that will shirk from defending herself from wolves and hold such accountable for their actions by ending them.

May I suggest ending the plaudits and comparisons and start addressing those that have attacked us without retribution for decades?

Or is keeping the *word* of President Reagan too difficult?

It was for him, that is for certain.

Can we find someone better to do that job and not flinch from it?

Someone to keep the word of a good man, who was incapable of doing so, himself.

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You must pay the price...

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COIN aircraft, back to the past!

A funny thing happened on the way to Counter Insurgency operations, we stepped back a few decades in aircraft. While jet aircraft have many major pluses on lift and speed, they lack fuel economy, endurance and typically need a large maintenance tail. COIN work requires large loiter times, low maintenance and yet the ability to be around when needed for Combat Air Support. Thus the new generation of COIN aircraft the A-67 Dragon (H/t: Strategypage), by US Aircraft Corporation which is making this mostly for export, but its purposes range across the COIN field.

One of the first reactions I had to looking at the aircraft was: 'They just re-invented the P-51 Mustang!' While unfair due to the modern electronics and aircraft parachute for recovery, these are very similar aircraft. This is one of those areas where coincident evolution of design based on technical specifications will lead you similar outcomes: there are hard and fast design limits that the P-51 was pushing and the A-67 is fitting into for another purpose. Thus, to get an idea of what we are looking at I will use the venerable P-51 Mustang for comparison (one of the late model variants if memory serves... I had picked up the information for general purposes for another idea and didn't keep track of where I had picked it up).

Aircraft Characteristics	A-67 Dragon	P-51 Mustang
Length		32'3”
Wingspan	38"	37'
Height		13'8”
Loaded Weight (lbs)	7,400
-Standard	10,200	9,200
-Max. Takeoff	10,200	12,100
Powerplant (hp)	1,600	1,695
Max. Speed (mph)	371	437
Max. Speed, tactical (mph)	346
Cruise Speed (mph)	301	362
Combat Radius (miles)	1,880	1,650 w/ext
Ferry Range (miles)
Service ceiling (ft)	35,000	41,900
Rate of Climb (ft/min)	4,882	3,200
Armament
-Centerline
-Wing Guns		6 x .50 cal mg
-other mount
Hardpoints		2
-Centerline	1
-Underwing	4	6
Max. Carry Weight (lbs)	3,600	2,840

While the A-67 Dragon does have an edge on climb, range and hardpoint external carry, the P-51 makes up for that with a higher operational ceiling, higher maximum speed and direct fire capability. The A-67 gives up direct fire for external load, higher speed for longer loiter and has a higher rate of climb to a lower operational ceiling.

Here the COIN concept takes charge but only slightly, since the P-51 was also made for ground attack and strafing, which 6 x .50 cals could do very effectively with electromechanical gunsights. What could be achieved in the modern era with HUD and computer adjusted firing is unknown, but my guess is that it would be quite spectacular. If the .50 cal could be swapped out, then the actual maximum external carry would be almost identical between these two aircraft.

One thing that the sales brochure for the A-67 is not clear on is the actual range and if that is with the centerline external fuel tank (which is my guess given the performance characteristics of the aircraft), in which case the 200 mile difference adds up to 1.5 hours of airtime. One thing not shown for the P-51 is the combat ferry which is a mode of guns only and maximum fuel, which adds range to the aircraft for a one-way ferry or more effective airtime, that would bring the P-51 well into the loiter time and possibly even carry two relatively light bombs (most likely 2x 250 lb. SDB) or two missiles.

This in no way disparages the A-67 Dragon, indeed the design similarities to the P-51 points out just how successful that design was for its purpose, as a single seat 'Pursuit' aircraft that was also capable of multiple roles in observation and ground attack. While later 'Attack' aircraft variants would show up after WWII, such as the A-1 Skyraider that was also a single seat aircraft for COIN work used up to Vietnam, the P-51 pointed to a design lineage that is nearly eternal for the kind of work it would do. And today's high resolution camera systems and persistent surveillance equipment would only add to the type of platform provided by that original design concept. Something very like the A-67 Dragon.

Still, the lack of robust firepower on-board has proven to be a major design flaw no matter what the combat aircraft is. And with modern, precision missiles and bombs, the ability to get 'lead on target' has always proven to be the final decider in a fight where the odds are evened by one means or another. With electronics and counter-measures to radar and heat seeking missiles, one very quickly gets down to guns no matter if the target is from a MANPAD or a green jet fighter pilot who just never was taught how to deal with planes that slow.

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The Political Lexicon - 2008 Edition

The following are terms and phrases used by different political groups, factions, organizations and their decoded meaning. Additionally are other, more traditional phrases also needing such listing.


1) Astroturf - To simulate a 'grassroots' campaign by paying individuals and organizations for support and not having such payments accredited to the parent organization. Originally used in the computer industry to identify a number of advertising and marketing campaigns sponsored by companies for their products without attribution of funding to those writing articles approving of such products. Now more generalized and inclusive of politics.

Ex. "That Senator sure astroturfed the problem for re-election support!"


2) Speaking the Truth to Power - Traditionally used by university freshmen and sophomores to tall about how they provided their views to the administration. Now used in a generic sense to indicate anyone that is a Liberal telling any elected official about their views. Usually reported in a positive light.

Ex. "I spoke the truth to power about global warming to the mayor."


3) Swiftboating - Speaking the Truth to Power to a Liberal utilizing said individual's record and asking for explanations. Usually reported in a negative light as being 'unfair' to an individual to remember their actions and explain them.

Ex. "The Senator was swiftboated on his record."


4) Quagmire - A term commonly used to describe every US military venture since 1945. Commonly used as a predictive term for failure of military operations before they begin.

Ex. "The US would face a quagmire invading Grenada."


5) Misunderstood Foreign Cultural Institutions - A phrase used to describe organized crime from overseas communities, like the Triads from China, Yakuza from Japan, Mafia from Italy, and Red Mafia from Russia.

Ex. "My campaign took donations from misunderstood foreign cultural institutions that are a normal part of their society."


6) Family Values - A term used to describe one's affiliation with a certain type of voting group. Alternatively meant to indicate that one running for office intends to try and pass legislation on morals. The vagueness of the term makes it applicable across the political spectrum.

Ex. "The party platform took a stand on family values for distressed couples of the same or opposite gender."


7) Fiscal Conservative - A term used to describe a candidate's position that 'holding the line on pork' is good enough.

Ex. "While running as a fiscal conservative, the Representative promised that payments for local projects would continue."


8) Federal Deficit - The amount the Federal Government runs in the red every year on current accounts.


9) Federal Debt - The total amount of all debt held by the Federal Government upon which interest is payed.


10) Social Security - A concept to retire older, viable workers from the workforce with monthly cash payment at a certain time garnered from young workers.


11) Health care insurance - A subsidized system of paperwork that utilizes a small fraction of the money paid into the system to deliver actual health benefits.


12) Subsidies - Government intervention in a market to appease a section of the electorate or to garner payments from industrial sectors. Subsidies usually contribute to overuse or abuse of the area being subsidized or to poor accounting and credit practices, leading to long term structural economic problems.

Ex. "Health care subsidies have increased the cost of health care."


13) Human shield - The act of interposing oneself to make a political statement. Done on the Liberal side this is meant to demonstrate 'solidarity' with a mental concept and often forget the individual's responsibilities to society as a whole.

- On the Conservative side this is meant to impede the rights of others to exercise their rights by insisting that 'if they only thought it over' the mind of the individual would change.

Ex. "The arrested individual was taken away after becoming a human shield at an abortion clinic to protest the quagmire in Iraq."


14) Soccer Moms - A key demographic that only shows up after an election is analyzed and then plays no further part in subsequent elections.


15) Chickenhawk - Individuals using this term prefer to have the Nation run by a military elite. Utilized to try and discredit an individual standing up for National defense and security. Also an indication of lack of comprehension of civilian control over military affairs.

Ex. "Only soldiers should get a say when we go to war and not people who don't volunteer, you chickenhawk!"


16) Triangulation - The political art of arriving at a policy point only after consulting all available polls and then changing such policy after subsequent polls.

Also - having no set political ideology or doctrine.


17) Two Americas - Any individual indicating that there are 'two Americas' is a rich individual without conscience or the unwillingness to contribute greatly to charity from their own funds.


18) Entitlement - Promises to give anything to a population segment to garner votes no matter the economic or sociological impacts of same. Often referred to as 'budget busters'.


19) Bleeding Heart - An individual so willing to take the side of the 'disenfranchised', 'underclass', or 'poor' that they are willing to sacrifice national sovereignty, national treasure or individual freedoms to gain these supposed 'good ends'.


20) Personal empowerment - A term used to indicate that the government holds all power and that anything the individual can wrest from it should be used to attack such government.

Ex. "The welfare applicant used pesonal empowerment to complain about the small amount of money he received from the government."


21) Post-Westphalian State - A Transnationalist concept to infer that progress can be had via the older system of religious persecution and Imperial oversight.


22) Transnationalism - Any system of ideology that seeks to remove rights from Nations and individuals and place those into unaccountable and unelected hands, be they individuals, groups or institutions.

Similar terms: Globalism, Internationalism, One Worldism, Just Imagine, Anti-Globalism, Socialism, Communism.


23) Free Trade - The religious orthodoxy movement that puts forth that freedom in trade promotes freedom, and that all such trade should be unaccountable to National needs. No effort to back this is ever demonstrated even when given contra-examples of this.

Ex. "Free Trade just takes time to work, and 30 years in China and 90 years in the Middle East just aren't enough."


24) The public's right to know - An excuse used by any journalistic endeavor of dubious outlook or backing that will undermine National Security.

Ex. "The public's right to know about the overseas wiretapping program may get to your Aunt Amelia's phone!"


25) The Public Interest - A phrase used by any ideologically oriented journalist or by a political activist for their partisan concerns.

Ex. "It is in the public interest for the Senator's sex life to be investigated in extreme detail."


26) For the children - Used across the ideological spectrum when no other argument for a program or project can be found.

Ex. "The banning of diyhydrogen monoxide is for the children!"


27) The common interest - An indication that one's taxes will be going up whenever this phrase is used.


28) It can't be addressed locally - A concept deployed so that a problem gets addressed less competently and at more cost at a higher level of government.


29) For the public good - Utilized any time that a pork project runs out of any other justification, including it being 'for the children'.


30) Only the Federal Government can address this - Any problem identified as such becomes perpetual and insoluble.


31) Count every vote and make sure every vote counts - Utilized when the vote count goes in favor of a partisan political organization, at which point that organization will use this and want the vote counting stopped.


32) Don't drink and drive - Originally utilized to help curb intoxicated drivers from taking to the road, this has now become the phrase of the New Temperance movement. Soon to be shortened to: Don't drink.


33) It's for your own good - Any time this is deployed it is an indication that an individual is about to suffer long term loss of property, funds or living. Often used in conjunction with 'the public good' and 'for the children'.


34) Racist - Anyone winning an argument with a Liberal.


35) We were put here for a purpose - Often used by those wishing to expand the number of laws covering morality.


36) Anonymous sources - Individuals who are 'anonymous sources' do not want to have their name revealed, be held accountable or questioned. Originally meant to demonstrate someone in authority revealing a nefarious program, it has come to mean any individual pushing an ideological viewpoint of any sort that does not want to be accredited with same.

Ex. "Anonymous sources in the CIA confirmed that fluoride in the water is a plot to rot your brains."


37) Single payer health care - A concept in which an individual applies to a bureaucrat to find out if they deserve health care. Also the removal of all health choices from the individual and giving it to the State.


38) Terrorism - A tactic used in illegitimate or illegal warfare performed by non-Nation States. When this happens at sea it is called Piracy, on land it remains tactic-descriptive oriented. Individual involved in this have no standing under the laws and customs of warfare.


39) Freedom Fighter - Individuals who organize, put on uniform, are held accountable to a command structure, and adhere to all the laws and customs of warfare.


40) Armed political organization - Ancient - Once used as a form of repudiation in regards to the Wiemar Republic's National Socialist and Communist parties in disparagement for their breaking with civil society. Typically applied to those seeking totalitarian rule.

-Modern - Now used to speak approvingly of the thuggish tactics used by any organization that makes any claim to politics in opposition to the United States or its allies. Typically applied to those seeking totalitarian rule that the Left approves of.

Ex. "Hezbollah is an armed political organization full of freedom fighters that just act like terrorists."


