U.S. losing war on terror, experts say

By Bob Deans

WASHINGTON - The United States is losing its fight against terrorism and the Iraq war is the biggest reason why, more than eight of 10 American terrorism and national security experts concluded in a poll released yesterday.

One participant, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey.

"The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror," said the former official, Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris, a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism efforts. "It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential."

Scheuer is one of more than 100 national security and terrorism analysts surveyed by Foreign Policy magazine and the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Asked whether the United States is "winning the war on terror," 84 percent said no and 13 percent answered yes. Asked whether the war in Iraq is helping or hurting the global anti-terrorism campaign, 87 percent said hurting. Eighty-six percent said the world is becoming "more dangerous for the United States and the American people."

White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites

Since 9/11, nobody -- and I mean nobody -- has done more reporting on the government's attempts to track terrorists through their data trails than the National Journal's Shane Harris. (The guy ate Spam and knocked back Tequizas with John Poindexter, for chrissake!) So I couldn't be more psyched to welcome Shane to the Defense Tech family. This is the first of what I hope will be a long string of posts for the site.

Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemn The New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism. But if the Times’ revelation about a program to monitor international exchanges is so damaging, why has the administration been chattering about efforts to monitor domestic transactions for nearly five years?

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many journalists — including this one — were briefed by U.S. Customs officials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up terrorist financiers by monitoring, among other things, "suspicious" bank transfers and ancient money lending programs favored by people of Middle Eastern descent.

I interviewed Marcy Forman, director of Green Quest, at her Washington offices in December 2001, when I was a writer for Government Executive magazine. Our meeting was sanctioned by Customs' public affairs office, and came at a time when the White House was eager to talk about all the work federal agencies were doing to hunt down terrorists. Forman told me the kinds of people, transactions, even locations that the government was targeting. (These are details, it should be noted, that the recent Times piece did not reveal.) Among the potentially sensitive items Forman told me, which were published:

“Operation Green Quest is focusing on the informal, largely paperless form of money exchange known as hawala, which is Arabic for ‘to change.’”

“Few undercover agents can penetrate Middle Eastern communities and money laundering rings because they look like outsiders and don't speak the language…. As a result, Green Quest has to be more clever, by setting traps on the Internet and working to flush currency traffickers out of their hiding places.”

“Treasury and FBI investigators have identified hawala as a means by which the alleged Sept. 11 terrorists may have received money from overseas.”

“Green Quest investigators, who've spent their careers dismantling money laundering rackets, were blindsided by the existence of the system. ‘Most of us couldn't spell hawala’ before Sept. 11,’ Forman said.”

“The agencies' [involved in Green Quest] cooperative efforts have recently culminated in raids of alleged money laundering operations that aid suspected terrorist networks.”

“Green Quest also wants to lower the threshold at which bank deposits and electronic funds transfers must be documented. Dropping the ceiling from $10,000 to $750, Forman said, may force money traffickers to try to get their cash out of the country by hand. They would then be subject to capture by a beefed-up cadre of Customs Service officers at border crossings, airports and seaports.”

Green Quest was only one of the administration’s efforts to combat terrorist financing which officials discussed publicly. More than two years after 9/11, federal officials testified before a congressional field hearing in Miami and "detailed efforts to stop the illegal financing of terrorist networks." A senior adviser for the Treasury Department "named several initiatives, such as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is developing technology to let financial institutions report suspicious transactions more easily and quickly." The adviser also named the system FinCEN was developing to manage a database built to search financial transactions. And he said the department was working directly with financial institutions to help them "develop software to better identify potential terrorist-financing activities."

These details, provided by Customs and Treasury officials, undoubtedly gave terrorists some insight into how the U.S. government was tracking them, and what investigators knew about terrorism financing. These officials weren’t whistleblowers—they were sanctioned by the administration to dispense this information.

In the wake of the latest Times revelation, Rep. Peter King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, wants the attorney general to investigate and prosecute reporters and editors of the Times for “aiding the cause of our enemies.” What King and others critics haven’t addressed is how the publication of specific details, over the past half decade, about the techniques the government employees to track terrorists’ money doesn’t also aid their cause.

-- Shane Harris

UPDATE 06/29/9:34 AM: Intel Dump takes a very different point of view. Meanwhile, Bob Kerrey -- and even, to some extent, Peter King -- wonder the Times' disclosure actually helps counterterror efforts.

Bob Kerrey, a member of the 9/11 commission, [said] that if the news reports drive terrorists out of the banking system, that could actually help the counterterrorism cause.

"If we tell people who are potential criminals that we have a lot of police on the beat, that's a substantial deterrent," said Mr. Kerrey, now president of New School University. If terrorists decide it is too risky to move money through official channels, "that's very good, because it's much, much harder to move money in other ways," Mr. Kerrey said.

A State Department official, Anthony Wayne, made a parallel point in 2004 before Congress. "As we've made it more difficult for them to use the banking system," Mr. Wayne said, "they've been shifting to other less reliable and more cumbersome methods, such as cash couriers..."

Since [9/11], the Treasury Department has produced dozens of news releases and public reports detailing its efforts. Though officials appear never to have mentioned the Swift program, they have repeatedly described their cooperation with financial networks to identify accounts held by people and organizations linked to terrorism...

Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, convened a hearing in 2004 where Treasury officials described at length their efforts, assisted by financial institutions, to trace terrorists' money. But he has been among the most vehement critics of the disclosures about the Swift program, saying editors and reporters of The New York Times should be imprisoned for publishing government secrets.

In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. King said he saw no contradiction. "Obviously we wanted the terrorists to know we were trying to track them," Mr. King said. "But we didn't want them to know the details."

American Coup D'Etat

Military thinkers discuss the unthinkable

Eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, Americans—who spent decades war-gaming a Soviet invasion and have taken more recently to daydreaming about “ticking bomb” scenarios—should cast at least an occasional thought toward the only truly existential threat that American democracy might face today. We now live in a unipolar world, after all, in which conquest of the United States by an outside power is nearly inconceivable. Even the best-equipped terrorists, for their part, could dispatch at most a city or two; and armed revolution is a futile prospect, so fearsomely is our homeland secured by police and military forces. To subdue America entirely, the only route remaining would be to seize the machinery of state itself, to steer it toward malign ends—to carry out, that is, a coup d’état.

Given that the linchpin of any coup d’état is the participation, or at least the support, of a nation’s military officers, Harper’s Magazine assembled a panel of experts to discuss the state of our own military—its culture, its relationship with the wider society, and the steadfastness of its loyalty to the ideals of democracy and to the United States Constitution.

The following forum is based on a discussion that took place in January at the Ruth’s Chris Steak House in Arlington, Virginia. Bill Wasik served as moderator.

ANDREW J. BACEVICH is a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author, most recently, of The New American Militarism. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1992.

BRIG. GEN. CHARLES J. DUNLAP JR. is a staff judge advocate at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 1992 he published an essay entitled “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012.” (His views here are personal and do not reflect those of the U.S. Department of Defense.)

RICHARD H. KOHN is the chair of the curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and editor of the book The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789‒1989, among others.

EDWARD N. LUTTWAK is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author of many books, including Coup D’Etat: A Practical Handbook.

BILL WASIK is a senior editor of Harper’s Magazine.

I.

BILL WASIK: Let us begin with the most straightforward approach. Would it be possible for a renegade group of military officers, or the officer corps as a whole, to simply plot and carry out a coup d’état in the United States?

EDWARD LUTTWAK: If somebody asked me to plan such a coup, I wouldn’t take on the assignment.

CHARLES DUNLAP: I wouldn’t either. [Laughs]

LUTTWAK: I’ve done it for other countries. But it just wouldn’t work here. You could go down the list and take over these headquarters, that headquarters, the White House, the Defense Department, the television, the radio, and so on. You could arrest all the leaders, detain or kill off their families. And you would have accomplished nothing.

ANDREW BACEVICH: That’s right. What are you going to seize that, having seized it, gives you control of the country?

LUTTWAK: You would sit in the office of the Secretary of Defense, and the first place where you wouldn’t be obeyed would be inside your office. If they did follow orders inside the office, then people in the rest of the Pentagon wouldn’t. If everybody in the Pentagon followed orders, people out in the military bases wouldn’t. If they did, as well, American citizens would still not accept your legitimacy.

RICHARD KOHN: It’s a problem of public opinion. All of the organs of opinion in this country would rise up with one voice: the courts, the media, business leaders, education leaders, the clergy.

LUTTWAK: You could shut down the media—

KOHN: You can’t shut it down. It’s too dispersed.

LUTTWAK: No, you could shut down the media, but even if you did shut down the media, you still wouldn’t be able to rule. Because, remember, in order to actually rule, you have to have acceptance. Think of Saddam Hussein: he was not a very, you know, popular leader, but he did have to be obeyed at the very minimum by his security forces, his Republican Guards. So there is a minimum group that one needs in order to control any country. But in this country, you could never control such a minimum group.

KOHN: I’ve raised this point before with military audiences: Do you really think you can control New York City without the cooperation of 40,000 New York police officers? And what about Idaho, with all those militia groups? Do you think you can control Idaho? I’m not even going to talk about Texas.

BACEVICH: And this comes back to the federal system. As Edward pointed out, even if you seized Washington, Americans are willing to acknowledge that Washington is the seat of political authority only to a limited extent. The coup plotters could sit in the Capitol, but up in Boston we’re going to ask, “What’s this got to do with us?”

DUNLAP: It’s also impossible given the culture of the military. The notion of a cabal of U.S. military officers colluding to overthrow the government is almost unthinkable. Civilian control of the military is too deeply ingrained in the armed forces.

BACEVICH: The professional ethic within the military is firmly committed to the principle that they don’t rule.

WASIK: So we can agree, then, that the blunt approach won’t work. Was there ever a time in our history when the United States was in danger of an outright military takeover?

