"Another information warfare subject that has long been hidden from view is "perception management". While everyone knew that perceptions played a major role in shaping the outcome of conflict, the very topic was taboo. It smacked too much of manipulating people in ways that evoked questionable legal issues. issues no one wanted to address. … in the amorphous gray areas between peace & conflict, there is an opportunity to apply non- lethal force selectively to prevent escalation of conflict. Information warfare is an ideal tool for sending a very strong message to potential adversaries. That message is that we have the capability, intent, and will to use force; Accede to our demands!"

Future War Non-Lethal Weapons in 21st Century Warfare
1999   Col. John B. Alexander, USArmy ret.   St. Martin's Press

Balkanization of Africa; Destruction of Congo
4.6.01   Ellen Ray & Bill Schaap Inst. for Media Analysis143 W 4th St NY NY 10012

When a nation is targeted for Balkanization, justification for overt & covert operations is almost always "humanitarian" effort to control inter-ethnic strife. Media generate public confusion by fabricating or exaggerating ethnic & tribal, mini-wars, often heightened & and paid for by agents of the would-be Balkanizers. For example, nearly every article about the invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo by U.S.- supplied & trained armies of Uganda & Rwanda referred to the invaders' local paid agents as oppressed Congolese ethnic groups or former members of Mobutu's army rebelling against the Kinshasa government. The articles often described "tribal warfare" in breathless detail, citing mini-wars like those being fostered by outsiders between the Hema & the Lentu.
Severe destabilization of a targeted nation or area of the world is logical and necessary prerequisite to Balkanization. Media help to promote that destabilization by their demonization of targeted leaders. Such campaigns often carry overtones of ethnic persecution, along with accusations of corruption, communism, terrorism, or (but only when it suits the U.S.) fundamentalism. Even though the western press could not, in the end, continue to boost Mobutu, their grudging recognition of Kabila was at best cautious, suspicious and extremely short-lived. After Kabila threw out the Tutsi officers (Rwandan & Ugandan) who had been installed in most key military & intelligence posts, usually over the strong objections of the local people, the press's honeymoon with Kabila was over. As Kabila heard the complaints of the Congolese people about Tutsi-led terror against Hutu refugees and as he traveled to independent nations like China, Libya & Cuba, he began to be vilified as "corrupt," as a "thug."

A very shady peace process has furthered African Balkanization, just as it did in Yugoslavia. The Lusaka accord was not a good deal for the Congo government; Kabila was forced to accede by implicit & explicit threats of even greater assistance to the rebels, and an endless war. In consequence, a divided Congo became accepted, institutionalized reality, a solid line drawn through the country in every map that accompanies every news story. Negotiations, stage-managed by the U.S., intensified demands for pullout of all foreign troops from Congo, neatly equating the Ugandan & Rwandan invaders with the troops from Angola, Namibia & Zimbabwe invited by the invaded country to assist in repelling the invasion. There is no moral equivalency here. As President Dos Santos of Angola pointed out during the U.N. debate, the accord did not even recognize the legitimacy of the Kabila govt.
Kabila has been murdered a year later; the very first peacekeeping forces are arriving and setting up camp in Goma while the de facto division of Congo has become conventional wisdom. Outsiders in the east now behind the cease-fire line and protected by the peacekeepers control some of the most valuable natural resources in the world while the Congolese people suffer. Western wire service headlines in the aftermath of the murder of Laurent Kabila hint candidly at Congo's future.

U.S. Military & Corporate Recolonization of the Congo   Project Censored Top Ten Award winner
CovertAction Quarterly co-founder & co-editor 1978-2001

Institute for Media Analysis, Inc. pres. & dir.   Independent documentary film producer, journalist since 1968
Lies Of Our Times exec. editor 1990-1994   CounterSpy magazine co-editor, 1976-77

co-editor intelligence & media-related books incl
Dirty Work The CIA in Western Europe   Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa
member, Women's Foreign Policy Council, Women for Mutual Security board B.A. Univ. NE 1962; grad Harvard 1963

