FTR#485—Interview with Robert Parry and Lucy Komisar—(Two 30-minute segments) (Sources are presented in this description.) (Recorded on 11/14/2004.)

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Summary of FTR#485—(Note: The massive volume of “For The Record” programs about 9/11 and related topics is summarized and analyzed in the periodically-updated description for FTR#391. FTR#’s 454, 455, 456 are compilations of much of the key documentation culled from Mr. Emory’s investigation into 9/11. Along with FTR#391, they should give listeners/readers a substantive grasp of this momentous event. It is recommended that listeners use this description and e-mail it to others. Also: The book “Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile” is available at About Paul Manning. In addition, the professional history of the late Paul Manning, the book’s author, is presented in the description About Paul Manning. This enables listeners to acquaint others with Mr. Manning’s journalistic credentials. Key material from the book is synopsized in an extended description for FTR#305. Understanding the Bormann organization is essential to comprehending the concept of “the Underground Reich.” Note also that U.S. Government documents proving Prescott Bush Sr.’s Money-Laundering on behalf of the Third Reich before and after World War II are available at a linked website, along with commentary by John Buchanan, who located the documentation. This material is discussed in FTR#435. The website containing the documents is www.debatecomics.org/BushFamilyFortune/ .) This broadcast covers a range of topics. Featuring the work of premier journalists Robert Parry and Lucy Komisar, the program begins with Robert’s discussion of the gross irregularities in the 2004 election process. A sharp discrepancy between the exit polls (generally viewed as very reliable) and the ultimate election results is among the indicators that the 2004 election was tampered with in a serious way. Robert’s Consortium News (www.consortiumnews.com) was one of the few media outlets to report and analyze the disparities in the voting statistics. For doing so, they were branded as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists” by the Washington Post. Robert points how characteristic this is of the so-called “liberal news media.” Far from being liberal, they are in fact very conservative—often dishonestly so. After highlighting the Republicans’ development of a well-financed media/think tank nexus following the humiliating defeat of Watergate. This application of what the CIA calls “perception management” is essential to the success of the GOP and the Bush administration. Next, the show turns to the subject of the Iran-Contra scandal. Robert and his colleague Brian Barger first reported the existence of Oliver North’s back-channel support network for the Contras, and freshman Senator John Kerry led the congressional investigation of its operations. In particular, Kerry basically “cracked” the Contra-cocaine connection and endured the open ridicule of the media establishment for doing so. Lucy Komisar joined the program at this point and detailed the operations of the BCCI, highlighting the bank’s profound involvement in the intelligence and financial scandals of the ‘80’s. Of particular significance is the bank’s links with the Afghan mujahadeen and people and institutions linked to Osama bin Laden. And the milieu of the BCCI is the milieu of the Bush family. Lucy highlights John Kerry’s central role in pursuing the BCCI affair. As was the case with the Iran-Contra scandal, Kerry led the way. After Lucy reviews the fundamentals of the October Surprise story, she discusses the Clearstream network and its apparent involvement in that case. The program concludes with Lucy and Robert pointing out how the same cast of characters figures in the interrelated intelligence-related scandals running through the last two decades.

Program Highlights Include: An apparent PLO connection to the October Surprise; the role of Khalid bin Mahfouz in the BCCI scandal; Bin Mahfouz’s links to Islamic charities that have funded Al Qaeda; Lucy’s synopsis of the role of offshore banking havens in world affairs; the media establishment’s trashing of Gary Webb for his story about the Contra/Cocaine traffic; the active obstruction and media criticism Kerry received for his investigation of BCCI; current FBI chief Robert Mueller’s cover-up of U.S. governmental complicity in the BCCI case.

1.          The program begins with discussion of The Washington Post’s unfair (and frankly ludicrous) characterization of Robert Parry’s Consortium News (www.consortiumnews.com) as “Spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists” for their circumspect, judicious examination of the anomalies in the vote count in the 2004 election. Specifically, Robert noted the discrepancy in the exit polls (which showed Kerry winning) and the ultimate results of the election. Robert encapsulates the information presented in the stories presented below. Of particular note is the fact that Republican Dick Morris observed that it was extraordinary to blow even one exit poll, let alone polls in all six swing states. (Morris then proceeded to spin a conspiracy theory that maintained that Kerry supporters were more “chatty” than Bush supporters.) Consortium’s work on the election was covered in these stories:

2.          http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/112304.html

The Washington Post and other leading American newspapers are up in arms about the legitimacy of a presidential election where exit polls showed the challenger winning but where the incumbent party came out on top, amid complaints about heavy-handed election-day tactics and possibly rigged vote tallies.

In a lead editorial, the Post cited the divergent exit polls, along with voter claims about ballot irregularities, as prime reasons for overturning the official results. For its part, the New York Times cited reports of “suspiciously, even fantastically, high turnouts in regions that supported” the government candidate. The U.S. news media is making clear that the truth about these electoral anomalies must be told.

Of course, the election in question occurred in the Ukraine.

In the United States – where exit polls showed John Kerry winning on Nov. 2, where Republican tactics discouraged African-American voting in Democratic precincts, and where George W. Bush’s vote totals in many counties were eyebrow-raising – the Post, the Times and other top news outlets mocked anyone who questioned the results.

For instance, when we noted Bush’s surprising performance in Dade, Broward and other Florida counties, a Washington Post article termed us “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Washington Post’s Sloppy Analysis.”] Meanwhile, the New York Times accepted unsupported explanations for why the U.S. exit polls were so wrong, including the theory that Kerry supporters were chattier than Bush voters. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Evidence of a Second Bush Coup?”]

Hypocrisy? What Hypocrisy?

But why the double standard? Why would Ukrainian exit polls be deemed reliable evidence of fraud while American exit polls would simply be inexplicably wrong nationwide and in six battleground states where Kerry was shown to be leading but Bush ultimately won?

Logically, it would seem that U.S. exit polls would be more reliable because of the far greater experience in refining sampling techniques than in the Ukraine. Also, given the Ukraine’s authoritarian past, one might expect that Ukrainian voters would be more likely to rebuff pollsters or give false answers than American voters.

Instead, the U.S. news media chucked out or “corrected” the U.S. exit polls – CNN made them conform to the official results – while embracing the Ukrainian exit polls as a true measure of the popular will.

To compound the irony, the Washington Post editorial is now calling on George W. Bush to defend democratic principles halfway around the world. In the Nov. 23 editorial entitled “Coup in Kiev,” the Post wrote, “For the Bush administration, the responsibility starts with stating the unvarnished truth about what has happened in an election” – the one in the Ukraine, of course.

Election 2000

“Unvarnished truth” was far less important to the Post, the Times and other U.S. news organizations when they were reporting on the results of Election 2000.

Then, the cherished value was “unity,” as Americans were urged to ignore the fact that Al Gore got more votes and instead rally behind George W. Bush, even though he had dispatched thugs to Florida to disrupt recounts and then enlisted his political allies on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the counting of votes. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

In the months that followed Election 2000, the U.S. news media even put the cause of Bush’s legitimacy ahead of its duty to accurately inform the public. In November 2001, after conducting an unofficial recount of Florida’s ballots, the news outlets discovered that if all legally cast votes had been counted – regardless of the standard used for evaluating chads – Gore won.