KOHN: The closest, I would say, was a faction in the military at Newburgh, New York, in March of 1783. The army felt like it was about to be abandoned in the oncoming peace; officers were concerned about their reintegration into American society, that they wouldn’t get the pay that had been promised them. They got caught up in a very complex plot, in which they were used by a faction in the Congress that was trying to change the Articles of Confederation to give the central government the power to tax. Nationalist leaders in Congress basically provoked a coup attempt and then double-crossed the officers that they induced to do it by tipping off George Washington. All this led to a famous meeting of the officers when it was proposed that they see to their own interests, and either march on the Congress or, if the war continued, retire to the West and abandon the country. Washington faced down the conspirators in an emotional moment at Newburgh on March 15, 1783.

DUNLAP: He was reading a letter from a congressman, as I recall, and then at one point he said, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles. For I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”

KOHN: And this caused a kind of emotional break at the meeting, according to the people who were there.

DUNLAP: Because they realized how much he had sacrificed. And it humiliated them.

LUTTWAK: So the point here is to make sure your army has excellent retirement benefits. This was an industrial action. It was about getting paid.

KOHN: The pay represented a lot more than just the money, though. There was deep political intrigue involved, and personal animosity.

LUTTWAK: In other words, the republic was in great danger in 1783. Which doesn’t cause immediate alarm these days in the streets of Manhattan.

BACEVICH: But this does bring up another crucial reason there could never be a military coup in the United States: the military has learned to play politics. It doesn’t need to have a coup in order to get what it wants most of the time. Especially since World War II, the services have become very skillful at exploiting the media and at manipulating the Congress—particularly on the defense budget, which is estimated now to be equal to that of the entire rest of the world combined.

DUNLAP: I agree, though I wouldn’t characterize it negatively. The military works within the system to achieve its needs.

LUTTWAK: A few years back, the president of Argentina told the country’s air force that its budget for the next year would be $80 million. Now, Argentina has a fairly large air force; $80 million was enough for one base, basically. But the air force had no recourse, no back channels to Congress, no talk shows to go on. That could never happen in the United States.

BACEVICH: Right. Our military doesn’t need to overthrow the government, because it has learned how to play politics in order to achieve its interests.

II.

WASIK: Are there any unforeseen circumstances in which a coup might become possible in the United States?

KOHN: One could conceive of situations in which the military would be invited to exercise extraconstitutional authority. Imagine rolling biological attacks, with the need to quarantine whole cities or regions. A military takeover might arise, indeed, from a politician wanting to simply retain order in the country. It might be supported by the American people—and Congress and the courts might go along.

LUTTWAK: Such a scenario would probably play out through a multi-stage transformation. After all, take any group of nice people on a trip; if five bad things happen to them in a row, they will end up as cannibals. How many adverse events are needed before a political system, arguably the most firmly rooted constitutional system in the history of the world, becomes uprooted? How many September 11ths, on what scale? How much panic, what kind of leadership? All of us can say that it is foolish to talk of a coup in the United States, but any of us could design a scenario by which a coup becomes possible.

DUNLAP: If there were a massive attack by a nuclear weapon, or by some other weapon of mass destruction, the immediate crisis might require the use of the armed forces. But obviously there are plans for those scenarios, and if they’re executed, then control would be maintained under the Constitution.

BACEVICH: But these are scenarios in which the military would be invited to overstep its role.

KOHN: Yes. I cannot conceive that in such a situation the military would aggrandize its position on its own.

WASIK: So a weapon of mass destruction might cause the military to assume greater power. What about a purely political crisis? Could the military step in if, say, the Constitution were unclear on a course of action?

DUNLAP: One interesting scenario would be a crisis between the branches of government that are expected to control the military. I.e., if the armed forces were caught between the orders of the president, the Congress, or even the courts, and there were no constitutional path to resolve the disagreement.

KOHN: Wouldn’t the armed forces simply freeze? They’d be paralyzed.

LUTTWAK: It’s a very interesting line of inquiry. Let’s say a president, exercising his proper and legitimate presidential authority, initiates a military action. Then Congress wakes up and says, “Wait a minute, this president is berserk; he’s starting a war, and we’re against it.” But in the meantime, the military force has already been put in a very compromised situation. If things were moving very fast, the military might well take an unconstitutional action.

KOHN: Something similar actually happened during Reconstruction: there were conflicting orders from the Congress and the president.

LUTTWAK: What were the details?

KOHN: It was 1867, when Grant was the commanding general.

BACEVICH: The president, Andrew Johnson, was in favor of a rapid reconciliation and minimal political change. The Congress, under the control of radical Republicans, wanted to impose change on the South, and also thereby consolidate Republican control of the region. This dispute came to a head when Congress passed laws that essentially stripped Johnson of his control over the army: as far as Reconstruction was concerned, Grant and Edwin Stanton, who was secretary of war, were to take their marching orders from Congress. When Johnson fired Stanton, Grant found himself both the commanding general of the army and the acting secretary of war. But he struck an obedient, apolitical pose, and he continued to do the bidding of Congress.

LUTTWAK: What about a situation in which the military was ordered to start a war that it did not believe could be won? Imagine that President Bush orders the American armed forces to effect a landing in Fujian province and march up to Beijing. The army would say, “Of course, Mr. President, we’re willing to obey orders. But we have to have a universal military conscription, we have to bring our forces up to four million and a half.” And imagine that Bush refuses.

BACEVICH: The military would leak it to the Washington Post, and the war would never happen. It’s the Bosnia case: when President Clinton wanted to intervene in Bosnia, General Barry McCaffrey testified to Congress and gave a wildly inflated projection of the number of occupation troops that would be required. By overstating the cost of the operation, the generals changed the political dynamic and Clinton found his hands tied, at least for a period of time.

WASIK: Let’s get back, though, to the subject of crises, whether real or contrived. It seems as though the American public wants to see the military step in during these situations. A poll taken just after Hurricane Katrina found that 69 percent of people wanted to see the military serve as the primary responder to natural disasters.

DUNLAP: People don’t fully appreciate what the military is. By design it is authoritarian, socialistic, undemocratic. Those qualities help the armed forces to serve their very unique purpose in our society: namely, external defense against foreign enemies. In the military we look to destroy threats, not apprehend them for processing through a system that presumes them innocent until proven guilty. And I should add that if you do try to imprint soldiers with the restraint that a police force needs, then you disadvantage them against the ruthless adversaries that real war involves.

WASIK: Then why do so many Americans say they want to see the military get involved in law enforcement, “peacekeeping,” etc.?

DUNLAP: Americans today have an incredible trust in the military. In poll after poll they have much more confidence in the armed forces than they do in other institutions. The most recent poll, just this past spring, had trust in the military at 74 percent, while Congress was at 22 percent and the presidency was at 44 percent. In other words, the armed forces are much more trusted than the civilian institutions that are supposed to control them.

III.

BACEVICH: The question that arises is whether, in fact, we’re not already experiencing what is in essence a creeping coup d’état. But it’s not people in uniform who are seizing power. It’s militarized civilians, who conceive of the world as such a dangerous place that military power has to predominate, that constitutional constraints on the military need to be loosened. The ideology of national security has become ever more woven

into our politics. It has been especially apparent since 9/11, but more broadly it’s been going on since the beginning of the Cold War.

KOHN: The Constitution is being warped.

BACEVICH: Here we don’t need to conjure up hypothetical scenarios of the president deploying troops, etc. We have a president who created a program that directs the National Security Agency, which is part of the military, to engage in domestic eavesdropping.

LUTTWAK: I don’t know if this would be called a coup.

KOHN: Because it’s so incremental?

LUTTWAK: It’s more like an erosion. The president is usurping additional powers. Although what’s interesting is that the president’s usurpation of this particular power was entirely unnecessary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which approves terrorism-related requests for wiretaps, can be summoned over the telephone in a matter of minutes. In its entire history, it has said no to a request for surveillance only a handful of times, and those were cases where there was a mistake in the request. Really, even a small-town sheriff can get any interception he wants, so long as after the fact he can show a judge that there was reasonable cause.

BACEVICH: Bush’s move was unnecessary if the object of the exercise was to engage in surveillance. It was very useful indeed if the object is to expand executive power.

KOHN: Which is exactly what has been the agenda since the beginning of this administration.

LUTTWAK: Now you’re attributing motives.

BACEVICH: Yes, I am! If you read John Yoo, he suggests that one conscious aim of the project was to eliminate constraints on the chief executive when it comes to matters of national security.

DUNLAP: I will say that even if it was a completely legal project, there is a question of how appropriate it is for the armed forces to be involved in that kind of activity. Since, as I noted before, the American people have much less confidence in those institutions of civilian control than they do in the armed forces, we need to be very careful about what we ask the military to do, even assuming it’s legal.

WASIK: If we are talking about a “creeping coup” that is already under way, in what direction is it creeping?

BACEVICH: The creeping coup deflects attention away from domestic priorities and toward national-security matters, so that is where all our resources get deployed. “Leadership” today is what is demonstrated in the national-security realm. The current presidency is interesting in that regard. What has Bush accomplished apart from posturing in the role of commander in chief? He declares wars, he prosecutes wars, he insists we must continue to prosecute wars.

KOHN: By framing the terrorist threat itself as a war, we tend to look upon our national security from a much more military perspective.

BACEVICH: We don’t get Social Security reform, we don’t get immigration reform. The role of the president increasingly comes to be defined by his military function.

KOHN: And so our foreign policy becomes militarized. We neglect our diplomacy, de-emphasize allies.

DUNLAP: Well, without commenting on this particular subject—

KOHN: You shouldn’t. [Laughs]

DUNLAP: —is this not something that is decided at the ballot box? I mean, aren’t these the kinds of issues that the American people decide when they elect a president?

KOHN: But you imply by that statement, Charlie, that the ballot box exists as a kind of pristine, uncontextualized Athenian gathering at the square to vote. In fact, the ballot box in this country is the product of how things are framed by the political parties, by the political leaders. Also, very few of our congressional districts now are really contested, after gerrymandering. Very few of our Senate seats are real contests.