41) Grim statistic - Any casualty toll due to any ongoing process which can cause death. First applied to the automobile and drunk drivers, this term has been more generalized and often deployed for use in warfare. Statistics of this sort only stop growing once the class of individuals for which it is accountable ceases to exist or the operating modality for it ends. Typically a meaningless statistical count utilized for partisan political polemics.

Ex. "The grim statistic for individual deaths due to sword wounds has been reduced to single digits, globally, on an annual basis."


42) The President is responsible for (lack of equipment for soldiers) - Typically used by ideological partisans to pin blame on an individual for something that is not their fault, as Congress is the procurement and supply branch for the armed forces.


43) The worst war in history - Typically any ongoing warfare, this usage has been around since the beginning of warfare and misapplied to each conflict, which has typically led to bemusement, head nodding, yawns, appeasement and then worse wars.


44) Peace - A constructive arrangement between Nations to create a regularized atmosphere of trade and commerce. War is not a leading indicator of peace nor of peace to war, but are separate realms of endeavor that can and do overlap. Often the end of a war is not an indicator of peace nor is the state of peace without armed conflict arising. Nationally this is an either/or condition, globally it is a mixed condition of varying degrees of intensity.


45) Genocide - The utilization of mass slaughter against a targeted ethnic, religious or other minority. Once considered one of the greatest tragedies of mankind, multiple genocides have gone on without any response to them, thus ensuring the continuation of this form of killing.


46) Pacifist - Any individual who does not believe in warfare for any reason. Generally approves of genocide as it would require warfare to end an ongoing genocide and that is 'not their problem'.


47) Gender Gap - Ancient - A term once used to refer to the societal differences and earning power of men and women. Now that women are fully capable of making life decisions and accepting those consequences the differences in prime statistics of mortality and earning power are closing to the point of indifference.

- Modern - A term used to indicate that one's gender should exclude one from political scrutiny.


48) PC - Politically Correct or Political Correctness - A term used to identify those that do not adhere to a Leftist line in politics and to indoctrinate children and young adults via the educational system to Leftist lines of thought. More generally a system of thought control via harassment, abuse and attacks upon individuals and ideas the Left disagrees with.


49) Compassionate Conservatism - Big Government Conservatism.


50) Small "l" liberal or libertarian - An individual who does not like the trends towards Leftist and Libertinism seen in modern political movements, and repudiates other labels like 'Progressive' or 'Conservative' as being centered on government and not on individuals.


51) Nationalist - A term highly vilified by the political Left so as to eliminate supporters of Nation States from the political arena. Currently there are no Nationalist parties or candidates in the United States.

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The Power of Westphalia 359 years later

Photo courtesy: Michael Yon, Thanks and Praise, 2007
Thanks and Praise: I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome. - Michael Yon

CXIX.
The Ambassadors and Plenipotentiarys of the Emperor, of the King, and the States of the Empire, promise respectively and the one to the other, to cause the Emperor, the most Christian King, the Electors of the Sacred Roman Empire, the Princes and States, to agree and ratify the Peace which has been concluded in this manner, and by general Consent; and so infallibly to order it, that the solemn Acts of Ratification be presented at Munster, and mutually and in good form exchang'd in the term of eight weeks, to reckon from the day of signing.


CXX.
For the greater Firmness of all and every one of these Articles, this present Transaction shall serve for a perpetual Law and establish'd Sanction of the Empire, to be inserted like other fundamental Laws and Constitutions of the Empire in the Acts of the next Diet of the Empire, and the Imperial Capitulation; binding no less the absent than the present, the Ecclesiasticks than Seculars, whether they be States of the Empire or not: insomuch as that it shall be a prescrib'd Rule, perpetually to be follow'd, as well by the Imperial Counsellors and Officers, as those of other Lords, and all Judges and Officers of Courts of Justice.


CXXI.
That it never shall be alledg'd, allow'd, or admitted, that any Canonical or Civil Law, any general or particular Decrees of Councils, any Privileges, any Indulgences, any Edicts, any Commissions, Inhibitions, Mandates, Decrees, Rescripts, Suspensions of Law, Judgments pronounc'd at any time, Adjudications, Capitulations of the Emperor, and other Rules and Exceptions of Religious Orders, past or future Protestations, Contradictions, Appeals, Investitures, Transactions, Oaths, Renunciations, Contracts, and much less the Edict of 1629. or the Transaction of Prague, with its Appendixes, or the Concordates with the Popes, or the Interims of the Year 1548. or any other politick Statutes, or Ecclesiastical Decrees, Dispensations, Absolutions, or any other Exceptions, under what pretence or colour they can be invented; shall take place against this Convention, or any of its Clauses and Articles neither shall any inhibitory or other Processes or Commissions be ever allow'd to the Plaintiff or Defendant.


CXXXII.
That he who by his Assistance or Counsel shall contravene this Transaction or Publick Peace, or shall oppose its Execution and the abovesaid Restitution, or who shall have endeavour'd, after the Restitution has been lawfully made, and without exceeding the manner agreed on before, without a lawful Cognizance of the Cause, and without the ordinary Course of Justice, to molest those that have been restor'd, whether Ecclesiasticks or Laymen; he shall incur the Punishment of being an Infringer of the publick Peace, and Sentence given against him according to the Constitutions of the Empire, so that the Restitution and Reparation may have its full effect.


CXXIII.
That nevertheless the concluded Peace shall remain in force, and all Partys in this Transaction shall be oblig'd to defend and protect all and every Article of this Peace against any one, without distinction of Religion; and if it happens any point shall be violated, the Offended shall before all things exhort the Offender not to come to any Hostility, submitting the Cause to a friendly Composition, or the ordinary Proceedings of Justice.


CXXIV.
Nevertheless, if for the space of three years the Difference cannot be terminated by any of those means, all and every one of those concern'd in this Transaction shall be oblig'd to join the injur'd Party, and assist him with Counsel and Force to repel the Injury, being first advertis'd by the injur'd that gentle Means and Justice prevail'd nothing; but without prejudice, nevertheless, to every one's Jurisdiction, and the Administration of Justice conformable to the Laws of each Prince and State: and it shall not be permitted to any State of the Empire to pursue his Right by Force and Arms; but if any difference has happen'd or happens for the future, every one shall try the means of ordinary Justice, and the Contravener shall be regarded as an Infringer of the Peace. That which has been determin'd by Sentence of the Judge, shall be put in execution, without distinction of Condition, as the Laws of the Empire enjoin touching the Execution of Arrests and Sentences.


CXXV.
And that the publick Peace may be so much the better preserv'd intire, the Circles shall be renew'd; and as soon as any Beginnings of Troubles are perceiv'd, that which has been concluded in the Constitutions, of the Empire, touching the Execution and Preservation of the Public Peace, shall be observ'd.


CXXVI.
And as often as any would march Troops thro' the other Territorys, this Passage shall be done at the charge of him whom the Troops belong to, and that without burdening or doing any harm or damage to those whole Countrys they march thro'. In a word, all that the Imperial Constitutions determine and ordain touching the Preservation of the publick Peace, shall be strictly observ'd.

Peace of Westphalia, 15 MAY 1648 and 24 OCT 1648
Full text available: The Avalon Project, Yale University

A treaty well worth keeping, as it has the power to raise a cross in Baghdad, unmolested on the day of its raising with help from all religions of the Land of Iraq.

Cross-posted from The Jacksonian Party.

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Red Mafia and its connectivity

I am posting up the following article in its 'raw' form - no real attempt to neaten it, spell check, or even grammar check it has been done. Also missing are my usual neat and tidy formatting of blockquote text so that you can get an appealing color layout... in my copious free time I doubt I will ever get to doing *that*, either.

What you do get is one of those tightly interconnected looks at the Red Mafia, starting out from a place that is very, very familiar. Then it goes downhill from there....



There are questions that politics gives rise to that seem a bit strange or even absurd, until you go down just a bit to see what the connections between individuals and groups actually are. Previously I had looked at the strange question: What is the connection between Hillary Clinton and the unfinished Soviet Aircraft Carrier Varyag?

That question has a reasonable answer to it in the form of Macau's Triad connected legislator Chen Kai-kit, and his connections to the People's Liberation Army of China and via another associate to the North Korean government. Those sorts of questions actually yield meaningful answers and gives an idea of how close someone is related to various parts of society. From that a good idea of the capabilities and reach of an individual can be found via those interconnections. Those connections are via degrees of removal which indicate the number of connections involved, so the CV Varyag is two degress from Hillary Clinton: Hillary Clinton to Chen Kai-kit to CV Varyag. To work that Chen Kai-kit worked his contact network, of course, and also had received orders from the PLA to get the ship, which sits, today, rusting in a Chinese shipyard not really useful for anything.

One of the lesser known scandals around Hillary Clinton during her first Senatorial campaign would devolve to a delightfully absurd question: What is the connection to Hillary Clinton and Randy "Duke" Cunningham? Really, these are entirely two different parts of society represented by these individuals, with Hillary Clinton being on the Transnationalist Left and Randy "Duke" Cunningham being on the Corrupt Right. Beyond their Congressional contacts, of course, which only counts for something if they were caucausing together and such, which I take it they, and Mr. Cunningham's departure due to all sorts of bribery and tax evasion things that he admitted to. Well, the Clintons only admit to sax evasion not tax evasion and all the funding scandals due point out some nefarious goings-on, but those don't really cut it as connections as there is no real human connection there. There is, however, a real human connection between the two, and its an interesting thing to look at, who goes by the name Arik Kislin.

Now who, in all tarnation, is Arik Kislin?

Arik Kislin is the nephew of Semyon (Sam) Kislin. Does that help out?

No?

Ok, then it is the old 'blast from the past' deal, heading way back to 1999 and Hillary Clinton's first run for the Senate in NY State. The connections of the Kislin family are of interest due to Semyon's connection to a Bank of New York money laundering scheme that had a number of the Kislin family involved (including Arik via Blonde Management), the Chernoy brothers and the 'Red Don' Semion Mogilevich (as seen in this GlobalSecurity cache of a CRS Report on Russian Capital Flight in the Appendix on Recent Banking Scandals). The Kislin family seems to be somewhat involved in politics on the local level, and relatively bipartisan, at least in donations. That is where the connection to Randy "Duke" Cunningham shows up, in one of those strange juxtapositions of a donor able to support *both* Cunningham and Clinton. The OpenSecrets site has a good rundown on the Kislin family's donations (search OpenSecrets for Individual donors and use the name Kislin):

Contributor	Occupation	Date	Amount	Recipient
KISLIN, ARIK GREAT NECK,NY 11024	SELF/RETIRED	3/29/2005	$2,100	Berkley, Shelley
KISLIN, ARIK NEW YORK,NY 10010	SELF/REAL ESTATE INVESTMENTS	9/12/2006	$2,100	Clinton, Hillary
KISLIN, ARIK GREAT NECK,NY 11024	SELF/RETIRED	3/29/2005	$1,900	Berkley, Shelley
KISLIN, ARIK NEW YORK,NY 10010	SELF/REAL ESTATE INVESTMENTS	9/12/2006	$1,900	Clinton, Hillary
KISLIN, ARIK NEW YORK,NY 10019	BLONDE MANAGEMENT	10/30/1996	$1,000	Democratic National Committee
KISLIN, ARIK NEW YORK,NY 10019	REAL ESTATE	10/25/1995	$1,000	Cunningham, Randy "Duke"
KISLIN, DAVID NEW YORK,NY 10023		11/6/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, DAVID NEW YORK,NY 10023		11/6/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, LUDMILA NEW YORK,NY 10023		10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, LUDMILA NEW YORK,NY 10023		10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, LUDMILA NEW YORK,NY 10023		2/2/1996	$250	Dole, Bob
KISLIN, LUDNILA NEW YORK,NY 10023	HOUSEWIFE	11/9/1995	$1,000	Clinton, Bill
KISLIN, OLYA NEW YORK,NY 10010	N/A/HOMEMAKER	9/12/2006	$2,100	Clinton, Hillary
KISLIN, OLYA NEW YORK,NY 10010	N/A/HOMEMAKER	9/12/2006	$1,900	Clinton, Hillary
KISLIN, REGINA NEW YORK,NY 10023		10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, REGINA NEW YORK,NY 10023		10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, SAM NEW YORK,NY 10023	TRANS COMMODITIES	11/9/1995	$1,000	Clinton, Bill
KISLIN, SAM NEW YORK,NY 10019	REDI CORP USA	10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, SAM NEW YORK,NY 10019	REDI CORP USA	10/31/1997	$1,000	Schumer, Charles E
KISLIN, SAM NEW YORK,NY 10023	REDI CORP USA	2/25/1997	$1,000	D'Amato, Alfonse M

There are times when one does have to wonder about politics! Be that as it may, the Kislin family is pretty well represented here, and their backgrounds have been given a pretty good looking over by Knut Royce at The Center for Public Integrity in his article on the FBI tracking the donations of one of the Kislins to Rudy Giuliani as part of a larger investigation of the Kislins and others in the Russian Mafia. Unlike the current inHsurance problems going on, the Kislins seem to shift their donations around a bit over time, until they more properly align with the Democratic Party. Gone are the days of donating to Alfonse D'Amato, Bob Dole and Rudy Giuliani. Today the donations are more targeted at Democrats, particularly Hillary Clinton, and that for her 2006 Senate campaign. Do note that the records across the various donation searches pulls up that Mr. Giuliani returned donations, but the organizing done by Sam Kislin is similar to that of other 'bundlers'.