That finding meant that Gore was the rightful occupant of the White House and that Bush was a fraudulent president. But in those days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the news organizations again opted for “unity” over “unvarnished truth,” fudging their own results and burying the lead of Gore’s electoral victory.

To falsely tout Bush’s “victory,” the Post, the Times, CNN and other news outlets arbitrarily – and erroneously – ditched so-called “overvotes,” in which voters both checked and wrote in a candidate’s name. Not only were these votes legal under Florida law but they apparently would have been included in the statewide recount if the five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened at Bush’s behest. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “So Bush Did Steal the White House.”]

Weak Democrats

In another case of painful irony, the U.S. Democratic Party is expressing more outrage about electoral fairness in the Ukraine than in the United States. The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, which is sponsored by the Democratic Party, put out a statement declaring that “fundamental flaws in Ukraine’s presidential election process subverted its legitimacy.” [NYT, Nov. 23, 2004]

However, at home, the Democrats have accepted the Nov. 2 outcome passively, despite widespread fury within the Democratic base about what many see as the Bush campaign’s abusive practices. Again, “unity” has trumped “unvarnished truth.”

It has fallen to several third-party candidates to seek limited recounts in several states, including Ohio and New Hampshire, a move at least designed to give assurance to millions of Americans that the Bush campaign didn’t get away with stealing a second election. Meanwhile, the national Democratic Party has chosen to sit on the sidelines, presumably to avoid accusations of irresponsibility from the Washington Post and other parts of the big U.S. news media.

So, as the Ukrainian people take to the streets to defend the principles of democracy, including the concept that a just government derives from the consent of the governed, the United States – once democracy’s beacon to the world – presents its commitment to those ideals more through hypocrisy abroad than action at home.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/111204.html

The Washington Post and the big media have spoken: Questions about Nov. 2 voting irregularities and George W. Bush’s unusual vote tallies are just the ravings of Internet conspiracy theorists.

In a Nov. 11 story on A2, the Post gave the back of its hand to our story about Bush’s statistically improbable vote totals in Florida and elsewhere. While agreeing with our analysis that Bush pulled off the difficult task of winning more votes in Florida than the number of registered Republicans, the Post accuses us of overlooking the obvious explanation that many independents, “Dixiecrats” and other Democrats voted for Bush.

Mocking us as “spreadsheet-wielding conspiracy theorists,” Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating signaled their determination to put questions about Bush’s victory outside the bounds of responsible debate. Yet, if they hadn’t been so set in this agenda, they might have avoided sloppy mistakes and untrue assertions.

In an example of their slipshod reporting, Roig-Franzia and Keating state that we focused our data analysis on rural counties in Florida. They suggest that Bush’s gains in these rural counties might be explained by the greater appeal of son-of-the-South Al Gore in 2000 than Bostonian John Kerry in 2004.

But we didn’t focus on rural counties in Florida. Rather we looked at the vote tallies statewide and zeroed in on Bush’s performance in the larger, more metropolitan counties of southern and central Florida, where Bush got the vast majority of his new votes over his state totals in 2000.

It was in these large counties where Bush’s new totals compared most surprisingly with new voter registration because Democrats did a much better job in many of these counties of registering new voters. In other words, Bush outperformed Kerry among a relatively smaller ratio of Republicans to Democrats in many of these counties.

Also undermining the Post’s claims, Kerry actually improved on Gore’s total in the smallest 20 counties in Florida by 5,618 votes -- 50,883 votes for Kerry vs. 45,265 for Gore, a 12.5% increase. So, even the Post’s notion that Gore’s Southern heritage made him more attractive to rural Floridians doesn’t fit with the actual results.

Simple Question

We began our analysis of the vote totals with one simple question: Where did Bush earn his new votes? Since one of every nine new Bush voters nationwide came from Florida, we thought this battleground state was a good place to examine county-by-county tallies.

We also didn’t go into the analysis expecting to find statistical oddities. We were open to the possibility that Bush’s totals might have fit within statistical norms.

What we found, however, led us to report that Bush’s vote tallies were statistically improbable – though not impossible. Contrary to the Post’s claim, we did take into account the Dixiecrat element, which is why we didn’t focus on the Bush totals from Florida’s panhandle or the smaller, rural counties.

Our analysis found that of the 13 Florida counties where Bush’s vote total exceeded the number of registered Republicans for the first time, only two were counties with fewer than 100,000 registered voters. In 2000, Bush’s vote total exceeded the number of registered Republicans in 34 counties – not 32 as the Post inaccurately reported – but in 2004, this total shot up to 47 counties.

Rather than a rural surge of support, Bush actually earned more than seven out of 10 new votes in the 20 largest counties in Florida. Many of these counties are either Democratic strongholds – such as Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach – or they are swing counties, such as Orange, Hillsborough, and Duval.

Many of these large counties saw substantially more newly registered Democrats than Republicans. For example, in Orange County, a swing county home to Orlando, Democrats registered twice as many new voters than Republicans in the years since 2000. In Palm Beach and Broward combined, Democrats registered 111,000 new voters compared with fewer than 20,000 new Republicans.

However, in these three counties combined, Bush turned out about 10,000 more new voters than Kerry, a feat made all the more remarkable given that Kerry improved Democratic turnout in these counties by 21 percent.

No Landslide

Historically, increases like those Bush registered throughout Florida and across much of the country occur when there are huge swings in voting patterns caused by national landslides.

In 1972, for instance, Richard Nixon won millions of votes from Democrats who two elections earlier had supported Lyndon Johnson. But in 2004, the Democratic ticket didn’t suffer a hemorrhage of votes, actually turning out about 5 million more voters nationwide than in 2000.

Nor was that the case in Florida. In county after county in Florida, Bush achieved statistically stunning gains even as Kerry more than held his own. Bush earned nearly 35 percent more votes statewide than he did in 2000, which was already a huge surge for Bush over Bob Dole’s 1996 Florida turnout.

Contrary to assertions in the flawed Post article, the most surprising numbers actually don’t come from small rural counties in the state, but rather from large counties, including Orange county (mentioned above), Hillsborough (Tampa), Brevard (Cape Canaveral), Duval (Jacksonville), Polk (next to Orange county), and heavily Democratic Leon (Tallahassee) and Alachua (Gainesville). These are not tiny Dixiecrat counties with longtime registered Democrats who haven’t voted Democratic in years.

Rather, these seven counties have large, diverse populations that collectively saw Bush turn out 1,025,493 votes, exceeding the 946,420 registered Republicans. In these counties, Bush turned out nearly twice as many new votes than the number of newly registered Republicans. In these same counties, Kerry got more than 200,000 new votes, meaning that Bush’s tally can’t be attributed to crossover Democrats.

While Bush’s totals are not statistically impossible, they do raise eyebrows. Our question was: where did these gains come from? We are not claiming that the surprising numbers are evidence of fraud, but we do believe the tallies deserve an honest and independent review.