LUTTWAK: It becomes about personalities: you ask an American citizen to choose between Laura Bush and Teresa Heinz Kerry, and they choose Laura Bush. But it doesn’t mean that they favor the misuse of the American military to try and change the political culture of Afghanistan. This is madness—and it is bipartisan madness.

BACEVICH: That’s a key point.

LUTTWAK: Bipartisan madness. This is not even militarism. Militarism had to do with eminent professors of Greek desperate to become reserve officers so they could be invited to the military ball. That’s militarism. This is an intoxication about what the actual capabilities of any military force could be.

DUNLAP: This intoxication with the military’s capabilities certainly isn’t coming from the uniformed military officers.

BACEVICH: Except insofar as they are involved in the playing of politics, in constantly pressing for more resources. Meanwhile, we’ve underfunded the State Department for twenty-five years.

LUTTWAK: I once was privy to a peace negotiation conducted in the corridors of the State Department. The State Department literally had no funds to give lunch to the participants, a fact that both sides complained bitterly about.

DUNLAP: Well, I don’t think it’s anything new that the State Department is underfunded. The State Department has no bases in any state, so it does not have a constituency. But in terms of the expenditure of resources in the Department of Defense, that is very much controlled by civilians and not military commanders.

LUTTWAK: But it is still the military that has the resources.

BACEVICH: And so over time—because this has happened over time—you create a bias for military action. Which agency of government has the capacity to act? Well, the Department of Defense does. And that bias gets continually reinforced, and helps to create a circumstance in which any president who wants to appear effective, and therefore to win reelection, sees that the opportunity to do so is by acting in the military sphere.

IV.

WASIK: I want to address the question of partisanship in the military. Insofar as there is a “culture war” in America, everyone seems to agree that the armed forces fight on the Republican side. And this is borne out in polls: self-described Republicans outnumber Democrats in the military by more than four to one, and only 7 percent of soldiers describe themselves as “liberal.”

KOHN: It has become part of the informal culture of the military to be Republican. You see this at the military academies. They pick it up in the culture, in the training establishments.

DUNLAP: The military is an inherently conservative organization, and this is true of all militaries around the world. Also the demographics have changed: people in the South who were Democratic twenty years ago have become Republican today.

BACEVICH: Yes, all militaries are conservative. But since 1980 our military has become conservative in a more explicitly ideological sense. And that allegiance has been returned in spades by the conservative side in the culture war, which sees soldiers as virtuous representatives of how the country ought to be.

KOHN: And meanwhile there is a streak of anti-militarism on the left.

BACEVICH: It’s not that people on the left disdain the military but rather that they are just agnostic about it. They don’t identify with soldiers or soldiering.

LUTTWAK: And their children have less of a propensity to serve in the military. Parents who describe themselves as liberal are less likely to make positive noises to their children about the armed forces.

DUNLAP: Which brings up a crucial point. Let’s accept as a fact that the U.S. military has become more overtly ideological since 1980. What has happened since 1980? Roughly, that was the beginning of the all-volunteer force. What we are seeing right now is the result of twenty-five years of an all-volunteer force, in which people have self-selected into the organization.

BACEVICH: But the military is also recruited. And it doesn’t seem to me that the military has much interest in whether or not the force is representative of American society.

KOHN: I don’t think that’s true.

BACEVICH: Where do you think recruiting command is focused right now? It’s focused on those evangelicals, it’s on the rural South. We are reinforcing the lack of representativeness in the military because of the concentrated recruiting efforts among groups predisposed to serve.

DUNLAP: They are so focused on getting qualified people. The military is going to the Supreme Court so that it can recruit on campuses where currently we’re not able to.

KOHN: That’s just law schools.

DUNLAP: But it has implications across the armed forces.

BACEVICH: The recruiters go for the rich turf, which is where the evangelicals are. You have to work a hell of a lot harder to recruit people from Newton and Wellesley, Massachusetts.

KOHN: Or anywhere in the well-to-do or even middle-class suburbs.

BACEVICH: In an economic sense, the services are behaving quite rationally. But in doing so they perpetuate the fact that we have a military that in no way “looks like” American society.

DUNLAP: The other part of the problem is the behavior of the politicians. They realize the affection that American people have for people in uniform.

BACEVICH: And so they land on aircraft carriers to prance around in the flight suit of a fighter jock. Both parties now see the military vote as being a part of politics, as a constituency. It’s a constituency that the Republicans think they own and intend to continue to own. It’s a constituency that the Democrats want to pry away.

KOHN: And partisanship in the military overall, i.e., the percentage of the military that identifies with a party as opposed to being “independent” or non-affiliated, is much greater overall. Not only are military officers more partisan than the general population; they’re more partisan than, say, business leaders and other elite groups. I’ve tracked the numbers of retired four-star generals and admirals endorsing a candidate in presidential campaigns, and it’s vastly up in the last two elections.

BACEVICH: Remember at the Democratic National Convention, where General Claudia Kennedy introduced General John Shalikashvili to address the delegates? Why were they up there? There was only one reason: to try to match the parade of retired senior officers that the Republicans have long been trotting out on political occasions.

KOHN: But is that to get military votes? Or just to connect with the American people on national security and patriotism?

BACEVICH: It’s both. In 2000, the Republican National Committee put ads in the Army Times and other service magazines attacking the Clinton/Gore record. To me that was, quite frankly, contemptible.

WASIK: It seems as if the two are related: if it’s reported that you have the support of the military—as was the case before the 2004 election, when newspapers noted that Kerry had less than 20 percent support within the military—then you get a halo effect among the rest of the voters. Does the partisanship of our military present a danger to the nation?

KOHN: One of the great pillars in our history that has prevented military intervention in politics has been the military’s nonpartisan attitude. That’s why General George Marshall’s generation of officers essentially declined to vote at all, as did generations before them. In fact, for the first time in over a century we now have an officer corps that does identify overwhelmingly with one political party. And that is corrosive.

V.

KOHN: Consider this glaring example of political manipulation by the military: After every other American war before the Cold War, the country demobilized its wartime military establishment. Even during the Cold War, when we kept a large standing military, we expanded and contracted it for shooting wars. But in 1990 and 1991, the military—through General Colin Powell, who was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time—intervened and effectively prevented a demobilization.

BACEVICH: More accurately, I’d say that he prevented any discussion of a demobilization.

KOHN: That’s right.

DUNLAP: We did have a reduction in the size of the military. There were cuts of around 9 percent, in both dollars and manpower.

KOHN: But it was nothing compared to the end of great American wars prior to that.

BACEVICH: Powell is explicit on this in his memoirs. “I was determined to have the Joint Chiefs drive the military strategy train,” he wrote. He was not going to have “military reorganization schemes shoved down our throat.”

KOHN: This was not a coup, but it was very clearly a circumvention of civilian political authority.

BACEVICH: Let us also consider the classic case of gays in the military. Bill Clinton ran for the presidency saying he would issue an executive order that did for gays what Harry Truman did for African Americans. He wins the election. When he tries to do precisely what he said he would do, it triggers a firestorm of opposition in the military. This was not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff merely saying, in private, “Mr. President, I would like to give you my professional opinion.”

KOHN: It was the most open revolt the American military as a whole has ever engaged in.

LUTTWAK: Ever?

KOHN: Open revolt, yes.

BACEVICH: Now, Clinton’s actions were ill-advised, to put it mildly. But what we got was something like rebellion. Two Marines published an op-ed in the Washington Post, warning the Joint Chiefs that if they failed to stop this policy from being implemented, they were likely to lose the loyalty of junior officers. I mean, holy smokes.

DUNLAP: Which brings up the issue: How transparent should the uniformed side of the armed forces be about their opinions? I will tell you, it is very difficult for serving officers to figure out exactly where the line is. There are points where they feel that their military values require them to speak out.

KOHN: I’m not sympathetic. As professional military officers, they are called upon to make far more difficult decisions in far more ambiguous and dangerous situations. The civil-military relationship is one of the most important parts of their profession, and if they are not educated and prepared enough to make the proper judgments, then they don’t belong in high-ranking positions.

LUTTWAK: It seems as though we should take into account the views of the armed forces in regard to military questions and nothing more. The military is like a surgeon. If you go to a hospital—even if you own the hospital—you will defer to the surgeon if he tells you that you need your appendix out rather than your leg cut off. But if the surgeon starts talking about religion or politics or homosexuality, you wouldn’t defer to him at all.

KOHN: But with gays in the military, the officers framed it in military terms. They said that revoking the ban would destroy the good order and discipline of the armed forces.

LUTTWAK: In the showers.

KOHN: Exactly. In retrospect, it was a foolish argument—but that was how they framed it, in military terms.

LUTTWAK: So how should it have been done differently? President Clinton comes in and wants to allow homosexuals to serve in the military. Do soldiers have the right to express themselves on this?

KOHN: Not publicly.

DUNLAP: By law, you can contact your congressman.

LUTTWAK: Right.

DUNLAP: That may be the answer. The answer may be you can just do it on an individual basis.

KOHN: On a private basis.

LUTTWAK: But let’s consider a more recent example. One day General Eric Shinseki, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, happened to be testifying on Capitol Hill. Somebody asked him about a possible invasion of Iraq, and General Shinseki—reflecting what, as I understand it, was the view of anyone who had ever looked at that country and counted its population—said that it would take several hundred thousand troops to control Iraq. Whereupon Shinseki was publicly contradicted by his civilian superiors, who ridiculed his professional opinion.

DUNLAP: Right. Dick, do you consider that to have been appropriate feedback for him?

KOHN: No, Shinseki behaved appropriately. In contradicting and disparaging him, the civilians signalled to the military that they did not want candor even when it is required, which is in front of Congress.