Now for some background on Sam Kislin and his business partners, the first of which is Michael and Leo Chernoy. For this I will look at a report from the Russian Press Center that looks at the businessmen that have influenced Russia since the fall of the USSR: Exiled Russian Oligarchs: Battle for Moscow 2008. The Chernoy brothers started in the legal trade then went into flowers, plastics manufacturing, raw materials commodity trading and the manufacture of household goods during the mid to late 1980's. On page 36 of the report we see how they utilized their ventures via the local Russian press reports:

'The Chernoy brothers got their seed-money for business through their connections with the Uzbek criminal world, - Konservator newspaper wrote in 2003. - Chernoy's cooperative was used by the criminals to launder revenues from racketeering, prostitution, illegal arms and drugs trade.

From there the Chernoy (aka. Cherney, Chernoi, Chorny) brothers would utilize contacts to branch out in their business reach. That is where the Odessa emigre Sam Kislin first meets up with the Chernoy brothers as his company, Transcommoditites, also was a going concern in Russia. In the days right after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Chernoy brothers and Sam Kislin made out quite well by retaining ownership of their factories and dealing directly via barter and other means to continue production and good profit. The commodities market would prove especially good and that would lead to a profitable business utilizing Western contracts to supply coke from Russian smelters and utilizing their manufacturing businesses to barter goods and appliances for the coke. That triangular trade would serve as a basis for a thriving business in the coke manufacturing area that would bolster investments in heavy metals work. Michael Chernoy would partern with his younger brother Lev and become a dominant part of the export trade in coal, copper, coke and ferrous metals. By 1992 their association with Sam Kislin would end by bringing in the Reuben brothers (David from London and Simon from Monaco) for local manufacturing of aluminum from alumina ore. Part of that was no doubt due to Sam Kislin's association with organized crime, as gone over in page 43:

Although Chernoy has recently sought to position himself as a philanthropist and legitimate businessman, his documented association with major organized crime figures seriously undermines such claims. Chernoy is known to have a close relationship with Sam Kislin, an American-citizen from Ukraine tracked by the FBI for organized crime. A 1996 Interpol report confirms one of Kislin's companies was used by Chernoy and his brother Lev to launder millions of dollars. The FBI considers both Chernoy and Kislin to be members of the American Russian mob headed by imprisoned godfather Vyacheslav Ivankov, who was recently released.

Chernoy is also a known associate of Russian mobster, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a shadowy figure in Russia implicated in serious crimes such as arms dealing and smuggling. Tokhtakhounov was also charged with bribing figure skating judges in the 2002 Winter Olympics. A 2002 New York Times article reported that Tohktakhounov introduced Michael Chernoy to the "famous Russian mob leader, Anton Malevsky," who is a contract killer and head of the Izmailovskaya gang. Malevsky met an untimely death in a parachute accident in South Africa in 2001.

The Chernoys would go on to build the business up to become the third largest aluminum producer globally with the Reuben brothers and then take control of the entire thing from the Reubens by 1998. Trans World commodities would not stand there long, and Fortune Magazine has an article from 12 JUN 2000 at CNN to pick up some of the pieces of the investments that went on with Trans World. This is one of those chaotic investment concepts that went on in the post-Soviet Russia, and that involved the use of factories for a 'toll' which is actually paying a large workforce a minimum (or even sub-minimum) wage. The State waved all import and export taxes and tariffs, and also provided the 'toll' concept, which would allow for lucrative kickbacks to government officials from the factory owners. This temporary fix to the unemployment problem created the oligarch class of Russian traders and factory owners that still plagues the Nation. The Reuben brothers, would exploit this and the vagaries of world commodities trading as seen in the following:

"I don't seek any tax advice from experts," boasts Simon from his Geneva redoubt. "I can't read a computer screen and never use a calculator. It's all in my head and by hand." Simon's global web, set up to avoid taxes, has baffled investigators for years. For starters, there are more companies than employees: Some 200 entities were created in the West and nearly 100 more by his Russian associates. Shells within shells within shells--constantly shifting, many with similar names--in places like Cyprus, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Isle of Man. In 1999, a Virgin Islands shell (Landal Worldwide) seems to have been at the pyramid's apex. Below that, at various times: Trans World Group Inc.; Trans-World Group PLC; Trans-World Metals International; Trans-World Metals SA; TWM Holdings; TWM Trading; Transmet; Landal SAM; etc. The Reubens had a private bank in Western Samoa, a second in Moscow, a third in the Bahamas, a bank holding shell in Bermuda, and various accounts at nonrelated Swiss, German, and U.S. banks such as Bank of New York. The layers just go on and on, an optical illusion to make M.C. Escher scratch his head. "Simon loves the complexity," says one Trans World insider. "He'd set up three companies just to pay his rent."

It is that financial empire that allowed TransWorld Commodities to become the vast network it was, and implode when some of the investments and cross-investments started to be questioned. And as the old Soviet nomenklatura system did not like the new capitalist industry barons, those investments were questioned along with ties to organized crime. This also caused situations in which the need for liquidity or immediate cash to pay off loans also arose, and that, more than anything, would plague TransWorld:

The plant manager's assertion, in turn, dragged Trans World into an ongoing government inquiry into the theft of more than $100 million from Russia's central bank by a number of separate criminal groups during the early 1990s. That a theft occurred is not in dispute, nor is the fact that the Chernoys ended up with a piece of the stolen money and used it to partially fund Trans World's startup phase in 1992. (At Krasnoyarsk, FORTUNE has concluded, it helped fund the initial deals that brought raw materials into the plant.) The inquiry's objective was to determine whether the Chernoys knew the funds were indeed stolen.

Mind you, the Chernoys owned the business in question and it was in that period that Sam Kislin was helping the Chernoys to get it going. Such good luck for Sam Kislin to leave before that scandal hit! By 1996 some of those problems had been addressed, but new ones started to arise outside Russia that would revolve around the business dealings of the Reubens and Chernoys. Problems were cropping up in the UK, Switzerland and the US:

In Switzerland, Michael was briefly arrested and interrogated as a suspect in an organized crime case. (A probe there against him is still under way.) In England, Operation Copperfield (perhaps named for David Reuben) led British intelligence agents to connect the Chernoys to Vyacheslav Ivankov, the jailed "godfather" of the American arm of the Russian mafia. The agents found that 25% of the phone calls from Trans World's London offices went to apparent mob figures involved in money laundering, drugs, and gem smuggling. (David: "I would be grateful if you could get them to give you a single phone number, because it must be a mistake." The Brits: No comment.) In Russia, one government investigator linked the Chernoys to the cycling of funds from drugs and car thefts through retail stores and on to London, but complained that the scale of the scheme was too vast to grasp, according to the Copperfield report. The Russian Interior Minister, without a money-laundering law to back him up, asked the FBI for help.

Joel Bartow, a former FBI agent who specialized in Russian mob cases, spent nearly four years in the mid-1990s trying to indict Michael Cherney for laundering but says, "Money laundering is a difficult charge to prove on someone who is not a U.S. citizen." Bartow says he dug up evidence of "false bills of lading" and "phantom contracts" involving some of Michael's oil deals. "Lev and Michael were moving money for people, and they were taking 10%," he explains. "They knew how to move it, and they weren't asking where the money came from and didn't care where it was going. They were moving it for corrupt politicians, for people who were committing fraud, and for people who didn't want to pay taxes."

Very difficult to prove, as it turns out, especially when dealing in one of the world's largest trading companies and producers of aluminum. Just the sheer number of transactions to keep a company of that size going is difficult to track internally, and it was being done by HAND. As this was hitting the fan, back in 1996-97 the Reuben brothers were clearly in a bind as they were having problems documenting the procedures used to run TransWorld Commodities and getting investigated nearly everywhere. To stem that tide they would turn to:

The Reubens clearly needed high-powered help, and they found it in Mickey Kantor, the former U.S. Commerce Secretary, and his law firm, Mayer Brown & Platt, which received $5 million for its services. The lawyers enlisted IGI, the investigative agency that President Clinton used during the Monica Lewinsky affair. The IGI investigator assigned to the case--Terrence Burke, an ex-CIA agent and former acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration--met with Michael Cherney and various government officials. A top U.S. embassy staffer in Moscow said the U.S. believed Trans World was "an indirect beneficiary of laundered funds," according to a 1997 Mayer Brown report. The news given to Burke by the FBI was even worse: It believed Michael himself was an organized crime figure.

Burke recommended that the Reubens sever their ties with Michael, and in 1997, Simon reveals to FORTUNE, they did exactly that, giving him about $400 million just to go away. Lev, who remained with Trans World and continued to run the show from Israel, says the payoff was "almost all the profit" earned overall by the Chernoy half of the partnership.

But if the Reubens thought they could buy peace, they miscalculated. Instead, civil war broke out. Michael, feeling underpaid and humiliated after all he'd done for Trans World, proceeded to plot revenge on his brother and the Reubens. At his villa in Israel later that year, he assembled a group of Trans World's plant managers (as well as Malevsky, according to one Trans World insider) to lay the groundwork for a coup. In the end, it proved easy enough: Lev's relations with the managers had been deteriorating since he left Russia, and some of them controlled blocks of stock that had been parked in their names as a way for Trans World to skirt Russia's antimonopoly laws. It didn't take much prodding from Michael to induce the managers to combine their shares with his; by year's end Trans World had lost control of half its empire.

Damn that Mickey Kantor gets around! First in a law firm that helps Swaleh Naqvi during the BCCI scandal, then helping Terry McAuliffe and John Huang during the Lippo Bank Scandal, arranging financial aid for Webster Hubble and then helping the Reubens with their problems in Trans Commodities. After that he would go to China for a meeting in Beijing in 2003 as part of the International Finance Forum: after all the financial folks coming to him that are in hot water financially, he should know a lot about the subject. The Reubens would insist that they put up the money to start Trans Commodities, but the lack of evidence and the connection of stolen cash to the Chernoys makes that difficult:

But it remains unclear to this day exactly how Trans World financed its start in Russia. David Reuben insists that he and Simon put up their own money for the launch, but they have produced no records showing they were the source of any initial financing. Which brings us back to that oft-mentioned central bank caper. At its core, the scam involved multilayered deals wherein dollar-ruble conversions and false letters of credit delivered government money--through Russian banks--to a number of companies, including Trans World. In the middle of the transactions sat two similar-sounding entities: Trans-CIS Commodities, run by Lev and formed with the help of David Reuben, and Trans Commodities, a firm based in New York in which Michael was a 50% partner. (Michael's partner in Trans Commodities was an American emigre named Semyon "Sam" Kislin, later named in an FBI report as an associate of a now imprisoned Russian "godfather," and whose nephew, according to Joel Bartow, eventually went to work as Michael Cherney's right-hand man. Kislin has since become a member of the Economic Development Board in New York City as well as a big donor to Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Rudolph Giuliani. He denies any links to either the mob or Trans World.)

Those connections to Sam Kislin seem to be pointing in a different direction. The Reubens, however, would be cleared of charges and take their billions to the West and start investing in businesses that have a bit better oversight and management, but they would point out the connections of the Chernoy borthers as being the problem:

Today the Reubens say that while Michael was close to "dubious individuals" in Russia, he and Lev had split over Michael's relationships with those individuals. Additionally, the Reubens are currently pursuing criminal proceedings against Michael and others in Switzerland.