It also should be the job of journalists to probe questions as significant as the integrity of the U.S. voting system, not to simply belittle those who raise legitimate questions. The fact that Internet journals and blogs are doing more to examine these concerns than wealthy news organizations like the Washington Post is another indictment of the nation’s mainstream press.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110604.html

Theoretically at least, it is conceivable that sophisticated CIA-style computer hacking – known as “cyber-warfare” – could have let George W. Bush’s campaign transform a three-percentage-point defeat, as measured by exit polls, into an official victory of about the same margin.

Whether such a scheme is feasible, however, is another matter, since it would require penetration of hundreds of local computer systems across the country, presumably from a single remote location. The known CIA successes in cyber-war have come from targeting a specific bank account or from shutting down an adversary’s computer system, not from altering data simultaneously in a large number of computers.

To achieve that kind of result, cyber-war experts say, a preprogrammed “kernel of brain” would have to be inserted into election computers beforehand or teams of hackers would be needed to penetrate the lightly protected systems, targeting touch-screen systems without a paper backup for verifying the numbers. [More on “cyber-war” techniques below.]

Though there's still no proof of such a cyber-attack, suspicions are growing that the U.S. presidential election results were manipulated to some degree. Voting analyses of some precincts in Florida and Ohio have found surprisingly high percentages for Bush. Others have noted that the large turnout among young voters and the obvious enthusiasm of John Kerry’s voters would have suggested a better showing for the Democrat.

Exit Polls

But the most perplexing fact is that exit polls into the evening of Nov. 2 showed Kerry rolling to a clear victory nationally and carrying most of the battleground states, including Florida and Ohio, whose totals would have ensured Kerry’s victory in the Electoral College.

Significantly, polls also showed Republicans carrying the bulk of the tight Senate races. However, when the official results were tallied, the presidential exit polls proved wrong while the Senate polls proved right.

Explanations from the architects of the exit-poll sampling system also sound specious. Their report said Kerry voters were simply more willing than Bush voters to answer the exit pollsters’ questions. But this “chattiness thesis” seems more like a post-facto excuse than a serious argument.

Another explanation from some pundits was that the exit polls were adjusted by late in the day to rectify pro-Kerry exaggerations from the earlier samples. But that is not what happened. As the New York Times reported, “The presumption of a Kerry victory built a head of steam late in the day, when the national survey showed the senator with a statistically significant lead, one falling outside the survey’s margin of error.”

Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll wrote in an online chat on Nov. 3 that “the last wave of national exit polls we received … showed Kerry winning the popular vote by 51 percent to 48 percent – if true, surely enough to carry the Electoral College.” [NYT, Nov. 5, 2004]

Through the late afternoon, exit polls did show Kerry’s lead in some swing states shrinking, For instance, his lead in Ohio slipped from four points to one point. In Florida, his lead dropped from three points to one point. However, his edge in the popular vote seems to have held fairly steady at about three percent.

During the day, even Bush’s aides informed the president that he was losing the election by about three percentage points, according to a source with access to information inside the White House. But Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove reportedly voiced confidence that the vote would turn around. By evening, Bush was displaying a cool confidence that he would prevail.

Irregularities

Since Election Day, some computer irregularities have surfaced in Ohio and elsewhere.

Ohio elections officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than a 1,000 percent more than he actually got. Records indicated that only 638 voters cast ballots in the precinct and that Bush's total should have been recorded as 365.

The Associated Press reported that Franklin County is the only Ohio county to use Danaher Controls Inc.'s ELECTronic 1242, an older-style touch-screen voting system.

Much of the suspicion about Bush possibly manipulating the vote totals has centered on touch-screen electronic voting machines made by Ohio-based Diebold, which has more than 75,000 electronic voting stations operating across the United States.

Diebold’s chief executive is Walden O’Dell, a major Bush fundraiser. In an invitation to one Bush fundraising event at his mansion in Columbus, O’Dell wrote that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president.” He later expressed regret at his choice of language. [The Plain Dealer, Sept. 16, 2003, posted at Diebold’s Web site.]

One Kerry insider told me that Democratic suspicions also were raised by Republican resistance to implementing any meaningful backup system for checking the results on Diebold and other electronic-voting machines. For its part, Diebold denies that its systems are vulnerable to computer hacking, calling such allegations “fantasy.” [See Diebold’s statement.]

Dirty Tricks

Another reason for suspicion about manipulation of the Nov. 2 vote is the Republican Party’s long history of electoral dirty tricks, which I detail in my book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.

In 1968, Richard Nixon’s campaign reportedly sabotaged Vietnam War peace talks to help ensure his victory. In 1972, burglars working for Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into Democratic offices at Watergate.

In 1980, George H.W. Bush and other Republicans allegedly interfered with President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 hostages held in Iran. In 1992, Bush’s administration was implicated in an illegal search of Bill Clinton’s passport file. In 2000, George W. Bush sent a team of thugs to disrupt recounts in Florida and eventually got the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent a full counting of disputed ballots.

Now the question is whether Republicans have engaged in some high-tech dirty tricks to alter the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.

‘Cyber-War’

The highly secretive practice of “cyber-warfare” has advanced far more than many Americans understand, with U.S. intelligence agencies pioneering methods for surreptitiously entering enemy computer systems.

Through the 1990s, the CIA and the U.S. military aggressively expanded “cyber-war” capabilities, bringing online powerful computer systems and recruiting some of the nation’s best hackers, intelligence sources say. During the CIA’s recruitment rush, some hackers were hired despite criminal records and questionable backgrounds. One got in trouble when he was found masturbating in front of his computer screen.

By the mid-1990s, cyber-war – also known as "information warfare" – was such a hot topic within the U.S. military that the Pentagon produced a breezy 13-page booklet called "Information Warfare for Dummies."

The primer said traditional information warfare would target an enemy's battlefield command-and-control structure to "decapitate" senior officers from their fighters, thereby "causing panic and paralysis." But the primer added that "network penetrations" -- or hacking -- "represents a new and very high-tech form of warfighting."

Indirectly, the booklet acknowledged secret U.S. capabilities in these areas. The manual described these info-war tactics as "fairly ground-breaking stuff for our nation's mud-sloggers. … Theft and the intentional manipulation of data are the product of devilish minds."

The primer also gave some hints about the disruptive strategies in the U.S. arsenal. "Network penetrations" include "insertion of malicious code (viruses, worms, etc.), theft of information, manipulation of information, denial of service," the primer said.

The booklet also recognized the sensitivity of the topic. "Due to the moral, ethical and legal questions raised by hacking, the military likes to keep a low profile on this issue," the primer explained.

Despite the Pentagon's nervousness, the booklet said the cyber-war tactics do have advantages over other military operations. "The intrusions can be carried out remotely, transcending the boundaries of time and space," the manual said. "They also offer the prospect of 'plausible deniability' or repudiation."

The booklet indicated that U.S. intelligence has found it relatively easy to cover its tracks. "Due to the difficulty of tracing a network penetration to its source, it's difficult for the adversary to prove that you are the one responsible for corrupting their system," the primer said. "In fact, viral infections can be so subtle and insidious that the adversary may not even know that their systems have been attacked."