DUNLAP: There are two other interesting examples with General Pace, our current chairman. One was when he differed with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld about what a military person should do if he or she is present when there’s an abuse during an interrogation process. Pace insisted that the military had the obligation to intervene—which I think is the right answer.

KOHN: But afterward he fudged it and claimed that there was no disagreement with the secretary.

DUNLAP: Be that as it may, I think it was the right answer. The second and, I think, more difficult scenario was when Representative Jack Murtha said that he wouldn’t join the armed forces today, nor would he expect others to do so. General Pace publicly criticized Murtha’s remarks. Here was another instance in which the senior representative of the uniformed military spoke out in what was arguably a political context against civilian leadership. But in this case again, I thought it was appropriate.

WASIK: So it seems clear that whether we like it or not, the military has learned how to use the political system to protect its interests and also to uphold what it sees as its values. Thinking over the long term, are there any dangers inherent in this?

KOHN: Well, at this point the military has a long tradition of getting what it wants. If we ever attempted to truly demobilize—i.e., if the military were suddenly, radically cut back—it could lead if not to a coup then to very severe civil-military tension.

BACEVICH: Because the political game would no longer be prejudiced in the military’s favor.

KOHN: That’s right.

BACEVICH: But there is a more subtle danger too. The civilian leadership knows that in dealing with the military, they are dealing with an institution whose behavior is not purely defined by adherence to the military professional ethic, disinterested service, civilian subordination. Instead, the politicians know that they’re dealing with an institution that to some degree has its own agenda. And if you’re dealing with somebody who has his own agenda, well, you can bargain, you can trade. That creates a small opening—again, not to a coup but to the military making deals with politicians whose purposes may not be consistent with the Constitution.

Was the Invasion of Iraq A Jewish Conspiracy?

Did the Jews do it?

The US Congress will open hearings this week on the War in Iraq — a wee bit late one might think. But one question at the forefront of the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be asked: Did the Jews do it? I mean, after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manipulate the government of the United States into invading Babylon as part of a scheme to abet the expansion of Greater Israel?

The question was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speaking at a meeting of Mobilization for Peace in San Jose. A member of the audience asked, “Put it together — Who’s behind this war? Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a “Jew” American Century and, and, why don’t you talk about that, huh? And…”

But the questioner never had the full opportunity to complete his query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman — whose confederates then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Center was taking on a somewhat warlike character, I chose to call in the authorities and slip out the back.

Still, his question intrigued me. As an investigative reporter, “Who’s behind this war?” seemed like a reasonable challenge — and if it were a plot of Christ-killers and Illuminati, so be it. I just report the facts, ma’am.

And frankly, at first, it seemed like the gent had a point, twisted though his spin might be. There was Paul Wolfowitz, before Congress in March 2003, offering Americans the bargain of the century: a free Iraq — not “free” as in “freedom and democracy” but free in the sense of this won’t cost us a penny. Wolfowitz testified: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money.”

A “Free” Iraq

And where would these billions come from? Wolfowitz told us: “It starts with the assets of the Iraqi people… The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next two or three years.”

This was no small matter. The vulpine Deputy Defense Secretary knew that the number one question on the minds of Americans was not, “Does Saddam really have the bomb?” but “What’s this little war going to cost us?”

However, Wolfowitz left something out of his testimony: the truth. I hunted for weeks for the source of the Pentagon’s oil revenue projections — and found them. They were wildly different from the Wolfowitz testimony. But this was not perjury. Ever since the conviction of Elliott Abrams for perjury before Congress during the Iran-Contra hearings, neither Wolfowitz nor the other Bush factotums swear an oath before testifying. If you don’t raise your hand and promise to tell the truth, “so help me, God,” you’re off the hook with federal prosecutors.

How the Lord will judge that little ploy, we cannot say.

But Wolfowitz’s little numbers game can hardly count as a Great Zionist conspiracy. That seemed to come, at first glance, in the form of a confidential 101-page document slipped to our team at BBC’s Newsnight. It detailed the economic “recovery” of Iraq’s post-conquest economy. This blueprint for occupation, we learned, was first devised in secret in late 2001.

Notably, this program for Iraq’s recovery wasn’t written by Iraqis; rather, it was promoted by the neo-conservatives of the Defense Department, home of Abrams, Wolfowitz, Harold Rhode and other desktop Napoleons unafraid of moving toy tanks around the Pentagon war room.

Nose-Twist’s Hidden Hand

The neo-cons’ 101-page confidential document, which came to me in a brown envelope in February 2003, just before the tanks rolled, goes boldly where no U.S. invasion plan had gone before: the complete rewrite of the conquered state’s “policies, law and regulations.” A cap on the income taxes of Iraq’s wealthiest was included as a matter of course. And this was undoubtedly history’s first military assault plan appended to a program for toughening the target nation’s copyright laws. Once the 82nd Airborne liberated Iraq, never again would the Ba’athist dictatorship threaten America with bootleg dubs of Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time.”

It was more like a corporate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. It didn’t strike me as the work of a Kosher Cabal for an Imperial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork — Pig Heaven for corporate America looking for a slice of Iraq, and I suspected its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled Grover Norquist.

Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influence peddlers in Washington. Those jealous of his inside track to the White House call him “Gopher Nose-Twist.”

A devout Christian, Norquist channeled a million dollars to the Christian Coalition to fight the devil’s tool, legalized gambling. He didn’t tell the Coalition that the loot came from an Indian tribe represented by Norquist’s associate, Jack Abramoff. (The tribe didn’t want competition for its own casino operations.)

I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist’s L Street office, and under a poster of his idol [’NIXON — NOW MORE THAN EVER”], Norquist took a look at the “recovery” plan for Iraq and practically jumped over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at seeing his baby. Yes, he promoted the privatizations, the tax limit for the rich, and the change in copyright law, all concerns close to the hearts and wallets of his clients.

“The Oil” on Page 73

The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S. occupation grabfest, but there was, without doubt, one notable item in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the “privatization… [of] the oil and supporting industries,” the sell-off of every ounce of Iraq’s oil fields and reserves. Its mastermind, I learned, was Ariel Cohen of the Heritage Foundation.

For the neo-cons, this was The Big One. Behind it, no less a goal than to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia.

It would work like this: the Saudi’s power rests on control of OPEC, the oil cartel which, as any good monopoly, withholds oil from the market, kicking up prices. Sell-off Iraq’s oil fields and private companies will pump oil in their little Iraqi patches to the max. Iraq, the neo-cons hoped, would crank out six million barrels of oil a day, bust its OPEC quota, flood the world market, demolish OPEC and, as the price of oil fell off a cliff, Saudi Arabia would
fall to its knees.

“It’s a no-brainer,” Cohen told me, at his office at Heritage. It was a dim little cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone rang only once. For a guy who was supposed to be The Godfather of a globe-spanning Zionist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monopoly, he seemed kind of, well… pathetic.

And he failed. While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and copyright laws were dictated into Iraqi law by occupation chief Paul Bremer, the Cohen neo-con oil privatization died an unhappy death. What happened, Ari?

“Arab economists,” he hissed, “hired by the State Department… the witches brew of the Saudi Royal family and Soviet Ostblock.”

Well, the Soviet Ostblock does not exist, but the Arab economists do. I spoke with them in Riyadh, in London, in California, in wry accents mixing desert and Oxford drawls. They speak with confidence, knowing Saudi Arabia’s political authority is protected by the royal families — of Houston petroleum.

“Enhance OPEC”

After two mad years of hunting, I discovered the real plan for Iraq’s oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fallujah. Some 323 pages long and deeply confidential, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III Institute in Houston, Texas, under the strict guidance of Big Oil’s minions. It was the culmination of a series of planning groups that began in December 2000 with key players from the Baker Institute and Council on Foreign Relations (including one Ken Lay of Enron). This was followed by a State Department invasion-planning session in Walnut Creek, California, in February 2001, only weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Its concepts received official blessing after a March 2001 gathering of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq’s oil fields.

Once I discovered the Big Oil plan, several of the players agreed to speak with me (not, to the chagrin of some, realizing that I rarely hold such conversions without secretly recording them). Most forthright was Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, who was flown into Baghdad on a C-17 to make sure there would be no neo-con monkey business in America’s newest oil fields.

It had been a very good war for Big Oil, with tripled oil prices meaning tripled profits. In Houston, I asked Carroll, a commanding, steel-straight chief executive, about Ari Cohen’s oil privatization plan, the anti-Saudi “no-brainer.”

“I would agree with that statement” Caroll told me, “privatization is a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain.”

Bush world is divided in two: neo-cons on one side, and the Establishment (which includes the oil companies and the Saudis) on the other. The plan the Establishment created, crafted by Houston oil men, called for locking up Iraq’s oil with agreements between a new state oil company under “profit-sharing agreements” with “IOCs” (International Oil Companies). The combine could “enhance the [Iraq’s] government’s relationship with OPEC,” it read, by holding the line on quotas and thereby upholding high prices.

Wolfowitz Dammerung: Twilight Of The Neo-Con Gods

So there you have it. Wolfowitz and his neo-con clique — bookish, foolish, vainglorious — had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and convincingly by the powers of petroleum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis.

Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a contest. The end-game was crushing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Babylon. And to make certain the arriviste neo-cons got the point, public punishment was exacted, from exile to demotion to banishment. In January 2005, neo-con pointman Douglas Feith resigned from the Defense Department; his assistant
Larry Franklin later was busted for passing documents to pro-Israel lobbyists.
The State Department’s knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con orthodoxies, John Bolton, was booted from Washington to New York to the powerless post of U.N. Ambassador.

Finally, on March 16, 2005, second anniversary of the invasion, neo-con leader of the pack Wolfowitz was cast out of the Pentagon war room and tossed into the World Bank, moving from the testosterone-powered, war-making decision center to the lending office for Bangladeshi chicken farmers.
“The realists,” crowed the triumphant editor of the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, “have defeated the fantasists!”