So, just who else are the Chernoy brothers connected to? A 2003 Pravda article on the outflow of money and the role of 'facilitators' to help organized crime and Western companies is pointed out as the main area of growth for the Russian Mafia. They give us a quick run-down of the most well known of those in Russia doing the 'facilitating':

Between these two groups there was another layer of 'facilitators'; people who knew the parallel system. They set up the deals. They traded the hard earned cash from aluminium into cigarettes and vodka which could be brought back into Russia and sold for cash, providing liquidity to the system. These facilitators were among the first private businessmen in Russia. They had ties to the very independent private sector who had access to the raw materials and the internal organizations which could deliver on the agreements made; the Izmailova (the late Anton Malevksy), Soltsnevo, Long Pond groups to name but a few. The facilitators included the Chernoy brothers (Mischa and Lev), Sam Kislin, and the 'institutionals' Gregory Luchansky, Semyon Mogilevich (Lyubarsky and Long Pond) or Vadim Rabinovich in the Ukraine. Most of these, too, were Jews. Without these men the Russification of Russia couldn't have taken place. They provided the only working system in Russia. Even in the far reaches of Siberia or the outposts of the Far East one could always find someone who could provide what was needed

These 'private businessmen' would look at legal and illegal activities as the same thing, and utilize their knowledge of both areas to their own advantage. A bit earlier on the article points out to some of the trades that had been 'facilitated' with Western organized crime:

In early 1990 trainloads and truckloads of roubles left Russia, escorted by KGB police guards, for Western Europe. In Italy the Mafia, the Camorra and the 'Nhdragheta purchased millions of dollars worth of roubles from their illicit profits. Russia became the greatest laundry for money that was ever known. Bankers in the West were offered letters of credit in roubles with a Russian guarantee that these could be brought back into Russia. Santo Pasquale Morabito, a notorious Italian drug dealer and launderer for Pablo Escobar of Colombia swapped US$4.6 billion for 70 billion roubles (or less than half the official rate). The main Sicilian outlets were Ciccio Madonia's family in Palermo and Nitto Santapaola's in Catania. Everyone got into the act. A Sicilian Castellamarese capo called Tommy Marsala bought half a billion roubles for the Lebanese Druse leader Walid Jumblatt, who used them to buy small arms and rockets from Russia.

This sort of transaction does gain its own cast of characters, and the entrepeneurial spirit and a good set of contacts helps to select who will be able to deal with outside organizations. For awhile Russia was the money laundering capitol of the world, as its banks emptied and the Nation was looking for anything to support it. One of the prime individuals from the US that was pardoned for some of this work was Marc Rich, former DARPA employee working with various individuals in Russia on both sides of the legal fence.

Now back to Sam Kislin and that 1995 donation to Bill Clinton. Notice where it came from? Trans Commodities, a company in Russia that he, apparently, had not ties to. But that seems not to be the case as the Knut Royce article of 1999 we get to see some of the problems of law enforcement and intelligence agencies and how the wall constructed between them by the Clinton Administration would hamper investigating or even knowing about the activities of those of interest to either or both communities:

Kislin is not alone among emigres from the former Soviet Union who have successfully established themselves in the United States while law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI, track their alleged associations with organized crime. The Center for Public Integrity has obtained confidential law enforcement documents detailing the activities of dozens of the emigres, but authorities rarely make cases and still less share the intelligence outside their departments.

A 1996 Interpol report claims that Kislin's firm, Trans Commodities, Inc., was used by two reputed mobsters from Uzbekistan, Lev and Mikhail Chernoy, for fraud and embezzlement. And a confidential 1994 FBI intelligence report on the Brooklyn, N.Y., mob organization headed by Vyacheslav Ivankov, the imprisoned godfather of Russian organized crime in the United States, lists Kislin as a "member/associate" of Ivankov's gang. It claims that his company co-sponsored a Russian crime boss and contract killer for a U.S. visa and asserts that he was a "close associate" of the late notorious arms smuggler Babeck Seroush, who later settled in Russia.

In a telephone interview on Dec. 17, Kislin confirmed he had employed Mikhail Chernoy at Trans Commodities, but said he didn't know Ivankov. "I never met this guy; I never saw him in my life," he said. He said that someone had forged his signature to obtain the hit man's visa. And, he confirmed, "I used to do business with Babeck Seroush."

Sam Kislin did, indeed, continue to have holdings in the Trans Commodities business in the view of Interpol, at least, and by Sam's own donation record. A very interesting thing to have left the business and still be in it. This was a very chaotic period in Russia, so keeping track of who is involved with what is more than a bit difficult, and many articles published globally, even from Russia, had a hard problem keeping track of which companies and individuals where doing what. No thanks with that to Simon Reuben, throwing in a few hundred paper fronts that he tracked in his head and kept no records on. But an article from the Capital site in Russia would collect a bit more on the Chernoys and Kislin and some of the involvements that Knut Royce was trying to track down in the US. Those connections seen from the Russian side are more than a bit interesting, with the following taken from the 1999 article The World against Chorny Family at the Capital site:

According to a Swiss police investigation, dated 1996, Michael Chorny is very close to the Russian criminal group Solntsevskaya and to its boss Sergey Mikhaylov. In the end of 1998, there was a law suit against Mikhaylov, which had to prove his participation in the money laundering but it was not successful and Mikhaylov was discharged. The same report, which investigates Russian companies says:

"Vyacheslav Ivankov-Yaponchik is closely connected with the following persons...Michael Chorny, born on January 16, 1952 and his brothers Lev and David. Chorny is Yaponchik's partner in Trans Commodities, which serves as a cover for controlling the laundering of money through Blond Management Group, a company, which is also registered in New York and whose president is Alik Kislin - a member of the Kislin family". Allegedly, this family ensured Yaponchik's control over the organised Russian gangs in the USA. It is considered that Chorny is also closely connected to the scandalous Russian businessman Grigory Luchansky, manager of Nordex. Rumour has it that it is from Luchansky's companies that Chorny bought the Bulgarian GSM operator MobilTel.

Send in the blondes! There are times when the names of organizations seem to be taken as some sort of tagline to let you know that this is an alternate reality as no one, in their right mind, would try to run an outfit known as Blonde Management Group. But the co-owner of Blonde Management, as seen in the donation records, is Arik Kislin, nephew of Sam, the man who saw contributions to Randy "Duke" Cunningham AND Hillary Clinton in his donation history? Really I can't find much of a similarity between Cunningham and Clinton, beyond the easy donation acceptance qualities of both candidates, and the implication of the Russian Mafia supporting both and the facts of that, or not, in the Cunningham case will be at trial. The only other thing to note from the article, is that this would be part of the Yukos oil deal that would build up the Russian petro-giant over time. That company, it appears, utilizes legitimate and illegitimate funding sources for expansion.

But back to Michael Chernoy, Trans Commodities and Blonde Management as the Capital article points out one of the schemes used by Michael to launder money from Bulgaria to New York. The Russian National Oil Company was buying out its Bulgarian counterpart and Michael Chernoy, who was going to supply $6M for the deal in standing capital. That money was supplied by Blonde International and went into a subsidiary of the Bulgarian National Bank and then disappeared: no paper trail on its whereabouts. What a sweet deal! Get money sent to you and then have it disappear in a Bank without a trace. Then Michael Chernoy is able to get the Bulgarian Central Co-Operative Bank to re-imburse him for those funds, and the feeling by some are that he, somehow, not only was able to launder his money that way but actually got his hands on the original $6M and then asked for re-imbursement of that since it was 'lost'. That is 100% pure profit, if true.

What Blonde Management did, then, was serve as a money conduit for the Chernoys from the West. Attention was turned to this aspect of things due to the Commercial Bank of San Francisco suddenly attracting large amounts of money from the old Soviet Bloc. The 09 NOV 1999 article by Knut Royce looks at this before heading into Blonde Management, and it serves as a major problem point in Western banking. By a group of Bulgarian emigrees coming to San Franciso in 1991 and buying a 10% interest in the Commercial Bank of San Francisco, they were able to utilize it for money laundering schemes between the US, Bulgaria and Russia. Boris Goldstein, the major mover in this, sat on the board of directors of the bank and headed up its international department, thus putting him in a prime position to ensure that no proper oversight into such transactions would happen.

Soon after taking that spot, Russian deposits in the bank increased 9% over two months, bringing with it scrutiny from the FDIC. When the investigations started they ran straight into the Simon Reubens shell companies, shell banks and paper internetwork of same sitting off-shore to move money from legitimate channels with oversight to ones without oversight and low levels of accountability. Because such companies 'cross-own' in a complex web, investigators are stymied by that web in tracing out exactly *who* owns any part of it. If you have created three companies to pay your rent, then exactly how many would you dedicate towards laundering tens of millions of dollars?

Part of this transaction network went between the Commercial Bank of San Francisco and the Bank of New York via a husband and wife couple of emigrees. On 19 OCT 1999 the NYT published The Money Movers, by Timothy L. O'Brien and Lowell Bergman, which looked at the background of this couple and the dealings they were involved in:

Peter Berlin's venture, Benex International Company, got off to a slow start. But after a few years of arranging shipments of stereos and other electronic products to Russia, Mr. Berlin hit on something simpler and more lucrative to move around the world: money.

It proved an inspired choice. Nearly everyone in Russia with any money, from businessmen to gangsters, was searching for ways to hide their cash from onerous taxes or overly inquisitive investigators. Mr. Berlin offered a fast, discreet vehicle for moving dollars offshore -- lots of dollars.

Mr. Berlin's companies opened accounts at the Bank of New York, where his wife, Lucy Edwards, was an executive, and began whisking billions of dollars a year out of Russia. Ms. Edwards was in an ideal position to help. Just as he began his new business in 1996, she was promoted to a prestigious job at the bank in London drumming up commercial clients in Russia.

The couple prospered. According to people involved in the investigation, they earned millions of dollars from Benex's dealings, depositing the money offshore in accounts in the British Channel Islands and elsewhere. Mr. Berlin and Ms. Edwards, who had previously owned a small home in upstate New York, bought a $500,000 apartment in central London and enrolled her daughter in an expensive private school.

[..]

Nonetheless, the couple is now at the center of the biggest Federal money laundering investigation in history as law enforcement officials try to sort out how more than $7 billion sluiced through Mr. Berlin's companies over three years. Much remains unknown.

Federal investigators, for instance, suspect that Mr. Berlin's transformation from small-time businessman to leader of a widely used company was orchestrated by someone in Russia with ties to business or political leaders. But so far, neither they nor British investigators have been able to figure out who that might be.

Ms. Edwards' role remains equally unclear. British investigators who raided the couple's apartment in London in August found business cards and stationery for the Benex company that carried the Bank of New York logo. Prosecutors assert that Ms. Edwards was directly involved in expediting at least one transfer through Benex. And Western financiers say she ran financial seminars in Russia in which Benex's consulting services were promoted using the Bank of New York name.

Investigators are still trying to unravel whose money washed through Mr. Berlin's companies. Some of the more than 87,000 electronic transfers, they say, appear to involve legitimate Russian companies financing the purchase of imported goods and evading taxes. Some have been linked to Russian racketeers.

Or the old 'new kids make good' story, but with a twist to it, involving the movement of funds between the West and Russia for organized crime. This was lost in the transaction business due to lack of oversight by Bank of New York. Part of this was not due to regulatory problems, but volume of transaction and the type of transaction involved:

On a winter day three years ago, Mr. Berlin took a step that would change his life: He strolled into the Bank of New York's Wall Street headquarters and opened an account in the name of Benex International. Six months later, in July 1996, he opened an account in the name of Becs International at the same branch.

Closer scrutiny by the Bank of New York would have revealed corporate records on file with the State of New Jersey showing that one of its employees, Ms. Edwards, was one of two officers at Benex (Mr. Berlin was the other). The bank's own records noted that Ms. Edwards had authority to withdraw money from the Becs account.

Both of those facts should have been red flags at the bank. Banks typically restrict employees from playing a direct role in customers' businesses. The Bank of New York allows such arrangements only with permission of its chairman. Ms. Edwards's formal links to her husband's ventures, the bank says, did not surface until late 1998, after the Federal inquiry began.

Bank employees knew that Mr. Berlin and Ms. Edwards were married, but this apparently served only to shield the accounts from scrutiny. In Congressional testimony last month, the bank's chief executive, Thomas A. Renyi, said the fact that Mr. Berlin was married to ''a well-regarded bank officer'' had dissuaded bank auditors from looking more closely at the money in the accounts. He described that as ''a lapse on the part of the bank.''