Drug Scam

U.S. intelligence sources described one case study of a CIA high-tech "dirty trick" that worked in the mid-1990s. After learning of a drug lord's plans to bribe a South American government official, the spy agency waited for the money to be transferred and then accessed the bank records to remotely delete the bribe.

Besides stopping the bribe, the money's disappearance spread confusion within the cartel. The recriminations that followed – with the corrupt official and the drug lord complaining about the lost money – led eventually to the execution of a hapless bookkeeper, according to the story.

During the war over Kosovo in 1999, U.S. government hackers tried to expand on these strategies, targeting Serbian computer systems and government bank accounts. By most accounts, the cyber-war attacks on Serbian targets achieved only limited success.

While avoiding clear confirmation of a U.S. offensive cyber-war capability, American officials occasionally have discussed the topic in the third person, as if the United States were not a participant in this new arms race.

On Feb. 2, 1999, for instance, then-CIA director George Tenet said "several countries have or are developing the capability to attack an adversary's computer systems." He added that "developing a computer attack capability can be quite inexpensive and easily concealable."

Left unsaid in Tenet's statement was that the U.S. government, with the world's most powerful computers and the most sophisticated software designs, has led the way both in offensive “cyber-war” strategies and defensive countermeasures.

With questions lingering about discrepancies between the Nov. 2 exit polls and Bush's final tallies, some Democrats are wondering whether the intelligence community's cyber-war capabilities may have come home to roost.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110904.html

George W. Bush’s vote tallies, especially in the key state of Florida, are so statistically stunning that they border on the unbelievable.

While it’s extraordinary for a candidate to get a vote total that exceeds his party’s registration in any voting jurisdiction – because of non-voters – Bush racked up more votes than registered Republicans in 47 out of 67 counties in Florida. In 15 of those counties, his vote total more than doubled the number of registered Republicans and in four counties, Bush more than tripled the number.

Statewide, Bush earned about 20,000 more votes than registered Republicans.

By comparison, in 2000, Bush’s Florida total represented about 85 percent of the total number of registered Republicans, about 2.9 million votes compared with 3.4 million registered Republicans.

Bush achieved these totals although exit polls showed him winning only about 14 percent of the Democratic vote statewide – statistically the same as in 2000 when he won 13 percent of the Democratic vote – and losing Florida’s independent voters to Kerry by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. In 2000, Gore won the independent vote by a much narrower margin of 47 to 46 percent.

[For details on the Florida turnout in 2000, see http://www.msnbc.com/m/d2k/g/polls.asp?office=P&state=FL. For details on the 2004 Florida turnout, see http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/FL/P/00/index.html]

Exit Poll Discrepancies

Similar surprising jumps in Bush’s vote tallies across the country – especially when matched against national exits polls showing Kerry winning by 51 percent to 48 percent – have fed suspicion among rank-and-file Democrats that the Bush campaign rigged the vote, possibly through systematic computer hacking.

Republican pollster Dick Morris said the Election Night pattern of mistaken exit polls favoring Kerry in six battleground states – Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada and Iowa – was virtually inconceivable.

“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here.”

But instead of following his logic that the discrepancy suggested vote tampering – as it would in Latin America, Africa or Eastern Europe – Morris postulated a bizarre conspiracy theory that the exit polls were part of a scheme to have the networks call the election for Kerry and thus discourage Bush voters on the West Coast. Of course, none of the networks did call any of the six states for Kerry, making Morris’s conspiracy theory nonsensical. Nevertheless, some Democrats have agreed with Morris's bottom-line recommendation that the whole matter deserves “more scrutiny and investigation.” [The Hill, Nov. 8, 2004]

Erroneous Votes

Democratic doubts about the Nov. 2 election have deepened with anecdotal evidence of voters reporting that they tried to cast votes for Kerry but touch-screen voting machines came up registering their votes for Bush.

In Ohio, election officials said an error with an electronic voting system in Franklin County gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, more than 1,000 percent more than he actually got.

Yet, without a nationwide investigation, it’s impossible to know whether those cases were isolated glitches or part of a more troubling pattern.

If Bush’s totals weren’t artificially enhanced, they would represent one of the most remarkable electoral achievements in U.S. history.

In the two presidential elections since Sen. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton in 1996, Bush would have increased Republican voter turnout nationwide by a whopping 52 percent from just under 40 million votes for Dole to just under 60 million votes for the GOP ticket in 2004.

Such an increase in voter turnout over two consecutive election cycles is not unprecedented, but has historically flowed from landslide victories that see shifting voting patterns, with millions of crossover voters straying from one party to the other.

For example, in 1972, Richard Nixon increased Republican turnout by 73.5 percent over Barry Goldwater’s performance two elections earlier. But this turnout was amplified by the fact that Goldwater lost in 1964 to Lyndon Johnson by about 23 percentage points and Nixon trounced George McGovern by 23 percentage points.

What’s remarkable about Bush’s increase over the last two elections is that Democrats have done an impressive job boosting their own voter turnout from 1996 to 2004. Over this period, candidates Al Gore and John Kerry increased Democratic turnout by about 18 percent, from roughly 47.5 million votes in 1996 to nearly 56 million in 2004.

What this suggests is that Bush is not so much winning his new votes from Democrats crossing over, but rather by going deeper than many observers thought possible into new pockets of dormant Republican voters.

Bush’s Gains

But where did these new voters come from, and how did Bush manage to accelerate his turnout gains at a time when the Democratic ticket was also substantially increasing its turnout?

While the statistical analysis of these new voters is only just beginning, Bush’s ability to find nearly 9 million new voters in an election year when his Democratic opponent also saw gains of about 5 million new voters is the story of the 2004 election.

Exit polls also suggest that voters identifying themselves as Republicans voted as a greater proportion of the electorate than in 2000 and that Bush won a slightly greater percent of the Republican vote.

The party breakdown in 2000 was 39 percent Democrats, 35 percent Republicans, and 27 percent independents. In 2000, Bush won the Republican vote by 91 percent to 8 percent; narrowly won the independent vote by 47 percent to 45 percent and picked up 11 percent of the Democratic vote compared with Gore’s Democratic turnout of 86 percent. [See http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html for details.]

According to exit polls this year, the turnout broke evenly among Democrats and Republicans, with about 37 percent each. Independents represented about 26 percent of the electorate. Kerry actually did better among independents, winning that group of voters by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent margin.

However, Bush did slightly better among the larger number of Republican voters, winning 93 percent of their vote, while matching his 2000 performance by taking about 11 percent of the Democratic vote.

Registration Up

While this turnout might strike many observers as unusual in an election year that witnessed huge voter registration and mobilization efforts by Democrats and groups aligned with Democrats, the increased GOP turnout does seem to fit with the campaign strategy deployed by the Bush team to run to the base.

From the start of the 2004 campaign, political strategist Karl Rove and the Bush team made its goals clear – maximize Bush’s support among social and economic conservatives – including Evangelicals and Club for Growth/anti-government conservatives – and turn them out by driving up Kerry’s negatives with harsh attacks questioning Kerry’s leadership credentials.

This strategy emerged from Rove’s estimate after the 2000 election that 4 million Evangelical voters stayed home that year. The Bush/Rove strategy in 2004 rested primarily on turning out that base of support.