So much for the Big Zionist Conspiracy that supposedly directed this war. A half- dozen confused Jews, wandering in the policy desert a long distance from mainstream Jewish views, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly aphorisms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC potentates with a combined throw weight of half a trillion barrels of oil.

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Investigative reporter Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats,
Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left and other
Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War to be released next week in United Kingdom and Ireland by Penguin UK, from which this essay is adapted.

Is Brownback Bringing Opus Dei Into The Senate?

by Bob Geiger
http://www.democrats.com/node/9220

The United States Senate is often called "the greatest deliberative body in the world" which usually raises the bar on the tenor and intellectual content of speeches given on the floor and for the official record.

Not so for Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) who took to the Senate floor last week to deliver a strident push for the bigoted Marriage Protection Amendment, with massive distortions of the issue and an argument that was based almost solely on the opinion of a little-known, conservative think tank affiliated with the Roman Catholic organization, Opus Dei .

"The problem we have in front of us is the institution of marriage has been weakened, and the effort to redefine it on this vast social experiment that we have going on, redefining marriage differently than it has ever been defined before," the Kansas Senator grimly intoned last week. "This effort of this vast social experiment, the early data that we see from other places, harms the institution of the family, the raising of the next generation. And it is harmful to the future of the Republic."

Brownback then went on to give figures for how various states have shown their hatred of gay people with their own prohibitions on same-sex marriage and used that as his rationale for a similar amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

But Brownback really hit his stride when he described a paper, called "Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good," published by a fairly new and extremely-conservative group at Princeton University. According to Brownback, the paper is an "… important statement of principles from top American scholars [to] be considered carefully by my colleagues." He then added that the sentiments expressed in the non-scientific treatise were so vital to our national dialog that they should "..help guide our debate on this issue."

The paper, sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, makes a case for banning same-sex marriage altogether. What's extraordinary, is the idea of a United States Senator attempting to sway opinion on an amendment that would have altered our Constitution (had it not been defeated last Wednesday) by using a paper from an organization linked to Opus Dei, a strict, religious group that some former members have described as a cult.

Brownback spent a good part of his lengthy Senate speech last week citing the study and attributing it to "this Princeton group of scholars" while never mentioning that all of the findings were based on the ultraconservative Witherspoon Institute bolstered by the involvement -- directly or indirectly -- of a nonprofit, tax-exempt religious organization in Opus Dei.

So what exactly is the Witherspoon Institute, whose paper formed the foundation of Brownback's anti-gay argument?

The Institute, which has only been around since 2003, has close ties to Tony Perkins and the Family Research Council , but is also tightly aligned with Opus Dei. Indeed, Luis Tellez, the president of the Witherspoon Institute is also the director and lead cleric of Opus Dei in Princeton.

Since its founding in 1928, Opus Dei has been known for its traditionalist values and right-wing political stances. And critics in academia -- which include former members who sometimes go through "deprogramming" upon exiting Opus Dei -- charge that organizations like the Witherspoon Institute are just veiled attempts by Opus Dei to spread its influence in top-tier academic circles.

So why then, is a U.S. Senator offering to Congress "research" linked to Opus Dei on something as vital as amending the Constitution? It turns out that Brownback, who was formerly an evangelical Protestant, converted to Catholicism by way of Opus Dei in 2002 and was sponsored in that conversion by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA), a vocal Opus Dei advocate.

Tellez, the leader of Opus Dei in Princeton, is a “numerary,” considered the most conservative of the sect's members -- they are unmarried, celibate, devote every aspect of their lives to their spiritual beliefs and turn over their salaries from secular jobs to Opus Dei.

Again, it bears repeating that Tellez is also the head of the Witherspoon Institute, the group Brownback cited at great length as his primary argument against gay marriage.

And remember also, it is Brownback, as an Opus Dei convert, who also leads the charge on Capitol Hill against abortion and stem cell research and who, along with Santorum, is seen by the Religious Right's as a point man on “culture war” issues.

The other central figure in the Witherspoon orbit is Dr. Robert George, a Princeton professor and a board member in the Institute who, not coincidentally, helped draft the federal gay-marriage ban that was just defeated in the Senate. George chaired a meeting of religious leaders in late 2005, that included Dr. James Dobson and other members of the extreme Religious Right. In fact, in addition to his pivotal role in the Witherspoon Institute, George is also a board member at Perkins' Family Research Council , a group known for its bigoted positions on the gay community.

And, via Brownback, all of this is ultimately finding its way into the halls of Congress.

While it may not be technically illegal for Brownback to be so clearly mixing hard-right religious ideology -- and faux-academic papers promoted by religious organizations like Opus Dei -- with debate on the Senate floor, it should certainly raise some eyebrows. In a country where strict separation of church and state is mandated, it seems Brownback is freely blending the two, attempting to use religious dogma to influence public policy -- all the while not disclosing to his Senate colleagues the background sources of the research he is citing.

But this should not be surprising coming from Brownback.

In a January 2006 Rolling Stone article , "God's Senator," Brownback is described as a religious zealot with a view for America's future that could almost be described as medieval.

"In his dream America, the one he believes both the Bible and the Constitution promise, the state will simply wither away. In its place will be a country so suffused with God and the free market that the social fabric of the last hundred years -- schools, Social Security, welfare -- will be privatized or simply done away with," reads the article. "There will be no abortions; sex will be confined to heterosexual marriage. Men will lead families, mothers will tend children, and big business and the church will take care of all."

After all, it was Brownback, who came to Congress in 1994 and refused to sign Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America" because he felt it wasn't conservative enough. Even then, as a newcomer to the House of Representatives, Brownback believed that the vast majority of what he saw as Big Government should simply be eliminated, including the departments of education, energy and commerce.

And, yes, it was also Brownback who was so outraged at the split-second glimpse of Janet Jackson's nipple during the 2004 Super Bowl, that he introduced the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which substantially raised fines for such simple on-air displays of nudity.

Finally, in addition to being brought into Catholicism by the likes of Opus Dei and using laundered research by an affiliated group on the Senate floor, Brownback chairs a meeting every Tuesday night with the "Values Action Team," consisting of religious leaders like Dobson who help the Senator formulate his thoughts on public policy issues.

According to Time magazine , Opus Dei has assets in the neighborhood of $2.8 billion and, with John McCain unlikely to significantly rouse the Religious Right in 2008, look for Brownback to be the guy that Opus Dei, Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council turn to as their presidential candidate.

And make no mistake about it: Brownback wants to run. So if you think his views for a new America, as viewed from the Senate floor, are scary, think of what he'll be like sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In his mind, it may already be ordained.

You can reach Bob Geiger at geiger.bob@gmail.com

Strapped States Try New Route, Lease Toll Roads to Foreign Firms

by Amy Goldstein

ELKHART, Ind. -- Its official state motto is "the crossroads of America." Yet Indiana is about to turn over its entire toll road for the next 75 years to two foreign companies, making it more expensive to drive.

The decision to hand the Indiana Toll Road to an Australian and Spanish team for $3.8 billion at the end of this month has blown up into one of the biggest brawls here in a generation. It has unsettled the state's politics in the months before the November elections, pitting a governor who was President Bush's first budget director against the people of northern Indiana, which the highway passes through.

The decision also places Indiana at the leading edge of a nascent trend in which states and local governments are exploring the idea of privatizing parts of the United States' prized interstate highway system. The idea goes beyond projects, such as Northern Virginia's Dulles Greenway, in which states have turned to private companies to build or widen toll roads. Now, they are considering selling or leasing some of the best-known and most-traveled routes across America.

The trend started 1 1/2 years ago, when Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (D) pushed through a 99-year lease of the Chicago Skyway, nearly eight miles of elevated highway across the South Side, for $1.8 billion.

Since then, a New Jersey lawmaker has proposed selling a 49 percent interest in the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway. New York Gov. George E. Pataki (R) is trying to persuade the legislature to let investors rebuild or replace the Hudson River's Tappan Zee Bridge. In Houston, Harris County officials are studying leasing 57 miles of toll roads.

Locally, Virginia transportation officials announced last month that they would lease a debt-ridden toll road outside Richmond, the Pocahontas Parkway, to a private firm for $522 million.

Half a century after President Dwight D. Eisenhower persuaded the nation to build the interstate highway system, the allure of privatization is a rethinking of the relationship between the government and its roads. It reverses the view of highways as a public responsibility, ingrained since the first half of the 19th century, when states took over roads, bridges and canals that had gone bankrupt in private hands.

The Bush administration advocates the new view. "We are like a poker game," Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said in an interview. "We are inviting more people to the table and saying, 'Bring money when you come.' " Such eagerness for private investment stems from the financial strains on an overburdened highway system at a time when the White House and the Republican-controlled Congress want to curb domestic spending. The interstate system is decaying, and traffic congestion has worsened. Inflation in the price of building and improving roads is rampant.

Most significantly, money from federal and state gasoline taxes that pay for roads are falling further behind the need, with no political appetite in an era of record gas prices to increase the rates. According to U.S. projections, the part of the federal Highway Trust Fund devoted to roads is to run out of money for the first time in its history in 2009.

In response, the administration persuaded Congress last summer to take steps to make it easier for the private sector to finance new roads -- and take over existing ones. Lawmakers removed several legal barriers to charging tolls on interstates and gave private investors new access to tax-free bonds for transportation projects.

Mineta has been urging U.S. financial institutions to get involved. "This type of dialogue really didn't exist two years ago," said Mark Florian, a managing director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., which was paid $19 million to negotiate the Indiana deal and has discussed similar possibilities with officials in more than 35 states.

Still, skepticism abounds: Will companies take good care of highways? Will toll roads become too expensive to drive? Will investors pluck profitable routes, leaving others to crumble? What will happen to public toll-road workers -- including 600 in Indiana who have been promised interviews by the new operators, but not the same job?