There was plenty to look at. It is not clear precisely when the companies began moving money out of Russia, but by 1996 they had become one of the more heavily used pipelines for sending out cash. Millions of dollars a day coursed through the network, pouring through the Bank of New York unchecked.

Banks do not typically make much profit transferring money from one country to another. They charge their better clients as little as a few dollars per transaction.

The inter-institutional money transfers are electronic and even with the post-9/11 security systems in place, these types of transactions from apparently legitimate business to legitimate business still swamps the system. Making a few dollars on a multi-million dollar money transfer was, and is, chickenfeed. Even when 'flags' are put in place, the only thing they are good for are distractions as the utilization of seemingly legitimate front companies allows the actual destination to be masked. The bank records are good for transaction destinations, but for active tracing of funds there must be suspected accounts and activities to gain attention for them.

And if a company is made just to finance rent payment for property and is one of three in a 'holding agreement', then how does one actually determine if or when *any* of them are doing illegitimate business?

What Simon Reubens did was not illegal, per se, but the utilization of such methods to filter funds past financial barriers and restrictions makes the ability of the origin Nation to actually follow those funds nearly impossible. This is the high-end version of security through obscurity: being one moderately sized fish in a school of same is not out of place, especially if the fish is of a similar species as the larger amount of motion detracts from finding the one that is different.

By not being a 'high-flyer', the couple lived a relatively moderate life and gained little attention to their financial dealings and, unlike Simon Reubens, employed more computers than people:

Russian investigators have told their American counterparts they believe that crime groups in Russia exercised some form of control over the operation. American officials say they have no evidence of that, but are still trying to understand how Mr. Berlin corralled so much of the money-moving business so quickly.

The customers appear to have covered the entire range of Russian commerce. Some of the money, Federal investigators say, was moved by Russian criminal groups. Italian prosecutors have found that Russian gangs operating out of northern Italy, for instance, used Benex to transfer several million dollars out of Russia.

More than half of the $7 billion handled by Mr. Berlin's companies moved through the accounts before any suspicions arose. But in early 1998, investigators in two countries, working on different cases, began asking questions about Becs, Benex and Mr. Berlin.

The Manhattan District Attorney office, working with British officials on a money laundering and stock manipulation case, found that a Russian emigre they were investigating, Roman Amiragov, was moving $300,000 to $500,000 a week through Benex into the Bank of New York.

A few months later, the Russian Government separately asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation for help in tracing the ransom in a kidnapping case. The money, it turned out, had moved through a Benex account at the Bank of New York on its way to Russian organized crime figures, prompting the bureau to open its own inquiry.

The inquiry focused more closely on Mr. Berlin in August, 1998, after Republic Bank told the F.B.I. that $10 million had passed from Russia through an account controlled by one of his companies.

By living a realtively obscure life and serving as a digital financial hub, the Berlins were able to keep a high level of money throughput going, which would then disperse into a network of companies. Most of the companies were legitimate, and actual, real business was performed. Russian and US investigators, however, point to that part of the organized crime business that was not legitimate, but was masked by the throughput coordinated by the Berlins. In a later report in the NYT by Timothy L. O'Brien and Raymond Bonner on 16 FEB 2000, we would find one Bank of New York official charged with accepting a bribe and the investigation itself would narrow things down to the small portion of the transfers that were illegal, amounting only to $8M and an addition $1M in financial transaction servicing they garnered from moving such money. By 15 NOV 2000 Elizabeth Olson would report for the NYT that the amount frozen due to this activity would grow to $16.8M overseas and the Swiss would then cite $500M involved in money laundering and tax fraud by the Berliner couple.

In testimony to Congress on 09 MAR 2000, Jonathan Winer, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, would testify on the magnitude of the Benex transaction scheme:

That briefing took place a year ago, in March of 1999. It revealed a complex international network of shenanigans involving a typical infrastructure for commiting international financial crime and money laundering, involving an Ambassador from a West African country, members of the French mafia linked to a well-known Italian financial institution, Canadian lawyers, British soliciters and accountants, and various off-shore financial locations, such as Liberia and the Channel Islands. All interesting, but not so different from international money laundering schemes I had seen before.

The briefing then took on a more disturbing aspect. The British officials told me that they had run across a company called Benex International, Inc., based in Queens, New York, owned by a Russian named Peter Berlin. Benex was a small business, nothing more than a couple of people with a couple of personal computers. Yet Benex intersected in a number of ways with the money laundering infrastructure the British were investigating. It also had apparently sponsored U.S. visa applications for known members of the Semion Mogilevitch crime organization of Russia, and acted in false receivable scams with a firm known as YBM Magnex, in frauds involving the Toronto stock exchange.

The Semion Mogilevitch organization had been a priority target of law enforcement agencies throughout Western Europe and North America. Public accounts concerning Mogilevitch suggested the involvement of his criminal organization in almost every major form of organized crime: contract killings, drug trafficking, prostitution, extortion rackets, and frauds, extending to a substantial number of countries in Western and Central Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East.

Details about YBM Magnex's frauds, and Semion Mogilevitch's substantial interest in the company, were already publicly available from newspaper articles after regulatory and enforcment action were taken against it in the U.S. and Canada in 1998, leaving investors holding some $500 million in worthless securities. Ultimately the firm pled guilty to commiting both securities and mail fraud. Additional information I received in the United Kingdom suggested that Benex's accounts at the Bank of New York including funds from drug smuggling, extortion and contract killings. Benex thus appeared to be part of the infrastructure in the United States that the Mogilevitch organization, among others, was using to launder the proceeds of serious crimes and to commit serious frauds.

This in turn raised the question, in my mind, of what kind of volume of funds Benex was moving, and how large the company was.

In response to my questions, I learned that the Benex account at the Bank of New York had moved more than $4.2 billion, with over 8,000 transactions a month for an average of one wire transfer every five minutes, night and day, 24 hours a day, for 18 months. I learned that Benex with its couple of employees and personal computers was operated by Peter Berlin, a Russian who had married a U.S. citizen named Lucy Edwards, herself Russian-born, who had divorced her first, American husband after acquiring U.S. citizenship. I learned that Ms. Edwards worked at the Bank of New York, where Benex maintained its account and through which Benex undertook its money laundering activity. I learned that Ms. Edwards' job at the Bank of New York was to head the East European Trade Finance Department at the Bank of New York's London offices, and that she remained in daily contact with her husband Peter Berlin, who was still in New York, running Benex.

Mr. Chairman, my jaw literally dropped open when I was provided this information. In the past I had investigated the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, and a lot of other big international money laundering cases, but this case had stunning implications. It suggested as a serious possibility that Benex was a multibillion dollar money laundering business operated by a couple of Russians, including one insider at a major United States money center bank, and that Benex was among other things laundering funds in New York City for the some of the worst elements of the Russian mob. In various capacities, I had prosecuted, investigated, analyzed, or undertaken oversight of many major money laundering cases over the previous 20 years. I had never heard of any money laundering case of this magnitude.

And BCCI was huge! He would later go on to cite the very problems of these accounts being difficult to trace and transactions to have oversight, and that if the Benex or the Berliners had become a licensed money transfer institution there would have been no laws that could touch them: those transfers would be inherently legitimate. The World Bank would also cite the high level connections of these deals as part of the capital flight from Russia during the early 1990's in this 2001 article on Foreign Loans Diverted in Monster Money Laundering?:

Russia's national police agency, the MVD, conservatively estimates that $9 billion illegally flees the country each year. A study by the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Centre for the Study of International Economic Relations at the University of Western Ontario, published this May, suggested that up to $70 billion disappeared in 1992 and 1993 alone. Other specialists argue that total capital flight in 1994-98 amounted to more than $140 billion and currently is running at more than $15 billion a year. Overall, some $350 billion in capital has fled the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, with nearly a third of it landing in the United States, intelligence sources told the U.S. News and World Report. And investigators believe that the flow of funds has accelerated since the crash of the ruble in August 1998. As Russian companies face bankruptcy, their motivation to preserve assets tends to vanish.

During an August 21 raid on the Bank of New York, U.S. federal investigators seized the files of Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a senior vice president who supervised the bank's East European division. She and the bank's vice president in London, Lucy Edwards, were suspended. Ms. Kagalovsky is the wife of Konstantin Kagalovsky, Russia's representative to the IMF in the early 1990s under Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar's government. After Gaidar was replaced, Kagalovsky moved to Russia's Bank Menatep, headed by Russian oil and banking baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Menatep snapped up a number of enterprises during Russia's controversial "loan to share" privatization, including a controlling stake in the country's second-largest oil company, Yukos. Menatep failed last year amid Russia's financial crisis (see box on page 16). Kagalovsky is now deputy chairman of Yukos.

[..]

Also under the scrutiny of U.S. federal and local investigators is Russian businessman Peter Berlin and his wife, Lucy Edwards. Berlin, British corporate records show, is listed as a director of Benex Worldwide Ltd., the company that kept several of the suspicious accounts at the New York Bank. Benex maintained close ties to Semion Mogilevich the alleged head of Solnetsevo, Russia's largest organized crime group. Mogilevich has built a $100 million empire from arms dealing, extortion, prostitution, and other rackets. Before submerging in recent years, he lived in Budapest, Hungary, but is thought to have moved to Moscow in recent weeks. Mogilevich allegedly is the principal target of a strike force assembled in early 1998 by the U.S. government. The force is comprised of the FBI, the Treasury Department, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Hungarian Interior Ministry.

A senior U.S. government official said there were "substantial links" between Benex and YBM Magnex International Inc., a Newtown, Pennsylvania, maker of industrial magnets. Mogilevich was a founding shareholder of the company. Founded in 1994 by a Russian emigre scientist, YBM Magnex, a magnet and bicycle manufacturer, rose from an obscure penny stock to a multinational worth nearly $1 billion in less than four years. Its numbers astonished competitors and delighted stockholders. Net sales quadrupled from 1994 to March 1998, net income jumped ninefold, earnings rose by a factor of five, and the future looked just as promising. Benex became a distributor of YBM Magnex's magnets. By March 1998 YBM was boasting of plans to become "the world's leading producer of high-energy permanent magnets."

But six months later, in June of last year, YBM Magnex pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and has since filed for bankruptcy-law protection. In December 1998 the company's new board, composed of outside investors, admitted to U.S. authorities that there was evidence of YBM's criminal wrongdoings, possibly involving links to organized crime. YBM had faked customer lists showing money laundering activity in accounts and business dealings in Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. (Money laundering means moving ill-gotten gains through a series of bank accounts to make them look like legitimate business proceeds).

Earlier this year, the FBI and other federal agents raided YBM's world headquarters in Newtown. The confiscated documents suggest that Russian mobsters may have used the company's Eastern European operations to launder millions in dirty money through a web of related enterprises.

[..]

Mogilevich disappeared from Budapest following a Hungarian-American coordinated raid. Officials confiscated documents and computers in his Budapest offices that well-informed sources link to the FBI's New York investigation. The Hungarian authorities declined to discuss the results of these raids. The Hungarian tax police have extended an ongoing inquiry into companies controlled by Mogilevich.

Investigators in New York estimate $6 billion zipped through the Benex accounts in the short time since authorities began monitoring the transactions last fall. They told the New York Times that the Berlins may be involved in one of the largest money-laundering operations ever conducted in the United States. Some $4.2 billion passed through a single account in more than 10,000 transactions between October and March, the New York Times reported. The cash in question appears to have passed through European and U.S. banks before landing in an offshore account in the Channel Islands that was controlled by a Russian commercial bank.

Some of the accounts Berlin established at the Bank of New York weren't regular deposit accounts but "micro/CA$H-REGISTER" accounts. These accounts are typically used by businesses for cash management purposes and are designed to make international fund transfers simpler. Account holders access their accounts and can conduct numerous transactions, including wire transfers and payment orders in foreign currencies, via a personal computer.

Computers do make fraud so much easier than ever before! And a major worry is that IMF funds were diverted by the Russian banking system into organized crime. At the Moscow Telegraph, they have the forward to the book Redwash An American Coverup looking into the Bank of New York scandal, ties to organized crime and the ease with which money flows through the banking system. Of note this is a post-9/11 book that also points out that the Bank of New York has not severed its ties with multiple banks in problematic areas of the world including, at the time the site was put up, Afghanistan. But that is jumping upscale of the problem when scoping out the fine detail still needs some work. So to get an idea of what sort of things would go through the accounts at Bank of New York, one need look no further than the chicken leg scandal.... chicken leg scandal? Yes, indeed, NYC had a chicken leg scandal that, unlike the duplicating $6M in the Yukos deal this would involve chicken legs. From the NYT article by Katherine E. Finklestein we get Same Chicken in Every Plot? on 18 JUL 2000:

Using forged documents and shipments of frozen chicken legs to Eastern Europe, a father and son from Westchester County with links to Russian organized crime stole more than $35 million from banks and financiers in Latvia and the United States, Manhattan prosecutors said yesterday.