But, even if one were to estimate that 100 percent of these Evangelical voters turned out for Bush in 2004 and that 100 percent of Bush’s 2000 supporters turned out again for him, this still leaves about 5 million new Bush voters unaccounted for.

Altogether, Bush’s new 9 million votes came mainly from the largest states in the country. But nowhere was Bush’s performance more incredible than in Florida, where Bush found roughly 1 million new voters, about 11 percent all new Bush voters nationwide and more than twice the number of new voters than in any other state other than Texas.

Bush increased his turnout in all 67 Florida counties, marking the second consecutive election in which Bush increased Republican vote totals in all Florida counties, and overall achieved a 34 percent increase in Florida votes over his 2000 total.

Since Bob Dole’s 1996 turnout of 2.24 million Florida votes, Bush has increased the GOP’s performance in the state by an astonishing 74 percent. Making Bush’s gains even more impressive, Kerry also saw gains in all but five Florida counties and in 22 counties earned at least 10,000 more votes than Gore earned in 2000.

Exceeding Kerry

But Bush’s vote gains exceeded Kerry’s in all the large counties in the state except in heavily Democratic Miami-Dade, where Kerry increased his turnout by 56,000 new votes compared with Bush’s 40,000 new votes. This Democratic improvement in Miami-Dade seems to have come in large part from Democratic success in registering new voters in the county by almost a 2-to-1 margin over Republicans.

In spite of this new-voter registration advantage, Kerry only earned a 7-to-5 increase of new voter turnout over Bush in Miami-Dade, a statistical oddity given the fact that Kerry did a better job than Gore in turning out his Democratic base, earning a vote total equaling 85 percent of all registered Democrats in the county compared with Gore’s total in 2000 equaling 83 percent of all registered Democrats.

In other Democratic strongholds of Broward and Palm Beach counties, Kerry gained 114,000 new voters, earning nearly 770,000 votes, and bested Bush by more than 320,000 votes. But, this was actually a modest improvement for Bush over 2000, thanks to Bush’s increase of 119,000 new voters in these counties, from 330,000 votes in 2000 to 449,000 votes in 2004.

Bush’s performance in these two counties is worth studying in greater detail. In both counties, Democrats saw a significant increase in new voter registration since 2000, more than 77,000 newly registered Democrats in Broward and 34,000 newly registered Democrats in Palm Beach.

Republicans on the other hand only registered 17,000 new voters in Broward and a bit more than 2,000 new voters in Palm Beach. While both counties saw substantial numbers of new unaffiliated or third party registered voters, the Democratic advantage in both counties combined of more than 111,000 newly registered Dems against fewer than 20,000 newly registered GOP voters, as well as the voter intensity that these new registration rates usually represent, suggested that Kerry should have done better than Bush relative to the 2000 election.

Instead, Bush actually increased his vote total in the two counties by earning about 5,000 more new voters than Kerry.

New Level

Beyond southern Florida, Bush took turnout throughout the state to a new level, testing the bounds of statistical probability by winning votes seemingly from every corner of the state, from the panhandle to the Gulf Coast, from the I-4 corridor to the Atlantic Coast from Jacksonville to Miami.

Another county worth examining in some detail is Orange County, a swing county home to Orlando in the center of the state. As in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward counties, Democrats successfully registered substantially more new voters than Republicans, about 49,000 new Democrats against about 25,000 new Republicans.

These gains broke what was once a statistical tie in registered voters between the parties, giving Democrats a 214,000 to 187,000 advantage across the county. But Kerry only managed a narrow countywide victory with 192,030 votes against 191,389 votes for Bush. In 2000, Gore carried the county with 140,115 votes against 134,476 votes for Bush.

While it's conceivable Bush might have achieved these and other gains through his hardball campaign strategies and strong get-out-the-vote effort, many Americans, looking at these and other statistically incredible Bush vote counts, are likely to continue to suspect that the Republicans put a thumb on the electoral scales, somehow exaggerating Bush's tallies through manipulation of computer tabulations.

Only an open-minded investigation with public scrutiny would have much hope of quelling these rising suspicions.

3.          Next, Robert highlights the myth of the “liberal news media”. Despite the drumfire from conservative media pundits about the media having a liberal bias, the fact is that the media have an overt conservative bias. Although the majority of reporters and staffers are relatively liberal, they do not exercise editorial authority over the media outlets. That authority is exercised by powerful people who realize a corporate agenda that could be described as conservative, if not outright reactionary. He notes that, following the Watergate scandal, the Republicans and their conservative reporters put together a vast, right-wing media machine. This media apparatus, in turn, was closely affiliated with a series of right-wing think tanks that generated many of the “talking points” and the party line on key issues that were trumpeted by the right-wing media establishment.

4.          The discussion then turns to the subject of the Iran-Contra scandal. Robert Parry and his colleague Brian Barger broke the story of the Oliver North back channel intelligence operation that supported the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Following the downing of Eugene Hasenfus’s plane in 1986, the full extent of the scandal broke.

5.     A major focal point of the program is the fact that freshman Senator John Kerry “took the point” in exposing the fact that a considerable amount of the Contra’s finances were derived from cocaine trafficking. Kerry was branded a “randy conspiracy buff” for his trouble. View Robert Parry’s article for Salon.com, posted at the following address: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/25/contra/ How John Kerry exposed the Contra-cocaine scandal--Derided by the mainstream press and taking on Reagan at the height of his popularity, the freshman senator battled to reveal one of America's ugliest foreign policy secrets. October 25, 2004: In December 1985, when Brian Barger and I wrote a groundbreaking story for the Associated Press about Nicaraguan Contra rebels smuggling cocaine into the United States, one U.S. senator put his political career on the line to follow up on our disturbing findings. His name was John Kerry.

Yet, over the past year, even as Kerry's heroism as a young Navy officer in Vietnam has become a point of controversy, this act of political courage by a freshman senator has gone virtually unmentioned, even though -- or perhaps because -- it marked Kerry's first challenge to the Bush family. In early 1986, the 42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America. Kerry assigned members of his personal Senate staff to pursue the allegations. He also persuaded the Republican majority on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to request information from the Reagan-Bush administration about the alleged Contra drug traffickers.

In taking on the inquiry, Kerry challenged President Ronald Reagan at the height of his power, at a time he was calling the Contras the "moral equals of the Founding Fathers." Kerry's questions represented a particular embarrassment to Vice President George H.W. Bush, whose responsibilities included overseeing U.S. drug-interdiction policies.

Kerry took on the investigation though he didn't have much support within his own party. By 1986, congressional Democrats had little stomach left for challenging the Reagan-Bush Contra war. Not only had Reagan won a historic landslide in 1984, amassing a record 54 million votes, but his conservative allies were targeting individual Democrats viewed as critical of the Contras fighting to oust Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. Most Washington journalists were backing off, too, for fear of getting labeled "Sandinista apologists" or worse.

Kerry's probe infuriated Reagan's White House, which was pushing Congress to restore military funding for the Contras. Some in the administration also saw Kerry's investigation as a threat to the secrecy surrounding the Contra supply operation, which was being run illegally by White House aide Oliver North and members of Bush's vice presidential staff.