In Elkhart, resistance to such change runs deep. At a rest stop here on a recent day -- at Milepost 77 near the midpoint between Illinois and Ohio -- both Indiana drivers and interstate truckers were almost uniformly against what the state has done. "I heard that foreigners were going to lease it, and that sounds like a bad deal to me," said Kreig Eberle, 36, a truck driver from Chillicothe, Ill., who uses the toll road nearly every day. "I think it is kind of baloney. Indiana ought to run it itself."

Dankia McLaren, 22, a kitchen designer from nearby South Bend, said: "It is sad. . . . It is just going to make it more expensive to drive."

The passionate opposition has astonished the architect of the deal, Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. (R), Bush's first budget director.

Daniels said he had his "little epiphany" about the toll road in 2004, after he returned from Washington and was campaigning for governor. At a barbecue in rural western Indiana, a veteran of the state highway department came over and said: "You understand it's a joke, don't you."

The joke, he told Daniels, was that the state for years had a list of promised transportation projects that would never be built. Running on a platform of economic development, Daniels immediately viewed a roads program as a means of creating jobs and attracting business to spur Indiana's sagging economy.

Soon after taking office last year, the governor ordered his staff to compute the price of the pent-up projects -- $2.6 billion more, it turned out, than the state could afford -- and propose ways to pay for them. Of more than 30 options, Daniels said in an interview, generating money by leasing the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road was the only "real bold stroke that could substantially close this huge gap."

In the shower one morning, he came up a name for his plan: "Major Moves," borrowed from the title of a Hank Williams Jr. country song. The governor announced Major Moves in September, saying the state was open for bids on the toll road to raise money for a 10-year transportation plan.

Late in January, he invited legislators, builders, manufacturers, mayors and trade union leaders to his office in Indianapolis to disclose that the winning bid was $3.85 billion, more than enough to fund the state's road projects. The crowd burst into applause. "Everybody thought, that was that," Daniels recalled. "We can stop dreaming and start digging all these big projects."

But, Daniels had not anticipated what he calls "the x-word" -- for xenophobia -- or the protests or the bumper stickers that say, "Keep the Toll Road, Lease Mitch."

"This was an authentic, spontaneous, very emotional reaction," the governor said, "and no interest group caused it."

The proposal stirred up one of the biggest fights the Indiana legislature had ever seen, with rallies and expensive media campaigns on both sides, and the governor unable to change minds at jammed town hall meetings in communities along the toll road where opposition was most fierce.

"Never in my legislative career will I ever again be faced with a [bill] quite like this," said the chief sponsor, state Rep. Randy Borror (R) of Fort Wayne, who walked the statehouse with thick notebooks filled with figures showing how much transportation money each legislator's district would get from the plan.

The winning bidders were Macquarie Infrastructure Group of Sydney, the same firm that controls the Dulles Greenway, and Cintra Concesiones de Infrastructures de Transporte S.A. of Madrid. Under the lease, the companies got the right to raise tolls -- which have not been increased in two decades -- for cars and trucks right away, and eventually to keep pace annually with inflation. The 103-page lease spells out the companies' responsibilities in meticulous detail, including clearing snow and road kill within specified times, and granting state police the right to patrol.

Steve Allen, Macquarie's chief executive, said the company, which operates toll roads in nine countries, has an incentive to improve the highways to attract more drivers. Since it took over the Chicago Skyway, he said, the company has built electronic toll booths sooner than required and made lane changes that reduce backups.

Indiana legislators were not reassured. Daniels and his allies made big compromises: extra money for each county along the toll road, a postponement of higher rates for cars until electronic tolls are installed, job-training money for economically depressed Gary. Even so, the plan passed the state House by one vote.

Three months after the legislation squeaked through, feelings remain raw.

"The whole thing stinks," said state Rep. B. Patrick Bauer, the House Democratic leader. The two companies, he said, "got a heck of an unbelievable deal. We got a bad deal."

Daniels's approval ratings have plummeted, from about 50 percent early last winter to 37 percent in the most recent polls. Borror said the issue "complicates the election" for state legislators in November.

"There are going to be a lot of states that fail at this," Borror said, "because they underestimate the amount of work it takes to get this bill passed." Even so, Daniels said, "I don't believe we'll ever [again] be able to do any one thing that will be as transformative and positive for the future of this state."

Poland opens inquiry into 1981 John Paul II death plot

WARSAW - Investigators in Poland said Monday they have opened an inquiry into a suspected plot behind an assassination attempt on late Polish-born Pope John Paul II in 1981.

"The inquiry is not into the attack itself but into a plot by communist (secret) services," said Ewa Koj of Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN), which is charged with prosecuting Communist and Nazi crimes.

Koj, head of the IPN's investigative department in the southern city of Katowice, told the PAP news agency the inquiry aimed to probe suspected involvement by several countries in planning the assassination attempt on the pope.

The IPN has previously said that it does not have direct proof that Polish Communist-era secret police took part in the attack.

Charges that the Soviet Union and then-communist Bulgaria organized the attack over John Paul's support for the Solidarity trade union movement in his native Poland were never proved.

In March, the head of an Italian parliamentary commission accused leaders of the former Soviet Union of ordering the assassination bid.

Italian senator Paolo Guzzanti said the findings of the commission showed "beyond all reasonable doubt" that Moscow's military secret service, the GRU, was responsible for the shooting.

But the commission's conclusions did not receive enough votes from lawmakers to be adopted by the Italian parliament.

Turkish hitman Ali Agca shot and seriously wounded John Paul II in St Peter's Square in Rome on May 13, 1981. The pope later forgave Agca when he met him in prison.

Russia's top-secret military intelligence service has dismissed as "absolutely absurd" accusations that Soviet agents were involved in the attack.

Russian Oligarch Fridman, Corporation Sued for Racketeering, Fraud That Used U.S. Banks and Exchanges

'Defendants' Tentacles Reach Into and Injure Numerous Americans'

NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Russian corporation Alfa Group Consortium and its U.S. entity, Alfa Capital Markets, Inc., are a criminal enterprise that has used U.S. banks and stock exchanges as an integral part of their theft schemes, costing American taxpayers and stockholders hundreds of millions of dollars, IPOC International Growth Fund, Ltd., alleges in a federal racketeering lawsuit filed late Thursday.

The suit alleges that Alfa, one of the largest business conglomerates in the Russian Federation -- along with Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman and U.S. citizen Leonid Rozhetskin -- engaged in a vast international money laundering and fraud scheme in an attempt to take control of the Russian cellular industry. "By doing so, defendants' conduct has had a substantial effect on the United States and its citizens, and much of the criminal conduct occurred in the United States," the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said.

The criminal enterprise affected Americans, U.S.-based investors and U.S. interests in numerous ways, the complaint alleges, involving the evasion of U.S. taxes, insider trading of shares on U.S. stock markets, and wiring payments through New York banks. The Alfa Group Consortium received support from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a U.S. government development agency, to provide a significant portion of funding for one of Alfa's related businesses.

"The complaint alleges that the racketeering and other wrongs cited in this case hurt U.S. investors, U.S. taxpayers and U.S. financial markets," said W. Gordon Dobie, an attorney with Winston & Strawn LLP, which filed the case for IPOC International Growth Fund, Ltd. "It's my opinion that the defendants should be called to account in court for their conduct."

A Daisy Chain of Nine Shell Companies

The suit details how Alfa, in a series of sham transactions over a 10-day period, knowingly and fraudulently colluded to steal IPOC's 25.1 percent stake in Russia's third largest mobile telecom company, MegaFon. IPOC had originally signed two options agreements to buy the stake from LV Finance, had paid for the shares and at all junctures honored the terms of the agreements. At the final stage, IPOC discovered that LV Finance, acting through its chairman Leonid Rozhetskin, had negotiated a purported sale of LV Finance's interest in MegaFon to Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group, involving a complex web of nine offshore companies. Both companies are alleged to have been aware of IPOC's prior ownership rights, but rode roughshod over the agreement and fraudulently colluded to sell the same stake twice. They "bought" and "sold" the $50 million stake, and yet there is no evidence of money having changed hands throughout this daisy chain of sham transactions.

"What was a legitimate business opportunity for IPOC evolved into a vehicle for Rozhetskin's and Mikhail Fridman's theft and misappropriation," the suit alleges.

Scheme Concealed Wrongdoing

The suit alleges that at the center of the enterprise was Fridman, a major VimpelCom shareholder, who used associates working directly for him and for VimpelCom, to transfer the assets in the summer of 2003. The scheme involved wiring payments through New York banks, taking the proceeds, and then transferring those proceeds to various off-shore companies "to conceal wrongdoing from IPOC, American taxing authorities, and others."

The suit states that Rozhetskin acted "as a point person to obtain additional cellular phone assets" and worked closely with Fridman to assist with the sham transactions. He later relied on New York banks to launder the theft of $50 million, the money IPOC paid for the stake.

The complaint also alleges that Rozhetskin and Fridman were assisted by Hans Bodmer, who served as escrow agent and sent instructions to IPOC to wire money through banks in New York for the benefit of the defendants. Bodmer recently plead guilty to criminal conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to violate the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with an unrelated scheme to bribe foreign leaders.

Insider Dealing and Manipulation of VimpelCom Tax Inquiry

The suit also alleges that Fridman and the Alfa Group attempted to manipulate VimpelCom's share price for their own gain, in their position as major VimpelCom shareholders. On Dec. 8, 2004, the suit said, VimpelCom, a New York Stock Exchange Company, disclosed the Russian tax authorities were investigating the company for back taxes carrying potential for heavy fines and penalties.

The news coincided with the auction of a $10 billion subsidiary of Russian conglomerate Yukos to satisfy back-dated tax obligations. Yukos later went through an unprecedented bankruptcy filing in the United States.

The suit claims that manipulation was insider dealing that advanced the defendants' goal of obtaining control and consolidation of the telecommunications market in Russia, furthering the ability to raise prices for cellular services through a near-monopoly or oligopoly.