The men, Nickolai and Serguei Kouznetsov, who already face a half- dozen civil lawsuits in Florida, Illinois and New York, and an accomplice were indicted yesterday on charges that they sold -- and resold -- the same chicken legs to multiple buyers.

According to court records, one Latvian bank lent them $3.5 million on the basis of forged documents stating that six million pounds of chicken were in a Florida warehouse, when they had already been sold abroad and shipped to Tallinn, Estonia.

The indictments mark the first stage of a continuing investigation into the scheme, which exploited a Russian love of dark-meat chicken, one of America's largest exports to that country, said Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney.

[..]

The authorities said the elaborate scheme began on Long Island, where the Kouznetsovs sold frozen chicken-leg quarters, along with whole chickens, beef liver, turkey thighs and hot dogs, to various chicken exporters. Among those exporters was one of the largest such American company, Trans Commodities Inc., based in New York City and run by Sam Kislin, who has been a contributor to Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and other New York politicians.

But according to the indictment, the Kouznetsovs did not stop at selling the chicken legs once. They obtained a loan from the Paritate Bank in Latvia by giving the bank false warehouse receipts showing that more than six million pounds of chicken were being held for the bank as collateral in a warehouse in Pensacola, Fla.

On the basis of the warehouse receipt, the Paritate Bank wired $3.5 million to the Kouznetsovs account at the Bank of New York in New York City. But the chicken had already been sold to another purchaser and was on a ship on its way to Estonia.

It was not clear yesterday whether investors had made any independent effort to verify whether the chicken actually existed. As John W. Moscow, deputy chief of the Manhattan district attorney's investigation division, said of the loan from Paritate, ''There are a lot of suckers at that bank.''

More than just suckers, apparently, as the chicken legs find a way to get sold a couple of times all the while remaining in the deep freeze. The same Bank of New York that had Lucy Edwards (aka. Lucy Berlin, born Ludmilla Pritzker) and the very same one where she met Natasha Kagalovsky who was her boss at BoNY, as seen in Chapter 2 of Nick Kochan's work, The Washing Machine. Natasha was married to Konstantin Kagalovsky, one of the financiers of Russia during its post-Soviet era, and Natasha nad Lucy would travel to Russia to show off the "micro/CA$H-REGISTER" system there. The wonderful thing about that system is once cash got into the BoNY system, it would be in a safe haven and easily shifted to any other part of the system, no matter where it was. So the Edwards and Kagalovsky formed up Benex in 1995 and got the Depositano Klearingovi Bank (DKB) into the system. Suddenly there was a quick and easy way to transfer funds from, say, San Francisco to Moscow via the "micro/CA$H-REGISTER" system. Semion Mogilevich, aka The Red Don or The Most Dangerous Mobster in the World, would utilize this for his YBM-Magnex company that served as a front company for financial manipulation of the Canadian markets. As banking consolidation in Russia moved forward, multiple other banks were pulled in by DKB and the transfer system would also reach out to other banks, like American Bank, which would have contacts with Inkombank which, itself, had offices in places like Cyprus. The ease with which money could move in this system quickly and become untraceable is looked at by Mr. Kochan in the following:

Step One: Inkombank made a bogus United States dollar "loan" to Company A, which was secretly controlled by bank principals.

Step Two: Company A in turn "lent" or "invested" the proceeds in Company B, also secretly controlled by bank principals.

Step Three: When the original loan from the bank to Company A fell due, Company A defaulted.

Step Four: Rather than take a bad debt charge on its books for the original loan to Company A, Inkombank assigned the defaulted loan to Company C, also controlled by bank principals, in exchange for promissory notes of Company C. In this way, the loan was carried forward on the bank's records; in effect, it was "extended" rather than defaulted on.

Step Five: Company A dissolved. Ultimately, Company C also dissolved, when its promissory notes fell due. Proceeds of the "loan" remained in Company B, or were transferred through additional shell companies controlled by the bank's principals.

Luckily that sort of thing could become highly automated, so that criminals could quickly and easily launder their funds. In the charges against BoNY, it is put forth that the system also allowed the bankers to skim money off of the financial transactions in secret via fabricated accounts, and move those funds out to other accounts. And here is how that sort of operation worked to remove the auditing trail or obfuscate it to the point of secrecy:

In much the same way as the bankers allegedly fabricated names and accounts to keep safe their own shares of the laundered money, so they allegedly fabricated paperwork and false auditing trails for their punters to explain unusual transfers and losses. The complaints later indicated how the alleged scheme worked. One alleged: "the conspirators established 'independent' offshore companies to which they caused their banks to make unsecured loans, never intending the loans to be repaid. The conspirators also caused offshore companies to engage in fictitious business transactions using bogus sales contracts, letters of confirmation for electronic funds transfers, and other documents . . . It was precisely these types of transactions, in high risk locations such as Russia and offshore havens that FinCEN (the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), the agency responsible for administering the Bank Secrecy Act, had specifically identified as being potential money laundering schemes."

That is what happens when bankers go bad. Now, as if that wasn't enough, Lucy Edwards would *also* be involved in human trafficking, and would inform authorities in 1999 that she had helped hundreds of Russians to get into the US illegally ( American Russian Law Institute cache of Reuters article 16 FEB 2000). Unlike Simon Reubens, however, the Berlins had need of multiple companies to handle different cash networks, thus the formation of Becs International LLC, Lowater and Torfinex Corp, beyond Benex. One can imagine the problems facing those trying to trace Trans Commodities through its web of 300 or so companies and into the distributed network of banks through to other parts of the paper-company venue and then out again.


This is getting to be a bit of a tangled web, to say the least! First starting with Arik Kislin, and his interesting donation pattern to Randy "Duke" Cunningham a month before he reisgned from the House, Charles Schumer, Berley Shelley, the DNC and Hillary Clinton. That leads to the rest of the Kislin family, and its donations and holding a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani, and then that donation pattern switching over to Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton. This appears to have been headed up by Sam Kislin, uncle of Arik, who has ties to the Chernoy brothers. Additionally, Arik worked in the same office as part of Blonde Management as Trans Commodities and that helps to tie him to the strange incident of trying to get a hitman into the US. Now the FBI clears Sam Kislin (the forged signature on the document to get him a visa is that of Sam Kislin) and it appears to be forged possibly by one of the Chernoy brothers, to whom Sam Kislin is close. Of course Sam Kislin also admits to the Chernoys being more than a bit on the corrupt side and perfectly able to forge his signature. Strange that no one ever asked Arik if *he* had signed the the visa application.

Tracing back Sam Kislin's ties to Trans Commodities and the Chernoys has him showing up when the Chernoys need cash to expand, and getting an infusion of cash after meeting up with Sam Kislin. At about the same time it is revealed by the Russians that a wad of money is missing out of their Central Bank, and they can't figure out who stole it. Be that as it may, Sam Kislin and the Chernoys get a bit of triangular trade on a coke deal in which they can start spiralling up production at the Krasnoyarsk plant in exchange for consumer goods from the Chernoy's factories. With a steady flow of western cash from Austria, Sam Kislin departs from the scene to head up getting offices established in NY for Trans Commodities.

Meanwhile the Chernoys meet up with the Reuben brothers, who then begin the large scale aluminum processing concept going. That combined business venture will put Trans Commodities right behind Alcoa and Alcan as the #3 supplier of aluminum on the planet. During this time Michael Chernoy gets involved in the Yukos expansion by getting $6M from New York to put into the deal in Bulgaria, only to see that money disappear and having to be re-imbursed by the Central Bank. And most folks suspect that, somehow, Michael Chernoy was able to spirit the money out of the commercial bank, and then bring suit to get it *again* from the Central Bank.

That money transfer happened just as Lucy Edwards was taking charge of the BoNY international group, and she and her husband Peter Berlin had set up a "micro/CA$H-REGISTER" arrangement with DKB in Russia via her boss' husband having connections with Boris Yeltsin. One of the first major organized crime figures to use that system was Semion Mogilevitch (The Brainy Don/Red Don/Most dangerous criminal on the planet) in his YBM Magnex and other companies attempting to control parts of the Canadian stock market. The Berlins would have a relatively small office that would process 8,000 financial transactions with Russia per year, which is about 1 every 5 minutes.

As part of that they would corrupt the bank manager, and set up disposable dummy accounts to skim money from transactions and to create an entirely false accounting setup, so as to clean the trail of the skiming *and* the auditing system. Starting at pleading guilty to $6.5M in fraudulent transactions, and Mogilovitch leaving $500M (estimates range up to $1B) in worthless securities behind as part of his entire Magnex scheme when he fled the country just ahead of the warrants for his arrest. The $35M Kouznetzov chicken leg scandal would also work through the BoNY system to a Latvian bank, all part of the problematical 'easy money transfer' concept that was going on at the time. And the ransom money for kidnapped Russian lawyer Eduard Olevinsky appears to have gone through the lovely BoNY money transfer system (Moscow News, 2005).

Semion Mogilovich is also associated with Vyacheslav Ivankov (the Godfather of the Russian Mafia in the US) who is associated with the Chernoys, Kislins and Blonde Management. Thus completing the circle of nefarious activity started out with Arik Kislin.


So back to start and to see where some of these players went after all of this!

The Berlins went to jail after pleading guilty to all sorts of bank fraud.

There, that is the *easy* set!

Vyacheslav Ivankov was sentenced to 60 years for extortion in a New York court, but the organization he was a part of was very extensive. To give just a taste of that, an excerpt from Donald N. Jensen's paper, The Boss: How Yury Luzhkov Runs Moscow, is most telling when talking about the major organized crime groups of Moscow:

The largest and most powerful criminal association originally based in a city neighbourhood is the Solntsevo gang. Founded about 1988, Russian organized crime experts believe the group bribed local police and ran racketeering operations before branching out into drug trafficking, money laundering and prostitution in Europe, the United States, and Israel. The group is believed to control an extensive array of legal business companies, including the firm Maxim, Arbat International, the Magnex company in Hungary, and Empire Bond in Israel, through which the organization allegedly launders money. The Solntsevo group has about 1,7000 members, and some group members, according to the FBI and other law enforcement authorities, specialize in assassination. A Russian crime expert has claimed that Solntsevo today unites more than 300 crime groups and is active in the Russian regions, Europe, and North America. There is reportedly no formal hierarchy within Solntsevo, though key figures are personally powerful and have roles as mediators, arbitrators and ambassadors.

Despite this organizational fluidity, many law enforcement officials believe that Moscow businessmen Sergey Mikhaylov (Mikhas) and Viktor Averin are the overall Solntsevo bosses. Mikhaylov is suspected of links to the Russian mobster Vyacheslav Ivankov, nicknamed Yaponchik, who in 1997 was sentenced to 60 years in jail for extortion by a New York court. Mikhaylov has denied he has anything to do with the Solntsevo gang. He has been convicted of violating the law only once, in December 1994, on a relatively minor charge, though in 1989 he spent 18 months in a Moscow detention centre charged with racketeering. On the eve of that trial, however, key witnesses changed their testimony and Mikhaylov was released. Despite Interpol and FBI support for Swiss law enforcement authorities, in December 1998 Mikhas was acquitted of charges that he belonged to a criminal organization.

One does get the feeling of an on-going concern here. As seen previously the Magnex company is associated with Semion Mogilevitch, as a semi-separate concern under the umbrella group. That said by 2000 CBS reported that Ivankov was only serving 9.5 years for extortion ( Russian Mafia's World Grip, 21 JUL 2000 by Bill Plante). In 2004 Vyacheslav Ivankov would be estradited to Russia for the 1992 murders of two Turks in a Moscow restaurant, after being charged in absentia (13 JUL 2004, Pravda), after skipping out on probation in Russia. Strange how 60 years moves to 9.5 years and then, as cited in the Pravda article, down to a bit over 7 years with 'good behavior' and bad behavior only getting a few months put back on. That's right, in 2004 or so, Ivankov was going to walk out a free man in the US and only getting sent to Russia stopped that. Just to get a feel for how Ivankov got to that point, here is how it looks from the Pravda side of things:

In 1981 Yaponchik was jailed again for 14 years, but was released in 1991. After that he spent less than a year in Russia and left to the US with a filming crew of the famous Russian director Rolan Bykov. To legalize his stay in the States, Ivankov married an American woman. As soon as Yaponchik appeared in New York, the number of assassinations of Soviet immigrants abruptly increased in Brooklyn. As a rule, they were the people standing in Ivankov's way.