Through most of 1986, Kerry's staff inquiry advanced against withering political fire. His investigators interviewed witnesses in Washington, contacted Contra sources in Miami and Costa Rica, and tried to make sense of sometimes convoluted stories of intrigue from the shadowy worlds of covert warfare and the drug trade.

Kerry's chief Senate staff investigators were Ron Rosenblith, Jonathan Winer and Dick McCall. Rosenblith, a Massachusetts political strategist from Kerry's victorious 1984 campaign, braved both political and personal risks as he traveled to Central America for face-to-face meetings with witnesses. Winer, a lawyer also from Massachusetts, charted the inquiry's legal framework and mastered its complex details. McCall, an experienced congressional staffer, brought Capitol Hill savvy to the investigation. Behind it all was Kerry, who combined a prosecutor's sense for sniffing out criminality and a politician's instinct for pushing the limits. The Kerry whom I met during this period was a complex man who balanced a rebellious idealism with a determination not to burn his bridges to the political establishment.

The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly, Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.

The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

But almost a decade later, in 1998, Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were implicated in the cocaine trade and that U.S. agencies had looked the other way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the Reagan-Bush administration.

Even after the CIA's admissions, the national press corps never fully corrected its earlier dismissive treatment. That would have meant the New York Times and other leading publications admitting they had bungled their coverage of one of the worst scandals of the Reagan-Bush era. . . . View this article in its entirety at the URL noted above. (You will have to view an ad to access the article in full. This is not a complicated or time-consuming process.)

6.     At this point in the broadcast, Lucy Komisar joins the discussion. (For more on Lucy’s work, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 356, 357, 359, 360, 367, 387, 392, 412, 458, 463.) One of the institutions that was centrally involved in the Iran-Contra machinations was the BCCI. Lucy highlights that Bank’s involvement with Oliver North’s network, as well as the Reagan and Bush administrations’ use of the bank to arm Saddam Hussein. After noting that BCCI was used to launder money for terrorists and drug dealers, Lucy also notes the involvement of the BCCI with the funding of the Afghan mujahadeen. Among the principals of the BCCI were people such as Saudi banker Khalid bin Mahfouz. Mahfouz was heavily involved with the Muwafaq Foundation, an Islamic charity allegedly involved with funding Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Lucy recently published a very important story on the BCCI, setting forth the pivotal role of John Kerry in exposing the scandal. As was the case with the Contra/Cocaine case, Kerry “walked point” with the BCCI case and was repudiated for doing so. In addition, congressional committees and government agencies that should have cooperated with Kerry’s investigation failed to do so. Lucy’s article is reproduced below: The Case That Kerry Cracked

By Lucy Komisar, AlterNet. Posted October 22, 2004.

As a senator, John Kerry was a tenacious investigator and exposed BCCI, an international criminal bank, and its murderous clients. The experience should serve him well in dealing with the international threats we face today.

One gets an eerie sense of deja vu watching John Kerry battle the Bush clan. He’s done it once before, against the old man, President Bush’s father, though many voters have probably forgotten. That battle involved the first Bush administration’s attempt to put the lid on an investigation that connected a worldwide criminal bank to narco-traffickers, terrorists, and to Middle East money men who helped the Bush family make piles of cash. Those links connect to people now on the U.S. post-9/11 terrorist list.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kerry fought to expose an international criminal bank, BCCI ‘ the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The bank was run by a Pakistani, working with Persian Gulf managers who operated through a network of secret offshore centers to hide their operations from the world’s bank examiners. They weren’t, however, hidden from the CIA, which not only knew what the bank was doing, but used the bank to funnel cash through its Islamabad and other Pakistani branches to CIA client Osama bin Laden, part of the $2 billion Washington sent to the Afghani mujahideen. The operation gave bin Laden an education in black finance. CIA director William Casey himself met with BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi. The CIA also paid its own agents through the bank and used BCCI to fund black ops all over the world.

Kerry took on not only the Bush clan and its friends, but the CIA, and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. This is not irrelevant history, but important to examine, because it reveals a lot about Kerry and how he might respond to terrorism or other global criminal enterprises. Kerry’s record shows that he took on powerful political and bureaucratic interests, was a tenacious investigator, and savvy about international crime and money flows, which is crucial in the fight against terrorism.

Against the opposition of powerful Republicans and Democrats, and in light of a lack of cooperation from a very politicized Justice Department and stonewalling by the CIA, Kerry worked with investigators and ran Senate hearings that exposed the bank’s shadowy multi-billion-dollar scams and precipitated its end.

The Bank and the CIA

BCCI was founded in 1972 by Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi and initially capitalized by Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi. It incorporated in the bank secrecy jurisdiction of Luxembourg but operated out of London. During two decades, it expanded to 73 countries worldwide, with nearly a million depositors with accounts totaling more than $10 billion. When the bank was finally shut down nearly 20 years later, between $9.5 and $15 billion, the analysts differ, had been lost or stolen, making this the biggest bank fraud in the world.

The bank had carved out a niche: it was the banker to the bad guys. One U.S. indictment would say that money laundering was BCCI's "corporate strategy." BCCI survived for two decades because it floated on the waves of the offshore system, with key booking operations in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, where bank regulators couldn’t go. Its Grand Cayman "bank-within-a-bank" was just a post office box. The bank also had friends in high places in the U.S. and, of course, the wink and nod of the CIA and the Reagan-Bush administration, which depended on its services. Over the years, BCCI was involved with:

Drug cartels. As early as 1985, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the IRS found that BCCI was involved in laundering heroin money, with numerous branches in Colombia to handle accounts for the drug cartels. It ran accounts for the traffickers’ protector, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, as well as for the drug kingpins of Asia’s Golden Crescent, including Burmese heroin warlord Khun Sa, and for drug trafficking Afghanis and Pakistanis.

Illegal arms traders. For the Afghanis, the rule was ‘drugs out, American and British arms in.’ Clients also included Middle East terrorist Abu Nidal, who used bank financing to get weapons; the sellers of nuclear technology to Pakistan; and Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar. The bank served international organized crime involved in extortion, bribery, kidnapping and murder, and ran accounts for Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Haiti's Jean-Claude Duvalier, Liberian strongman Samuel Doe and other thieving heads of state who needed to hide their stolen cash.

The Iran/Contra scandal. BCCI had a role in the infamous scandal of the Reagan years. The CIA told Noriega to use the bank for the payoffs he got for helping National Security Council (NSC) staffer Oliver North set up shell companies and secret bank accounts in Panama to illegally move funds to the Contras in Nicaragua and arms to Iran in 1985-86. North had arranged to illegally sell 1,250 U.S. Tow missiles to Iran in exchange for a promise that Teheran would press militants in Lebanon to release American hostages. Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman and fixer, used a BCCI account to move $20 million for the illegal arms and money plot. BCCI prepared phony documents for the arms sale, and checks signed by North were drawn on the Paris branch of BCCI, which ‘had no records’ of the account when U.S. law enforcement later sought them. The profits were sent to Nicaragua’s right wing Contra rebels, violating a congressional ban on such aid.