Notes to Editors * IPOC International Growth Fund, Ltd. is an open-ended mutual fund company based in Bermuda. * The suit, based on claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, charges that Fridman conspired with Rozhetskin to steal IPOC's interest through money laundering, bribery, wire fraud and other criminal wrongdoings. Other defendants are Alfa Capital Markets, Inc., a U.S. corporation; Alfa Telecom (n/k/a) Altimo; and Hans Bodmer. * Alfa Group Consortium is an association of various companies controlled by Fridman. It controls major international corporations traded in the United States, including VimpelCom (NYSE) Russia's second largest mobile telecoms company, Golden Telecom (NASDAQ) and Turkcell (NYSE). * For more information about IPOC, go to http://www.ipocfund.com. A copy of the lawsuit is being posted on this Web site June 9. The Many Ties to the United States As the lawsuit states, "... defendants' tentacles reach into and injure numerous Americans...." The investors, taxpayers and financial markets of the United States have been harmed.

The below sets out the individuals and firms referred to in the lawsuit, and provides some further information:

The Defendants:

Leonard Rozhetskin: "Defendant Leonard Rozhetskin is a former director and principal shareholder of LV Finance Group Limited ("LVFG"). He is a United States taxpayer and citizen, owns property in the District, and lived in the District for more than a decade ... featured on the cover of the Russian edition of Forbes with the title: 'The Most Dangerous Shark in Our Waters.'... Rozhetskin resides in the United States...."[pg.6]"

Mikhail Fridman: "Defendant Mikhail Fridman currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of co-conspirator Alfa Bank and as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Defendant Consortium Alfa Group. Fridman further served on the Board of VimpelCom, a NYSE company, and has control over Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company ... purchased the United States trading firm owned by American, Mark Rich, the one time commodities baron pardoned by President Clinton with much controversy. Fridman purports to have become a philanthropist in the United States" and is a member of the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations based in New York. [pgs. 6-7]

Pyotr Aven: "Defendant Pyotr Aven also has been a major participant in the scheme and worked directly with Rozhetskin and Fridman in the misappropriation and theft of IPOC monies. Aven is a director of Golden Telecom, a NASDAQ company, which regularly files with the United States Securities Exchange Commission. He is a controversial figure: As observed by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a Russian 'corruption task force informed [the government] that Aven was engaged in various misdeeds, including drug trafficking. See OAO Alfa Bank v. Center for Public Integrity, Civ. Action No. 00-2208 (JDB), Mem. Op., Sept. 22, 2005 at 11 n.26." [pg. 8]

Hans Bodmer: "Defendant Hans Bodmer ... assisted Rozhetskin and Fridman with the Sonic Duo/MegaFon theft scheme ... worked with his co-conspirators to send instructions to IPOC to wire money through banks in New York for the benefit of the Defendants. Bodmer is no stranger to criminal prosecution in the United States, having recently pled guilty to the criminal conspiracy to launder money and conspiracy to violate the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the scheme to bribe foreign leaders (along with Victor Kozeny, who is currently being extradited to New York from the Bahamas). Case No: 01: 05-CR-00518-RCC-ALL (S.D.N.Y.)." [pg. 9]

* Publicly Listed U.S. Corporations Affiliated with Defendants:

Vimpel-Communications, VimpelCom and Golden Telecom, Inc. "... Defendant Fridman has successfully obtained hundreds of millions of dollars from American investors through the sale of interests in his Russian telecommunications empire -- which includes New York Stock Exchange company Vimpel-Communications, also known as VimpelCom, and Golden Telecom, Inc., ("Golden Telecom"), a NASDAQ company. [pg. 3]"

Vimpel-Communications/VimpelCom Web site is http://www.vimpelcom.com/index.wbp Golden Telecom, Inc. Web site is http://www.goldentelecom.com/?id=12

Alfa Capital Markets (USA), Inc: "Alfa Capital Markets (USA), Inc. ("Alfa Capital Markets") is a member of the Alfa Group and is a corporation organized under the laws of the United States with its principal place of business and office in New York City. Upon information and belief, Alfa Capital Markets was used to structure the laundering of the proceeds of the Fridman M.C. Enterprise for investment in the United States, such as the recent acquisition of Golden Telecom, Inc., a publicly held American company, controlled by the Alfa Group. On information and belief, Alfa Capital Markets' accounts were used to fund the misappropriation of plaintiffs' property." [pg. 9]

The Alfa Capital Markets (USA), Inc. Web site is http://www.alfabank.com/usa/

A Wide Variety of U.S. Ties: * The U.S. Banking System and the U.S. Treasury: "... goal of cheating the American government of taxes due and owing ....": Rozhetskin knew the assets were unlawfully taken when he made use of the United States to transfer the assets in interstate commerce. Further, Rozhetskin's actions were in furtherance of his goal of cheating the American government of taxes due and owing on the transactions." [pg. 18]

"... money laundering and wire fraud that affected interstate and foreign commerce." "Defendants conspired to steal IPOC's money and property, and to conceal their wrongdoing and the true ownership of the proceeds through a series of sham transactions and transfer the stolen assets in interstate and foreign commerce with the intent of carrying on and furthering their unlawful activity. By doing so, Defendants engaged in money laundering and wire fraud that affected interstate and foreign commerce." [pg. 20]

"... substantial effect on the United States and its citizens....": "Their actions included assisting Rozhetskin in an international money laundering scheme by which Rozhetskin, using the United States banking systems as an integral part of his theft scheme, took the proceeds of his criminal conduct, and then transferred them to various off-shore companies as part of an attempt to conceal wrongdoing from IPOC, American taxing authorities, and others. By doing so, Defendants' conduct has had a substantial effect on the United States and its citizens, and much of the criminal conduct occurred in the United States." [pg. 21]

"... (Rozhetskin) defrauded the United States of taxes and his return.": "Although Rozhetskin claimed to have sold LVFG and 25% stake in MegaFon for hundreds of millions of dollars, he defrauded the United States of taxes monies. He failed to pay taxes on monies received from IPOC and from Fridman and his shell companies as part of their money laundering/fraud scheme. Defendant Rozhetskin did so while relying upon New York banks to launder the theft of Plaintiffs' money." [pg. 23]

"... tax fraud against the United States.": "Defendant Rozhetskin was aided by co-Defendants who participated in a variety of sham transactions using hold companies to collectively assist Rozhetskin in his tax fraud against the United States." [pg. 23]

* U.S. Lobbying Firm and Corporation:

Barbour Griffith and Rogers: "The Alfa Group conducts such significant and varied business in the United States that it has actually found it to be in its interest to spend millions of dollars courting the American political elite through Washington D.C. based lobbying firm of Barbour Griffith and Rogers, LLC which lobbies Congress and others in Washington on its behalf." [pgs. 7-8]

"In addition to using his lobbying firm, Alfa Group has retained Edward Rogers' Washington D.C. based "investigative" firm, Diligence, Inc. -- which has criminally misappropriated IPOC information as described further below ....[pg. 8]

"Having chosen to spend millions of dollars to influence the United States Congress and others, and having received millions of dollars from the American government and private citizens, it should not fairly be heard to complain of being called to task now in an American courtroom." [pg. 8]

Diligence, Inc.: "Defendants have also paid U.S.-based Diligence, Inc. to steal IPOC property in Bermuda. Indeed, at the Fridman M.C. Enterprise's direction Diligence bribed officials of an accounting firm and/or otherwise misappropriated IPOC property. More specifically, Diligence, Inc. describes itself on its web site and in its press releases as a company comprised of former Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") and British MI5 operatives that 'specialize in obtaining non-public or hard-to-get information on corporations.' See http://www.diligencecorp.com. Diligence, Inc. is owned in part by Edward Rogers who has also been paid millions by defendants to lobby Congress and consult for Alfa." [pg. 24]

"In violation of 18 U.S.C. section 912 and at Defendant Alfa's instructions, Diligence, Inc. posed as United States Agents acting under the authority of the United States to misappropriate IPOC information from an accounting firm. Defendants further violated 18 U.S.C. section 913 by searching IPOC property while falsely representing, through Diligence, Inc., to be agents of the United States. By doing so, Defendants have had an effect on the United States."[pg. 24]

* U.S.-related Investigations:

Norex Case: "In fact, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed a District Court decision which had dismissed RICO claims against these Defendants based upon a RICO conspiracy to defraud Norex, its Canadian partner, of its ownership interest in another company. Discovery is now proceeding in that case. [pg. 5]

The ruling is available at http://www.norexpetroleum.com/norex_vs_alfa/us_court_of_appeals_ruling/eng.pdf Oil for Food Program: "The United Nations in New York, through former Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Paul Volcker, has named Defendant Alfa Group for criminal wrongdoing and cited its $2.3 million in illegal kickbacks and bribes to Saddam Hussein in the Oil for Food Program. See Independent Inquiry Committee into The United Nations Oil-For Food Programme ("Volcker Report") at 44-66 (Oct. 27, 2005), http://www.iicc-offp.org/story27oct05.htm; http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/03-1846855,00.html (noting an Alfa payment of $2.3 million). In light of the Volcker report and other activities in this Country, Alfa has found it to be in its interest to retain its own politically connected Washington D.C. lobbying firm to protect its interest as discussed further below." [pg. 5]

Center for Public Integrity Case: "Recently, Mikhail Fridman along with Pyotr Aven availed themselves of American courts as a plaintiff in litigation brought in September 2005. Fridman and Aven lost that case on the merits at summary judgment. See OAO Alfa Bank v. Center for Public Integrity, 387 F. Supp. 2d 20 (D.D.C. 2005)." [pg. 7]

The opening paragraph of the court ruling states: Plaintiffs are two Russian businessmen and their companies who have sued the defendants, a public interest organization and its reporters, for defamation for publishing an article alleging that plaintiffs have connections to organized crime and have engaged in narcotics trafficking. Defendants have filed a motion for summary judgment in which they argue, among other things, that plaintiffs are limited public figures, and that the evidence demonstrates as a matter of law that defendants did not publish the piece with actual malice. The Court agrees. Although defendants' actions are not beyond reproach, they do not rise to the level of actual malice that the Constitution demands in order to preserve a vibrant exchange of ideas on issues of public concern. For this reason, the Court grants defendants' motion for summary judgment on all plaintiffs' claims. The ruling is available at www.dcd.uscourts.gov/opinions/2005/Bates/2000-CV-2208~12:14:20~9-27-2005-a.pdf * U.S. Government Agency Funded Investment Firm:

The Great Circle Fund: The Alfa Group "[i]s also the regional manager for a US/OPIC sponsored investment firm called 'The Great Circle Fund.' The Alfa Group makes use of this United State agency's (OPIC's) support to provide a significant portion of the funding to meet its investment objectives." [pg. 7]

Per the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) Web site, it was "established as a development agency of the U.S. government in 1971. OPIC helps U.S. businesses invest overseas, fosters economic development in new and emerging markets, complements the private sector in managing the risks associated with foreign direct investment, and supports U.S. foreign policy. OPIC evaluates all project applications on the basis of their contribution to economic development to ensure successful implementation of the organization's core developmental mission, and prioritizes the allocation of scarce resources to projects on the basis of their developmental benefits."