FBI was watching Yaponchik from the very start, but federal agents did not manage to arrest the Russian mob until 1995. Ivankov's friends came to ask his help in a financial matter. They said two entrepreneurs, closely linked with Chara Bank, received a large sum of money from him and then disappeared in the US. Yaponchik asked the businessmen to return the money. Vyacheslav Ivankov was arrested on the allegation of extortion. In 1997 an American court sentenced the Russian crime boss to 9 years and seven months in jail.

Go to America, extort funds and leave a trail of bodies behind you and you get: time off for good behavior! Mind you in 2005 Ivankov would be set free as a jury would not convict him there (Kommersant, 19 JUL 2005) due to things like the statute of limitations running out, inability to find some witnesses and an eyewitness being unable to identify him. Basically an incompetent prosecutor... not that we haven't heard that before. What is he up to these days? No idea, but he has to be getting pretty close to 70.

Sermion Mogilevich, has had an interesting career, what with heading out of the US just before a couple of FBI Warrants could be served to him for the securities fraud surrounding YBM Magnex and some other companies in the US. In a Moscow News article from 2003, Russian Scam without Borders, we get the lowdown on how the Magnex deal worked:

The hand of the U.S. law rarely reaches as far as Yekaterinburg or Vladivostok or Tyumen or Odessa or Gomel or Chisinau. But those of our former compatriots who begin playing games with the U.S. penal code on U.S. territory sooner or later end up in the dock.

A report from Pennsylvania says that FBI agents arrested Yakov Bogatin, 56, former president of YBM Magnex International Corp., a naturalized U.S. citizen of Soviet origin. According to Philadelphia Daily News, Bogatin was charged with securities fraud. The fraud involved persons known for their connections with Russian organized crime. Bogatin was set free on a $1 million bail and is now under house arrest and electronic surveillance.

In another report, the paper provides a more detailed account of the machinations and identities of Russian organized crime figures. The Pennsylvania-based YBM Magnex International Corp., manufacturing industrial magnets, was founded by the ill-famed Semyon Mogilevich, a former Kiev resident whom British law enforcers described in the second half of the 1990s as one of the world's most dangerous criminals: According to Western reports, he made a fortune from drug trafficking, arms smuggling, prostitution, and extortion rackets. By using double-entry bookkeeping, bribes, blackmail, and suchlike methods, Mogilevich and his sidekicks - Yakov Bogatin, Igor Fisherman, and Anatoly Tsura - showed investors non-existent super-profits, within a short time span inflating company stock prices from 10 cents to $20 apiece. The bubble burst in 1998; the company was slapped with stiff fines, and the share trading operation stopped.

Defrauded investors sank $400 million in YBM, of which, according to the indictment, Mogilevich pocketed more than $18 million; Bogatin, more than $10 million; Fisherman, $3 million; and Tsura, over $1 million.

Of the four suspects only Bogatin has been arrested. Mogilevich, Fisherman (51, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Ukraine), and Tsura (54, a Russian national) are on the run someplace in Russia. Recently Jeffrey Lampinski, head of the FBI Philadelphia division, enlisted the support of Russian and Ukrainian authorities in tracking them down.

Yes the group of them did their best during the 'internet bubble' to push a company that made permanent magnets, and artificially inflated its value. They did, indeed, take the money and run, save for Bogatin who was stuck in the US. Ahhhh... the 1990's and the Clintons and the 'internet bubble' and being able to get cash for any harebrained idea! The US Senate has a very brief rundown in this testimony by Stewart Ash, Associate Deputy AG on 14 FEB 2006, on page 8.

An interesting place that Mogilevich popped up was in a briefing on a presentation to Congress from Professor Stephen Blank of the US Army War College on Radical Islamic Challenges in Central Asia (OCT 2003 via GlobalSecurity.org):

In Russia's recent gas deal with Turkmenistan the firm chosen to move gas from Turkmenistan to Russia and Ukraine is Trans-Ural, a firm chartered in a Hungarian village named Csadba and headed by one of the most notorious crime lords in Russian organized crime, Semyon Mogilevich. Mogilevich's firm stands to make from $320 million to $1 billion on this deal. Thus this raises the most disturbing implications. First it attests to the commingling of government, major energy corporations, and criminal enterprises in Russia and to the mutual enrichment of each of these actors at the expense of the citizens of the CIS, not just Russia. As these firms are already contributing significant sums to President Putin's reelection it is impossible to pretend that he and his colleagues are unaware of Trans-Ural's background. And given the long-standing ties between Gazprom and Russia's special services, the widely reported collaboration of these institutions with organized crime and Russian energy and other firms that has been widely reported throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and the involvement of those services in the earlier attempted coup in Turkmenistan in 2002, not to mention earlier ones in Georgia and Azerbaidzhan, the implications of this deal become much more stark for all concerned.

Mogilevich made his early entry into organized crime via arms sales to Iran as seen in the Robert Friedman article in the Village Voice, 20-26 MAY 1998. Really, in an article this lengthy I can't do justice to his criminal career, which spans from the Golden Triangle to Iran to San Francisco: a true transnationalist organized crime figure if ever there was one and encompasses arms dealing, narcotics trafficking, prostitution... a long, long list to say the least. One of his cronies shows up in Ukrainian deal where the Russian petro giant Gazprom was looking to buy out RusUkrEnegro, in which Firtash owned 45% of RUE by owning a major part of it called Centrogas from Austria. That connection came forward in a Moscow News item of 16 APR 2006, The Orange Boomerang:

An experienced politician, Yulia Tymoshenko managed not only to make the "presidential steps" but also ensured that the Ukrainian people remember to whom they owe the real improvement in their living standards. Experts believe that this is the main factor in Yushchenko's declining ratings amid the growing popularity of the "iron lady."

It is true that the Ukrainians' attitude toward their president has also been affected by the latest round of rumors and speculation that the opposition timed for the upcoming parliamentary election: e.g., when he became president, Yushchenko worked hard to hush up the investigation of his purported poisoning; that Boris Berezovsky funded his election campaign in 2004, also writing a version of his inauguration address; and that Yushchenko's mother-in-law traveled from Philadelphia to Kiev for the inauguration ceremony on a charter flight paid for by businessman Dmitry Firtash, the right-hand man of Semen Mogilevich who is on the FBI's wanted list, but recently took part in discussing the Russian-Ukrainian gas agreement in Moscow.

In short, the Orange boomerang that Yushchenko threw at corrupt officials in the form of his "All Felons Will Be Jailed!" calls never hit anyone. As it turns out, only Yushchenko was hit.

Interesting that such a close connection to Mogilevich is made especially to post-Orange Ukraine. Apparently getting rid of the crooks is a bit harder to do than just getting a popular government in power. A part of this deal is also Eural Trans Gas, and the US DoJ started to look into the dealings of ETG and the entire Gazprom situation (26 APR 2006, St. Petersburg Times), and found that Raiffeisen Bank of Austria held 50% of RUE. From the previous Moscow News article that was reported at $53B from Petrohaz, a company in the United Arab Emirates which was owned Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's older brother Petro Yushchenko. RUE was set up to replace ETG and subsume its structure, and that original structure (from the St. Petersburg Times article) was started by Zeev Gordon, an Israeli lawyer, who's claim to fame was representing Semion Mogilevich for 20 years before founding ETG in Hungary. Dmitry Firtash was also involved in that, so that his Cypress based Highrock Holdings could control ETG.

Firtash has a regular conglomerate empire under him, including: Nitrofert, an Estonian fertilizer factory and a Crimean Soda Plant, both owned through ACI Trading from Cypress; co-owner of one of the largest real estate companies in Kiev, JV Mandarin Plaza for $500-560M, Heritage Properties International AB (source: Developer Project, Ukraine website); Parus Office project for approximately $300M and the Obolon housing development project for $200M, and has become the owner of the Hungarian natural gas trading company, Emfesz, for $779M (source: Serkalo Nedeli article 06-12 OCT 2007 by Alla Yeremenko) along with cable television channels in Ukraine K2, K2 and Megasport as well as the Kyiv basketball team. He is selling off the television channels, however, so as to properly consolidate his other real estate and industrial holdings (Kommersant, 27 JUN 2007).

That is what happens when you are the right-hand man of one of the most capable underworld figures around! Mogilevich is trained in economics and has been utilizing that to his advantage for decades, and it is paying off with the RUE deal, and other subsidiary companies and organizations. By putting Firtash in control of those, and looking to handle some of the Far East oil and gas trade, Gazprom becomes an effective subsidiary company between them, and RUE becomes a government/criminal investment opportunity to exploit that. So far we have crossed the paths of two extremely competent and effective individuals in this entire affair: Semion Mogilevich and Simon Reubens, each of them highly competent in areas of money laundering of criminal enterprises.

On 17 MAY 2007, Forbes' reporter Liz Moyer reported that the connection between Mogilevich and BoNY were about to come back and haunt BoNY:

In a move worthy of the Dr. Evil character from Mike Myers' Austin Powers movies, an official at Russia's Customs Service has decided to sue Bank of New York for an astronomical figure--a cool $22.5 bil-lee-on dollars.

It is the latest chapter in a decade-long intrigue involving an international money laundering ring allegedly connected to the Russian mob and reputed gangster boss Semion Yukovich Mogilevich.

The suit, confirmed to wire services by a spokeswoman for the Russian Customs Service, has yet to be received by Bank of New York , according to the company. In a statement, the bank said "any such suit would be totally without merit, if not frivolous, and we would expect to defend it vigorously."

The proposed damages represent nearly three-quarters of Bank of New York's $31 billion market capitalization.

Well, they did become 'well capitalized' by processing so much in the way of Russian money during the 1990's and having it reside in their system. This may also come back to haund Republic New York bank which was picked up by HSBC Holdings which, itself, was part of the money laundering operation run by Berlin/Edwards. Which is, as they say, how the cookie crumbles.

But this entire thing was not brought to my attention by any of this, believe it or not!

No, I first got interested by the mention of Kislin in the Center for Public Integrity article and then the thing that got me really interested in this is the blog by Margie Burns and her view of what was happening between Mogilevich and the individual that I have done a lot of looking at: Monzer al-Kassar. Her two reports of 08 AUG 2007 and 09 AUG 2007, got me started on the inverse approach of the low-level operatives (the Kislins) and how their connectivity spread. Most compelling is her reporting in the second article of Semion Mogilevich having a transport locus in Marbella, Spain the exact same town that Monzer al-Kassar lives in and the one, extremely compelling connection she cites:

By coincidence, a little less than two weeks before September 11, 2001, a plane crashed at Spain's Malaga airport carrying a passenger from Morocco on his way to meet with both Mr. Al Kassar and Mr. Mogilevich. According to the London Sunday Express, the passenger was believed by Israeli intelligence to be a "bag man" for Osama bin Laden. He was being monitored by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad but was released after being treated for minor injuries at a nearby hospital, in the confusion after the plane crash.

[..]

In the years lapsed since 2001, Mr. Mogilevich himself seems to have turned up in northern Virginia - safe haven for U.S. government contractors, the military-security-surveillance complex, gun sellers, and the lawyers and lobbyists who protect them.

A little background: Mogilevich's name has several variant spellings, and Mr. Mogilevich has gone by numerous aliases, listed by the FBI as Seva Moguilevich, Semon Yudkovich Palagnyuk, Semen Yukovich Telesh, Simeon Mogilevitch, Semjon Mogilevcs, Shimon Makelwitsh, Shimon Makhelwitsch, "Seva."

I discovered in 2006 that companies linked to Mogilevich had set up shop in Virginia.

I published my discovery of these entities, registered in the Virginia database, in Online Journal on March 24, 2006 ("Semion Mogilevich, wanted by FBI, in northern Virginia?").

I also published articles about the apparent Mogilevich-Commonwealth of Virginia connection on March 23, 2006 and April 20, 2006 on this blog site ("Semion Mogilevich in Virginia?" and "Virginia is for Mogilevich"), and around the same time in the small community weekly that I was writing for at the time, the Prince George's Sentinel.