Saddam Hussein. During the Reagan-Bush support of Iraq as an adversary to Iran, BCCI funneled millions of dollars to Baghdad's banker in the U.S., the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, (an Italian bank), so that from 1985 to 1989 it could make $4 billion in secret loans to Iraq’s money for arms. BNL was a client of Kissinger Associates, and Henry Kissinger was on the bank’s international advisory board along with Brent Scowcroft, who would become Bush Sr.’s National Security Advisor.

BCCI’s global connections also helped bring private profit to the Bushes. Former Senate investigator Jack Blum told me, ‘This whole collection of people were wrapped up in the Bush crowd in Texas.’ Prominent Saudis played a key role: Khalid Bin Mahfouz, head of National Commercial Bank in Saudi Arabia, and a major investor and BCCI board member; Kamal Adham, brother-in-law of the late Saudi King Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence and a major shareholder and frontman for BCCI, and; Ghaith Rashad Pharaon, a BCCI shareholder and front man for the bank’s illegal purchase of three U.S. banks.

Then there was James Bath, a Texas businessman, who owned Houston’s Main Bank with Bin Mahfouz and Pharaon. When George W. Bush set up Arbusto Energy Inc. in 1979 and 1980, Bath provided some of the financing. As it turned out, Bush was not much of a businessman, and when Arbusto needed a bailout, political connections eventually got him a buyout by Harken Energy Corp., which paid him $600,000 in stock and a $120,000-a-year consultancy.

BCCI-connected friends were there again with money to help when Harken got into trouble. Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens in 1987 worked out Harken’s debts by getting $25 million financing from Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), a partner with BCCI in the Swiss Banque de Commerce et de Placements. As part of that deal, a board seat was given to Harken shareholder Sheikh Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, whose chief banker was BCCI shareholder Bin Mahfouz.

Were the Bushes putting their financial interests ahead of American security? Given the Bush links to BCCI, it’s not surprising that the Bush administration tried to smother the investigation and prosecution of the bank.

It might have succeeded, were it not for New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and the junior Senator from Massachussetts, John Kerry.

Kerry The Investigator

As a former prosecutor, Kerry knew a lot about the workings of financial crime. Kerry pointed out how billions of dollars looted from U.S. savings and loans in the 1980s after Ronald Reagan deregulated the thrift industry had been stashed in secret offshore accounts. After he became head of the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Kerry had wanted to look into cocaine trafficking by Contras fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the connection to Oliver North’s illegal offshore Contra-support operation. So, in 1986, Kerry hired Washington lawyer Jack Blum to head the investigation.

As an investigator for Senator Frank Church’s subcommittee on multinational corporations, Blum had exposed the Lockheed bribes and ITT’s attempts to destabilize the government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

‘The Foreign Relations Committee was looking at the relationship between drug trafficking and arms dealing and the way we run foreign policy,’ says Blum. ‘Did we ignore all the stuff going on to support the war in Nicaragua’’ We got into the issue of money laundering.’ Blum said he ‘stumbled across Lee Ritch,’ who told the panel, ‘I used to launder my money in the Cayman Islands. The U.S. wised up, and the bankers told me to shift to Panama. In Panama, I’m told the only guy to talk to is Noriega. He sends me to BCCI.’

Blum says, ‘We go poking around. I found a guy who had worked for BCCI. I met him in Miami. He said, ‘That’s their major line of work. They’re a bunch of criminals.’ He goes on to say that in addition to handling drug money, they were managing Noriega’s personal finances and that the bankers who did that lived in Miami.’ Noriega even carried a BCCI Visa credit card.

So Blum subpoenaed that information. He said, ‘There is a subplot between us and the federal government and prosecutors. We find out about coming arrests for money laundering [in an ongoing Tampa drug trafficking investigation], but the feds want to make only a limited case in Tampa; they don’t want to investigate other ramifications. Their story is they had their case and didn’t want it messed up with extraneous stuff. The notion the other stuff was extraneous boggles the mind.’

Blum began poking deeper and came across the CIA standing in the shadows. He found that during the 1980s, the CIA had prepared hundreds of reports that discussed BCCI’s criminal connections ‘drug trafficking, money laundering’ and its control of Washington's First American Bank, part of an illegal plot to get into the U.S. banking system. He also found that this was accomplished with the help of major U.S. figures, including former Treasury Secretary Bert Lance, former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Sen. Stuart Symington, ex-federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators.

The CIA provided its reports to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan but not to the prosecutors in Tampa. The Treasury and Customs departments also sat on evidence. Kerry tried to get the Bush Justice Department to expand the Tampa investigation or to turn its information over to the FBI or other agencies. It refused.

Blum told me, ‘We started with laundering drug money, but then pursued it much further and got in testimony a pretty good layout of the criminal nature of the bank. Having done that, we wrote a report and said the matter needs further investigation. But the Justice Department doesn’t pick up on any of the clues. I talked to them. I got a leading figure in the bank to turn evidence to the government, which didn’t want to listen. I taped him for three days with undercover agents in a hotel room in Miami; the government didn’t transcribe the tapes.’

The chief Customs undercover agent who handled the drug sting against BCCI was so disgusted, he quit. The Justice Department ordered key witnesses not to cooperate with Kerry, and it refused to produce documents subpoenaed by his subcommittee. The CIA also stonewalled or lied to the Kerry investigators.

As a junior senator, Kerry was further hampered because his subcommittee mandate was limited to looking into terrorism and drugs. But even that investigation was bothering too many important people, so Clayborne Pell, a Democratic senator, shut it down.

Then the Justice Department closed the Tampa case with a plea bargain that let BCCI off the hook. Kerry was furious. He thought the crooked bank should be shut down. He said the deal kept the bank alive and discouraged bank officials from telling the U.S. what they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including its ownership of First American and other U.S. banks. However, the bank relied on its friends. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) defended the plea bargain on the Senate floor, and then asked the bank to lend $10 million to a friend.

Following the plea agreement, the Justice Department stopped investigating BCCI for about 18 months. It even lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open ‘ after being urged to do that by former Justice Department personnel working for BCCI.

Kerry tried in 1990 and 1991 to get an investigation by the Senate Banking Committee, chaired by Democrat Donald Riegle. But Riegle and four of the other members of his committee had gotten money from Charles Keating, head of Lincoln Savings and Loan, who was later convicted of fraud, and they weren’t interested in drawing attention to crooked banks.

Finally, Kerry got permission to run a one-day subcommittee hearing in May 1991. Then he started holding public hearings through the banking committee, which wouldn’t staff them; he had to use his own people. ‘Riegle considered himself a gentlemen, because he let Kerry do that,’ says Blum. ‘Riegle is probably the most misnamed U.S. senator.’

The bank’s friends prevented more Kerry hearings, says Blum. ‘They got it out of Foreign Relations,’ he recalled. ‘We later learned that BCCI, between September 1988 and July 1991 when the bank closed, spent $26 million on lawyers and lobbyists trying to keep themselves in business. They hired people on both sides to shut [the investigations] down.’

But, Blum adds, ‘They didn’t stop me from going to the New York County DA’s office with Kerry’s blessing to assure a prosecution would ensue.’ Blum went to see New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and told him about the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate BCCI's involvement in drug money laundering and other crimes. The Justice Department and the Federal Reserve, run by Paul Volcker, refused to aid the DA’s investigation.