The Great Circle Capital Web site http://www.greatcirclecapital.com/ for the Great Circle Fund LP states that "Great Circle Capital has appointed Moscow-based Alfa Capital as the regional manager and Brussel's based probel (sic) Capital Management as investment advisor. A substantial portion of the fund's capital is provided by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an independent, developmental US government agency."

* Defendants Used U.S. Banks for Transfers. Some Examples Follow:

Barclays Bank in New York and Credit Suisse First Boston: "On April 11, 2001, IPOC wired $5,065,000 from its bank in Bermuda to Barclays Bank in New York for further transfer to the Credit Suisse First Boston account of Rozhetskin." [pg. 16]

Barclays Bank in New York and Chase Manhattan: "Using a number of intermediaries and at Rozhetskin's requirement, such money was wired from IPOC's account in Bermuda through Barclays Bank in New York and Chase Manhattan to Rozhetskin and his designees in November 2001." [pg. 16]

Bank of New York and Credit Suisse First Boston. "[o]n December 20, 2001, IPOC through intermediaries wired an additional $3,070,000 to Rozhetskin and his designees through the Bank of New York located at One Wall Street in New York to Credit Suisse First Boston." [pg. 17]

"... using the American banks as a vehicle for the fraud scheme. ...": "Plaintiff IPOC made all such payments and others through the United States without knowledge that Defendants Rozhetskin, Bodmer, Fridman, Alfa Group, Alfa Capital and Alfa Telecom were all conspiring whereby Rozhetskin, using the American banks as a vehicle for the fraud scheme, would obtain IPOC's cash, while Fridman through a labyrinth of associates and individuals would obtain effective control over Plaintiffs' interest in Sonic Duo/MegaFon." [pg. 17]

"... use of the United States to transfer assets in interstate commerce": "Rozhetskin knew the assets were unlawfully taken when he made use of the United States to transfer the assets in interstate commerce. Further, Rozhetskin's actions were in furtherance of his goal of cheating the American government of taxes due and owing on the transactions." [pg. 18]

$1 million Moonie Mystery

by RICK CASEY

It was a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets.

The phone rang on my desk, waking me from a reverie I don't remember.

"Casey," I said, hoping to sound like a private eye.

The guy on the other end really was a private eye. Not Garrison Keillor's "Guy Noir," but a Virginia electronic gumshoe named Larry Zilliox.

Maybe you have a hobby. Zilliox's is keeping tabs on the sprawling empire of the world's wealthiest self-described Messiah, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

In the course of his probing, Zilliox came across an odd entry in the most recent tax filing of the Washington Times Foundation, which is associated with the conservative newspaper founded in 1982 by Moon.

The document was dated mid-2004 and included a list of organizations to which grants had been made.

A million bucks to Houston?

Three received grants totaling $9,000.

The New York headquarters of Moon's Unification Church received $11,200.

Another of Moon's organizations, the American Family Coalition Inc., received a grant of $254,500.

Then came the grabber: a whopping $1 million to the Greater Houston Community Foundation.

Why would Moon's Washington Times Foundation give a million bucks to Houston?

Zilliox said he figured I'd have a better chance of finding out than he would.

Maybe he was right.

I decided to take the direct approach.

I called the Washington Times Foundation, but the number listed on its tax form was no longer working.

The Bush connection

I called the Washington Times and asked for the foundation. I reached the voice mail of a separate foundation, but my call was not returned.

I located two of the officers of the foundation at the Washington Times and another at UPI (also owned by the Moon organization), but my phone calls and e-mails went unanswered.

So I called Steve Maislin, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Community Foundation.

He wasn't in, but I left a message asking why the Washington Times Foundation would give $1 million to his foundation. He called and left a message in return.

He couldn't legally tell me, he said.

Later I reached Maislin and asked him if he could point me to the law that bound his lips. He said he misspoke.

"I meant that under the law it's not a public record," he said. "We're not required to disclose donations in or grants out in our tax returns. We don't as a matter of policy."

Actually, they do report the grants they give, as we will see below.

He said some people who give money want it kept private so they won't be badgered by fundraisers.

Zilliox had a theory. He figured Moon gave the money to the Houston foundation as a pass-through to the presidential library of the elder President Bush.

It wouldn't be the first connection between Moon and Bush. In 1995 Bush was handsomely paid to make six speeches to Moon-related groups in Japan.

The next year he would go to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to celebrate the opening of a new Moonie newspaper there.

Zilliox's notion turned out not to be an idle theory. The long list of grant recipients listed in the community foundation's tax return that year included the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation at Texas A&M.

The amount: $2,132,471.

So I called Rod Thornton at the Bush library foundation.

He hesitated for a moment, then explained that the donation from the Greater Houston Community Foundation came from proceeds from Bush's 80th birthday celebration in 2004, which included a huge party at Minute Maid Park and a fundraising extravaganza to benefit three of the former president's favorite causes: his library, the Points of Light Foundation he founded, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

M.D. Anderson received $4.4 million from the Greater Houston Community Foundation that year, and the Points of Light Foundation received $1.8 million.

One call remained, to Jim McGrath, a former speechwriter for the former president who still serves as a family spokesman.

He explained that the money raised through Bush's birthday bash was funneled through the Greater Houston Community Foundation because of its tax-exempt status.

And did $1 million come from the Washington Times Foundation?

"We're in an uncomfortable position," he said. "If a donor doesn't want to be identified we need to honor their privacy."

I asked him about another part of Zilliox's theory: that the donation was made to help persuade Bush's son, the current president, to grant Moon a pardon for a 1982 felony tax evasion conviction that had put him in prison for 13 months.

Moon had applied for a pardon from the elder president Bush, but withdrew the request.

"If that's why he gave the grant, he's throwing his money away," said McGrath. "That's not the way the Bushes operate."

He added, "President Bush has been very grateful for the friendship shown to him by the Washington Times Foundation, and the Washington Times serves a vital role in Washington. But there can't be any connection to any kind of a pardon."

C.I.A. Knew Where Eichmann Was Hiding, Documents Show

by SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, June 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust administrator Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to C.I.A. documents released Tuesday that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informants after World War II.

The C.I.A. was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Clemens — a slight variation on his actual alias, Ricardo Klement — but did not share the information with Israel, which had been hunting for him for years, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and flew him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.

The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the C.I.A. to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet K.G.B., according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, said the documents showed that the C.I.A "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.

The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that American intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat.

But Ms. Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann put into effect the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. Captured by the United States Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognized, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.

Israeli agents hunting for Eichmann came to suspect that he was in Argentina but did not know his alias. They temporarily abandoned their search around the time, in March 1958, that West German intelligence told the C.I.A. that Eichmann had been living in Argentina as Clemens, said Mr. Naftali, of the University of Virginia.

The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi government official then serving as a top national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the C.I.A. persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann's memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Mr. Globke before publication, the documents show.

Ironically, in view of the information the C.I.A. received in 1958, documents previously released by the C.I.A. showed that it was surprised in May 1960 when the Israelis captured Eichmann. Cables from the time show that Allen Dulles, the C.I.A. director, demanded that officers find out more about the capture.

Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has worked to declassify more than eight million pages of documents.

Norman J. W. Goda, an Ohio University historian who reviewed the C.I.A. material, said it showed in greater detail than previously known how the K.G.B. aggressively recruited former Nazi intelligence officers after the war. In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the postwar West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the C.I.A.

Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the K.G.B. Mr. Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence, a Soviet agent placed in charge of combating Soviet espionage.

The C.I.A. shared much sensitive information with Mr. Felfe, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 C.I.A. damage assessment, written after Mr. Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 C.I.A. staffers" and caused many eavesdropping operations to end with "complete failure or a worthless product."

The documents also provide new information about the case of Tscherim Soobzokov, a former SS officer who was the subject of a much-publicized deportation case in 1979 when he was living as an American citizen in Paterson, N.J. He was charged with having falsified his immigration application to conceal his SS service, which ordinarily would have barred his entry. But the charge was dropped when a C.I.A. document turned up showing that he had disclosed his SS membership.

The newly declassified records show that he was employed by the C.I.A. from 1952 to 1959 despite "clear evidence of a war crimes record," said another historian at the briefing, Richard Breitman of American University.

Because it valued Mr. Soobzokov for his language skills and ties to fellow ethnic Circassians living in the Soviet Union, the C.I.A. deliberately hid details of his Nazi record from the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he moved to the United States in 1955, Mr. Breitman said.

But Mr. Soobzokov ultimately did not escape his past. He died in 1985 after a pipe bomb exploded outside his house. The case has never been solved.