This goes beyond the two definite pathways that I have been able to uncover between OBL and Kassar (the UK firm that he put under after dealing with OBL and tainting the company with that, and the head of Iranian Intelligence that, apparently, has decent ties with OBL and Zawahiri). This is supported by Jason Freier's article from SEP 2005 on Arms and the Terrorist from The Journal of International Security Affairs which starts out talking about Victor Bout:

Victor Bout is a key player in this game. A former Soviet KGB officer of Tadjik origin, Bout-like many of his former Soviet military colleagues-was forced out of the military when his air force regiment was disbanded at the end of Cold War. But Bout had the experience required to connect the demand for weapons with the abundant supply that dotted the landscapes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Bout created his first airline, Air Cess, just as the Soviet Air Force was reducing its forces. Drawing from old Soviet cargo planes, he managed to create what experts describe as "one of the world's largest private fleets of aircraft."7 Bout used these aging but still operable aircraft to ferry various and sundry military supplies to conflict zones worldwide. And Air Cess proved to be just the beginning; as of 2001, the U.S. government has been able to identify at least five airlines owned by Bout, and approximately 300 people directly employed by him.8

Today, Bout specializes in busting sanctions, and he does it well. He has flown weapons to the Philippines in support of Abu Sayyaf, and is known to have provided the Libyan government with weapons.9 Likewise, Bout has facilitated the shipment of small arms to various rebel movements in countries such as Liberia, Angola, and the Congo. Bout's chief motive is financial profit, and he sees no problem with supporting a number of warring factions against one another.

Bout, moreover, is not alone. In Europe, a Ukrainian named Semion Mogilevich smuggles weapons from Russia through an elaborate network that ends in Spain.10 Routinely, they travel by air or land through Ukraine to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. They traverse the Mediterranean Sea by boat through Gibraltar for a brief stop in Spanish Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, and then double back across to the Spanish resort of Marbella.11

These operations are just a small sampling of the numerous weapons trafficking networks that exist throughout the world, but they provide an illustration of the complexity of the phenomenon-and its worldwide reach.

[..]

During the 1990s, Bout became a key player in the long and bloody Liberian civil war, and in Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's active support of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. Earning a reputation as "someone who could fly virtually anything anywhere in Africa," Bout was the natural choice to provide Charles Taylor with the weapons he needed to fight for control over Liberia and support the RUF as it pillaged neighboring Sierra Leone.13 These operations, however, also connected Bout's organization to an industry deeply infiltrated by Islamic radicals, ranging from Hezbollah to al-Qaeda. Combined with his alleged support of the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, his provision of the surface-to-air missiles fired at an Israeli airliner in Mombassa in 2002,14 and his documented support of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Liberian connections display a tangled relationship between Bout's weapons trafficking networks and terrorist organizations. Bout-and others like him-either provide the actual weapons that terrorists use to conduct their training and operations, or indirectly supply the arms and logistical backbone used by those who support terrorists with havens from which to conduct attacks.

Mogilevich's activities tell a similar story. Just before the attacks of 2001, the Ukrainian mobster emerged at the center of a European investigation into the arrest of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Paris. When apprehended in August 2001, the group had in its possession a suitcase containing uranium-235.15 Subsequent investigations into the incident have determined that the group attained the uranium via Mogilevich's Ukraine-Marbella route-a transit corridor that, prior to September 11th, had been a favorite among transnational criminals and terrorists entering Europe from the Maghreb.16

This puts together the entirety of the WMD capability now available via the arms trafficking and organized crime operations. The various factories owned by individuals like Firtash, the Chernoys and Kislins, along with Mogilevich's extensive contacts all the way to radioactive materials, plus the ability of Monzer al-Kassar to add in-roads to corrupt South American arms and munitions manufaturers points to a nasty coalition able to deliver nearly anything to anyone who has the cash. By being able to utilize Syrian weapons expertise and development for chem/bio weapons and long range missile technology from al-Kassar and the rest of the bulk supply capability for industrial stand-up from Russian and Eastern European Mafias, the exchange capability to allow distributed production of WMDs of the chem/bio/radiological sort is at hand. Syria obviously gets support on raw materials via this system, and in exchanging its own processed raw materials (yellowcake and phosphorus) for better technology and other raw materials utilized in furthering the nuclear capacity beyond yellowcake. Iran is a direct recipient of that, and can utilize Syria as a front to Western underworld or go by its ties to al-Kassar as seen in the 1992 and 1994 bombings in Argentina.

Needless to say, this was *not* what I expected when I first started looking at source documents a couple of weeks ago! I was looking for another Hsu-type network and, instead, run across what appears to be 20% or so of the Russian Mafia networking. No such luck!

Now a final bit on where all this started: Arik Kislin.

After Blonde Management he became involved with MC Holdings and an owner of Ronnybrook Farms, and rented that out to a friend. He would later be implicated in trying to defraud a group of investors in the Falchi Building on Long Island (if I am reading my legal documents correctly, always a hazardous thing!) so as to have the group take the loss for it while he would then pick it up at half-price once the foreclosure had gone through. He has also been involved with a recission happening with Edulink, Inc. and having his company,Mega Media Holdings LLC, shift from Edulink support.

One of the final oddities is Arik Kislin's ownership of Air Rutter which saw one of its jets crash earlier this year in Mexico (source: NY Post, 01 OCT 2007), and the plane had recently been sold by Hotel Gansevoort, is where Arik Kislin is currently associated, to someone a bit less capable in piloting. The plane itself appears to have been on an illegal flight and had 3.2 metric tons of cocaine on-board (airliners.net has pictures). Apparently the jet in question had flown to Guantanamo Bay as part of its past service record with Oxford, CT being its round-trip destination, which tends to get the conspiracy theorists going. And the man who bought the plane from Kislin/Gansevoort? Alex Rodgriquez! Great on how its first charter it gets crashed...

And that is a great cue for the NY Post and its quickie article on 15 APR 2007, on the Shady 'Inn' Crowd:

YOU never know who owns what these days. Case in point: the Hotel Gansevoort. Arik Kislin, one of seven principals in the trendy, 187-room Meatpacking District inn, once ran a firm with ties to a suspected Moscow hit man, The Post's Dan Mangan reports. In the early 1990s, a Manhattan company called Blonde Management, of which Kislin was chairman, co-sponsored a U.S. visa sought by a Russian named Anton Malevskiy. The FBI believed Malevskiy to be a professional assassin and head of one of Moscow's leading criminal gangs, according to a 1999 article by the Center for Public Integrity, which cited an FBI report. Gansevoort flack Nancy Friedman at first denied Kislin had an ownership role in the hotel or that his name was on its liquor license, despite being told of a state agency document that shows otherwise. When we pressed for an explanation about Kislin's relationship to the hotel, Friedman said she would check with the Gansevoort's owners. But in a subsequent conversation, she suddenly clammed up, telling us, "I don't think there's going to be any response."

The places you will stay and the people who work for them! The Hotel Gansevoort apparently liked the other work that Arik Kislin had been involved in:

Arik Kislin is a principal in the projects of Gansevoort Hotel Group, LLC. His primary responsibilities are deal selection and acquiring capital for future/current projects. Arik has a broad background. He has been involved in real estate for over 13 years. His real estate investments prior to joining GHG include properties in Sheepshead Bay (land meant for residential development); Bridgeport, Connecticut (Commercial office building rented to the State of Connecticut); and a piece of land on the border of Queens and Nassau (residential development is underway on the site), across from J.F.K. Airport.

Most significantly, in 1992 Arik arranged the equity for the purchase of a portfolio including Manhattan and Queens properties. This purchase included the Chelsea Markets complex, which was part of a 3.6 million square foot industrial/commercial/retail package. Arik Kislin was the managing member of the group. Arik was responsible for negotiating the various stages of the project financing and purchase as well as creating the strategy for the leasing and redevelopment program.

And that brings up Sam Kislin's son, David Kislin! Isn't this wonderful? David Kislin has been an investor/developer in the High Line 519 towers (source: NY Observer), which will abut the old elevated railway in New York. This is one of those urban renewal/gentrification projects started to give a 'better quality of life' and 'unique living experience' for those that can afford such. David Kislin and Leo Tsimmer invested $28.25 fro Canyon Capital Realty Advisors (source: Highbeam article cache). David Kislin has been interested in this development area since at least 2003, when he bought property there to refurbish and resell (source: NYT ):

Mr. Jefferson bought the apartment from a pair of real estate investors who had paid $1.5 million for it in November 2003, with a plan to fix it up and resell it. One of the investors, Daren Herzberg, said that he and his partner, David Kislin, had spent $600,000 on the renovation.

''It was a total wreck,'' Mr. Herzberg said, referring to the condition of the apartment when he bought it a little more than a year ago. The apartment was unfinished, with no kitchen or bathroom. He said that the building, which was being converted from a warehouse, had not yet received a permanent certificate of occupancy, which made it difficult to get financing.

Mr. Herzberg, a sales agent with the Corcoran Group, and Mr. Kislin, the son of Semyon Kislin, a prominent Russian-émigré businessman, bought the apartment from the development company that was converting the building into condos. The development team included Samuel D. Waksal, the former chief executive of ImClone Systems, who is now serving a seven-year sentence in federal prison for securities fraud and other crimes.

Mr. Herzberg and Mr. Kislin hired Suk Design Group to create an apartment with four bedrooms, three-and-a-half bathrooms, a fireplace and hardwood floors. The ceilings, which have exposed beams, are 10 feet high, a plus for Mr. Jefferson, who is 6-foot-7.

Other condo owners in the building include the rap music impresario Sean Combs and Christopher D. Heinz, a son of Theresa Heinz, the wife of Senator John Kerry.

Purely pocket change to this crowd, that $600,000 investment, but you get to rub shoulders with the Heinz clan! But even more interesting is how the finances for Bogatin's properties got through the Chelsea area:

Bogatin is no stranger to the mob, however. His brother, David, a top Russian crime figure who once served in North Vietnam for the Soviets in an anti-aircraft unit, is now serving an eight-year term in a New York State prison for a multimillion-dollar gasoline tax fraud scheme. Just prior to trial, he had jumped bail, fleeing to Poland. There he set up the first commercial banks, which moved vast sums of money controlled by Russian wiseguys. (This after handing over his mortgages for five pricey Trump Tower apartments to a Genovese associate. The mortgages were liquidated and the funds were moved through a mafia-controlled bank in Chelsea.) Eventually he was caught and returned to the U.S. In the meantime, he lived like royalty in a five-star Viennese hotel, surrounded by a praetorian guard of 125 Polish parachutists, some of them bedecked in shiny gold uniforms.

Yes the Chelsea branch of the Bank of New York. So handy to have your own ability to use a bank like a global ATM! And Chelsea wasn't first looked at for furthering a criminal enterprise by the Russians. No the first group to look at it in that light is a bit further back than that:

BCCI's initial attempt to obtain a bank in the United States was notably unsuccessful. Initially, BCCI decided it would begin with a small acquisition, that of the Chelsea Bank, a national bank with a state-chartered holding company in New York. In order to keep the transaction low-key, BCCI decided to proceed through a nominee, a member of the Gokal family, whose shipping empire could be characterized as much BCCI affiliate as BCCI customer. Unfortunately, the nominee chosen had few resources of his own, and was a transparent alter ego for BCCI, prompting the very regulatory scrutiny in New York that BCCI had sought to avoid. As recounted by former Comptroller of the Currency John Heimann:

My first supervisory contact with BCCI occurred when I was New York Banking Superintendent. New York law requires the Superintended to approve the change of control of a New York chartered bank. . . A young Pakistani national was the proposed purchaser. His uncertified financial statement showed total assets of $4.5 million, of which $3 million was in the form of a loan from his sister. His reported annual income for the prior year was, as I recall, approximately $34,000.

Since he was not an experienced banker . . . and since BCCI was his primary banking relationship, he indicated that he would be relying upon that institution for advice and counsel.

BCCI had an interest in the Chelsea area long before the Russians and that comes from the BCCI 1992 Report, Chapter. 6 (via GlobalSecurity document cache) which is, apparently, just one of those coincidences of life. BCCI wouldn't make it through Chelsea or another bank in NY, but they would wait for Carter to get into office and then go through Bert Lance.

For a bit of fun and frivolity one can, indeed, hook up hte Chelsea development at the pier with Norman Hsu! Yes, on the "Speak Truth To Power" night of 06 OCT 2006, Norman Hsu was a co-chair of the event!

And that should do it.

No great wrap-ups, but just looking at how folks are connected, more done for my information than for your enjoyment.

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