However, Morgenthau got a grand jury indictment of BCCI in July 1991. It said the bank and its founders had defrauded depositors, falsified bank records to hide illegal money laundering, committed millions of dollars in larcenies and paid off public officials. It charged that BCCI had been a criminal enterprise since 1972 and had paid millions of dollars in bribes to central bankers or other financial officials in a dozen developing countries. Morgenthau named Ghaith Pharaon as a front man for BCCI who had gotten a secret loan from the bank to invest in three U.S. banks.

The New York Fed ‘not Washington’ also took action. It coordinated an action on the fourth of July weekend 1991 to shut BCCI down. And, finally, the DA’s investigation forced Washington to act, though it kept the case as limited as possible. Soon after, Assistant Attorney General Robert S. Mueller III (now head of the FBI) oversaw the indictment by a federal grand jury of Democratic influence-peddler and former Johnson Defense Secretary Clark Clifford and his protege Robert Altman, the top officials of First American Bank, for misleading the Federal Reserve Board about BCCI's secret control of the bank and obstructing the Fed's inquiries into BCCI.

Altman got off after convincing the jurors that he was an executive worth multi-millions of dollars in pay and stock benefits who didn’t know who the bank’s true owners were. Clifford evaded trial because of the Pinochet defense: his health.

In September, the Justice Department came up with an indictment of top BCCI officials which focused only on drug-money laundering, not on fraud against the bank’s depositors. It ignored leads, witnesses and evidence that would have revealed the bank’s large scale frauds and exposed CIA and Reagan-Bush use of the bank.

‘When I first looked at it, I thought there’s something nefarious or embarrassing ‘ what is it? Their own incompetence’ Worse? You never know the answer,’ says Blum. ‘There was the Fed, which looked stupider than hell, the Office of the Comptroller who were stupid beyond comprehension. The then head of CIA said, yes, the CIA had used the bank. Everything you touched about that bank led to somebody ugly. Margaret Thatcher’s husband and maybe son, the prime minister of Canada, a 'who’s who of politics and the worlds of skullduggery.’

In July 1992, a New York County grand jury indicted Khalid Bin Mahfouz and an aide for defrauding BCCI and its depositors of as much as $300 million. But Bin Mahfouz was in Saudi Arabia, out of reach, and in the end Morgenthau settled for a fine. The Fed fined Bin Mahfouz $170 million. The Justice Department didn’t go after Bin Mahfouz at all.

The Kerry Committee report issued in 1992 was damning. It said that the White House knew about BCCI’s criminal activities, that the U.S. intelligence agencies used it for secret banking and that BCCI routinely paid off American public officials. Among the Kerry Report’s major findings:

Federal prosecutors handling the Tampa drug money laundering indictment of BCCI did not use the information they collected to focus on or report to federal agencies BCCI’s other crimes, including its secret, illegal ownership of First American Bank.

The Justice, Treasury and Customs departments failed to support or aid investigators and prosecutors.

\Following lobbying by former Justice officials working for BCCI, the U.S. attorney in Tampa accepted a plea agreement that kept BCCI alive and discouraged bank officials from revealing other crimes.

CIA chief Casey and the agency knew, by early 1985, a lot about what BCCI was up to and didn’t inform the Justice Department or the Federal Reserve.

After the CIA knew that BCCI was, as an institution, a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations.

The Federal Reserve approved the first hidden BCCI takeover despite evidence the bank was behind it because it was swayed by influence-peddlers such as Clifford and because the CIA and Treasury failed to raise warnings about what they knew.

There’s a lot about BCCI that outsiders will never know. Once the investigations started, there were seven fires in the fireproof London warehouses where BCCI stored records. In one of them, four firemen were killed.

Experience That Counts

During this presidential campaign, Kerry has talked a lot about his service in Vietnam, but he doesn’t take credit now for exposing BCCI, perhaps because he thinks it’s too complicated for the American public to understand the scandal. Yet, more than physical courage, what the U.S. needs is guts and smarts and the resolution and courage to fight scourges that range from terrorism to international crime to corporate corruption and tax evasion.

So, what if John Kerry the investigator gets elected President? He would be not only the nation’s president but also a bold crime investigator and prosecutor who knows how to, and is willing to, overcome obstacles, whether they be international criminals or U.S. power brokers, to follow the money and bring about justice.

Jack Blum, who is not involved in the Kerry campaign, says: ‘There has never been a guy who has run for president who has, hands-on, known the kinds of substantive things he knows about the world of international crime, about banking and international bank regulation and finance, about the interconnectedness of the world finance system and how various intelligence agencies play into it. He is uniquely qualified.’

Kerry’s experience fighting the Washington establishment over BCCI also gave him a profound education in the workings of the insider Washington power and corruption that support corporate and organized crime and weaken the country’s ability to counter terrorism. He showed that he has what it takes to stand up to the big-money special interests that don’t want the system to change.

7.          In connection with the discussion of Lucy’s remarkable article, one should not fail to notice that the Justice Department’s cover-up of the BCCI case was overseen by Robert Mueller, now head of the FBI. In FTR#’s 462, 464, 467, we noted that Mueller has also covered up Operation Green Quest. That investigation linked the milieu of the BCCI to the milieu of the funders of Al Qaeda. The milieu of the BCCI is very closely linked to that of George W. Bush. In addition to Lucy’s writing on the subject and the broadcasts noted immediately above, the Bush/BCCI nexus is covered in, among other programs, FTR#’s 356, 357. THE SCALE OF THE COVER-UP OF BCCI IS EXEMPLIFIED BY THE STARTLING FACT THAT, AS LUCY NOTES IN THE ARTICLE ABOVE, ONCE THE BCCI CASE BEGAN, SEVEN FIRES BROKE OUT IN THE FIREPROOF LONDON WAREHOUSES IN WHICH THE BANK’S RECORDS WERE STORED. IN ONE OF THOSE FIRES, FOUR FIREMEN DIED.

8.          Next, Lucy explains the role in contemporary business of the offshore banking and tax havens, of which BCCI is one. In FTR#’s 387, 458, we examine the offshore havens at length and in detail. Refer to those programs for more complete treatment of the subject.

9.          The conclusion of the program deals with the October Surprise, the deal cut between the Reagan/Bush campaign and the Iranian Islamic fundamentalists to withhold the U.S. hostages taken from the American Embassy until after President Carter’s humiliation and consequent election defeat are assured. Lucy summarizes the role of the Clearstream network in some of the financial transfers involved in the October Surprise. (For a more detailed treatment of the subject, see FTR#’s 360, 458.)

10.      Next, Robert Parry details his own experiences covering the October Surprise story. After a Congressional task force dismissed the allegations, the substance of the investigation was substantively verified by disclosures coming by way of French intelligence (specifically Alexandre de Marenches) and the files of the former KGB. Nonetheless, the mainstream media refused to acknowledge this critically important discovery. Robert actually founded Consortium News (initially) to provide an outlet for this critical information.

11.      A fascinating aspect of the investigation concerns an apparent PLO connection to the October Surprise machinations. This is discussed in the Consortium article presented below: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/110204.html