From Online Journal-Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election.

[Guest guest]

T

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 14:32:35 -0800 (PST)

Subject:From Online Journal-Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US

rigged election

 

Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election

 

By Wayne Madsen

Online Journal Contributing Writer

 

November 25, 2004—According to informed sources in Washington and

Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place

operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The

operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were

actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES & S, Triad,

Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians

reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.

 

The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from

technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their

work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the

technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.

 

There have been media reports from around the country concerning the

locking down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one

unprecedented action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked

down the facility where votes were being counted. The officials said

this was in response to a Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being

issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren

County. George Bush won 72 percent of the vote in Warren County, much

larger than his percentage of victory statewide.

 

The money to rig the election in favor of Bush reportedly came from an

entity called Five Star Trust, largely based in Houston but a

worldwide entity that is directly tied to the Saudi Royal Family. Five

Star Trust was termed " a well-protected vehicle " that has been used to

support both Bush and Osama bin Laden in the US and around the world.

 

Other money used to fund the election rigging was from siphoned Enron

money stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands, which was once the

base of one of the more questionable and Saudi-linked BCCI

subsidiaries. Cook Islands banks also handled some of the weapons

smuggling financing of the Iran-Contra scandal. A former Justice

Department attorney who helped prosecute the BCCI case said the use of

the Cook Islands by the Bush reelection team indicates they wanted the

bank arrangements to be a " quick folding tent " operation that would

cease to exist when the election was over. He said the Cook Islands

was notorious for not requiring any documentation for such operations.

 

In fact, the Cook Islands has been a favorite location for various

covert intelligence activities. This most recent use of the islands is

a continuation of a scandal discovered in New Zealand in the early

'90s called the " Winebox Affair. " In 1992, a computer dealer named

Paul White bought some secondhand computers and floppy disks from the

Citibank office in Auckland, New Zealand, that had earlier sold them

to a scrap dealer.

 

White later discovered the floppies (and 10 paper files) detailed a

scheme to use the European Pacific Bank in the Cook Islands to bilk

foreign governments and banks for a phony 15 percent tax bill assessed

on various transactions by the Cook Islands government (at the time

run by Tom Davis, a former US Army and NASA research scientist who was

allegedly on the payroll of the CIA). European Pacific reaped millions

of illegal dollars from the New Zealand Treasury and a number of

Japanese banks, including Mitsubishi Bank. Paul White later died in a

suspicious auto accident.

 

As detailed in the book " The Paradise Conspiracy " by New Zealand

journalist Ian Wishart, the Cook Islands scheme also involved several

CIA operatives, including Lawrence John Fahey, who had an interest in

InterAir of Nevada, one of the airlines used by Ollie North to funnel

arms to Iran. It also involved William Raupe, a CIA officer stationed

under cover as a USAID employee at the US embassy in Suva. Raupe had

once worked for Air America in South East Asia. Another CIA agent

active in the Cooks was Robert C. Allen, known to New Zealand

authorities as a US agent who was formerly with the CIA proprietary

firm Bishop, Baldwin, Dillingham, Wong Ltd. In addition, along with

the late former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Gerald Parsky was

also involved in the European Pacific Bank's Cook Islands operations.

Parsky is George W. Bush's chief fundraiser and adviser in California

(he led Bush's 2000 California campaign) and supported Simon's son's

unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California against Gray Davis

and then again in the recall of Davis. Enron was involved early on

with Arnold Schwarzenegger at a meeting in 2001 at the Beverly Hills

Hotel at the same time Enron was bilking California utility customers

with increases as high as 1000 percent This scheme eventually led to

Davis's recall and his replacement by Schwarzenegger.

 

The Cook Islands-Citibank-European Pacific fraud appeared to have been

cooked up to take the place of other " outed " CIA banking activities,

including Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. European Pacific also involved

assets of BCCI, in particular the Commercial Bank of Commerce in

Rarotonga, Cook Islands, a BCCI subsidiary. MIchael Hand, a former

Green Beret who reportedly served with Deputy Secretary of State

Richard Armitage in Laos (and whose partner, Frank Nugan, was found

shot to death in 1980 in Australia) later turned up associated with

Euromac (European Manufacturing Center) Ltd., a British company that

tried to sell nuclear trigger krytrons to Saddam Hussein before the

first Gulf War. Nugan Hand's chief counsel, William Colby, a former

CIA Director, was found floating in the Chesapeake in 1996.

 

The sale of nuclear material to Iraq was funded through Saudi

operations in Houston, including those associated with George H. W.

Bush, George W. Bush, James R. Bath, and Saudis Abdullah Taha Baksh,

and Kamal Adham, as well as Lebanese businessman Ghaith Pharaon (who

was also involved in the collapse of Miami's CenTrust S & L, a bank that

had ties to Jeb Bush). This gang, along with Salem Bin Laden, the

older brother of Osama, funneled over $1 million into failed Bush

ventures, including Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Some of

the Saudi money also financed Enron Oil and Gas Resources (later EOG

Resources) in the Belspec Fusselman Field in Midland, Texas, a deal in

which George W. Bush had a financial stake. In fact, Saudi planes in

the 1980s landed in Houston with mountains of cash used to buy nuclear

material for Saddam to possibly use against the Iranians. The money

was laundered through Houston's Main Bank, a bank close to the Bush

family. Skyway Aircraft of Houston, owned by Bath, was invested in by

Abu Dhabi's ruler (the main owner of BCCI) and whose parent company in

the Cayman Islands was used by Ollie North to collect foreign money

for his Iran-contra enterprise.

 

Another person involved in the Cook Islands bank defrauding scheme was

a Lebanese-American named Samir Bashout (alias Dr. Khalaf B. Bashout)

who set up Midland International Bank and Trust Ltd in the Cook

Islands with no real capital. Bashout's Midland had nothing to do with

Midland Bank of the UK but may have been named for Midland, Texas, of

George W. Bush fame. Bashout was later convicted of beating his wife

in Rancho Park, Calif., amid a nasty divorce. She claimed he secreted

away much of his money. Bashout's Metro Bank (Philippines) account in

Los Angeles was found to contain only $10,000, not the $10 million he

claimed to Cook Islands' authorities. US Treasury agent John Shockey

alerted the Cook Islands internal auditor to Bashout's repeated

attempts to bounce a check for $5 million. In January 2002, Hamilton

Bank failed after it lost $500 million due to loan scandals and money

laundering charges. The recipient of a $5.5 million loan was Metro

Bank International, headquartered in Vanuatu, an offshore banking

location similar to the Cook Islands. Metro Bank was thought to

contain some of the billions of dollars laundered by the CIA and the

Cook Islands International Trust Corp. on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos.

Marcos's CIA intermediaries in the Cooks were Eldon William Morris,

James Centers, and Dante Dominigo Agdeppa. Morris was under

investigation by the Queensland Special Branch and the FBI in Hawaii

and California.

 

Bashout was also involved in the defunct World Arabic Television News

(WATN), an Arabic television network that attracted the attention of

the Houston-based Arab Times newspaper as not delivering on its

promises and defrauding investors.

 

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative reporter. He was

also the Operations Officer at Naval Facility Coos Head, Oregon from

1980 to 1982 and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation as a

temporary special agent.

 

http://onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/112504Madsen/112504madsen.html