Keith Snow 4.4.01   … exports from the DRCongo were some US$897 million in 1997, a "country" which was in a major war. In 1998, DRC ranked second in diamond production at 25.7 million carats. Again, a country in a brutal war where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, in fact I think millions of people, suffered the consequences through disease & despair & displacement and rape and hunger and robbery and often death. Based on my research, this is a western syndicated proxy war, and like Sierra Leone, Angola & Sudan, it is war-as-cover for the rapid and unrestricted extraction of raw materials, and war as a means to totally disenfranchise local people. Diamonds, gold, columbium tantalite, niobium, cobalt, manganese & petroleum, natural gas & timber, and possibly uranium, are a few of the major spoils pillaged behind the scenes as war ravages DRC; some of these minerals are almost solely found in DRC, esp. cobalt, niobium, columbium tantalite. Barrick Gold provides a convenient example using war-as-cover. According to testimony I took in November, Barrick Gold is operating in the Kilo Moto mines near Bunia. These mines are reportedly protected by UPDF. An Israeli General was awarded another Kilo Moto concession and UPDF and RCD operate others. And there is massive ivory poaching, again proptection rackets, going on. Barrick Advisory Board member Geo. Bush & his CIA connections certainly play into these mining deals and lay the groundwork a.k.a. slaughter if necessary to get the product. That includes long-time links to people like CIA station operative in Zaire; Lawrence Devlin for example, and his associations with the Templesmans. Look at the CIA

"perception management" of western media   ¹ Media reportage on Africa is Marlboro lecture topic 2.16.00   Marlboro College MARLBORO, VT   Putney, Vt resident Keith Snow hosting a slide lecture about experiences as journalist, photographer & activist in Africa. According to Snow, his lecture features an examination that compares and contrasts media reportage on Africa (i.e., propaganda, censorship, and bias that perpetuate racist discourse & political stagnation) and political, social, and economic realities in Africa (i.e., dictatorship, human rights, female sexual autonomy, famine, population, economics, & war). Snow also addresses U.S. military, intelligence, and CIA activities in Africa, mind control, and the social impact of Western newspaper reportage on its readers. Communicating Africa 6th African Studies Consortium Workshop 10.2.98   Univ. of PA Africa & the Western Media (Part 2) SESSION D Panel 8 Keith Snow, Freelance Journalist & Photographer: "Assessing Images of Africa in the Western Media" Barbara DeGorge, St. John's Univ. "The Modern Day Slave Trade and the Media: Slavery in the Sudan" Tonya Taylor, Univ. of Pennsylvania: "The Construction of the Dangerous African Other" Vera Viditz-Ward, Bloomsburg University: "Photographers in the Field: Contexts & Consequences" chair: Ali B. Dinar, Univ. of PA & Allyson Purpura, Haverford College SEJ

operations in Lumumbashi and you will find the evidence for the repression and massacres of students at the University of Lumumbashi in the early 1990's. Geo. Bush apparently telephoned Mobutu just prior to the first US supported invasion of Congo Aug. 1996 on behalf of Swedish Financier Adolph Lundin to negotiate a deal over the Kilo Moto fields. And the US Presidential Election outcome of 1996 was completely irrelevant to the invasion of Zaire and the replacement of Mobutu. Remember that Kagame was in Washington about Aug. 1996 checking his battle plans with the Pentagon. Mobutu's days were numbered.
The US took all the right decisions to allow the Rwanada genocide to unfold. And Clinton's comment that "we didn't know what was going on at the time" couldn't have been a bigger lie. Do you suppose it was coincidental that a Rwanda delegate rotated on to the security council in 1994 and then worked with US representatives to block all subsequent attempts to deal appropriately with the unfolding slaughter? The Lundin Group appears also to be involved in south Katanga, where they are into the Tenke Fungarume copper/cobalt concessions. This is near where America Mineral Fields International and Anglo American are operating as well. And these are a few of the many mining companies.

All these US military programs like IMET and E-IMET, ACRI and JCET are designed to consolidate US hegemony. UPDF and RCD have used child soldiers. They use sophisticated weapons, not only the machetes so widely advertised by the media propaganda front of 1994 which sowed indifference & apathy in the US public. Troops have been trained by US green berets and US military personnel have worked to coordinate SPLA and RPF/UPDF/RCD military campaigns. This is according to Ugandan dissidents and/or Congolese refugees fleeing Congo and/or ex-patriots on the ground. And there are plenty of people who support these statements. Weapons are reportedly shipped in through Entebbe. Again, people testified to seeing "American blacks", quote Negroes unquote, traveling in the area, both in Uganda & in Eastern DRC, but they are always very clandestine and they don't mingle or talk to people. One refugee cited the locations of jungle camps where western, he said American, military advisors were training RCD or RPF or UPDF guerrillas in counterinsurgency & heavy artillery operations. Again, this was in November.
Note that the whole Tutsi contre-genocide against Hutus is off the radar screen of people in the US and that's because the media has covered for the powerful interests and US agenda of consolidating power in the region by any means necessary. In fact, the RPF have actually "turned" Interahamwe to their service in doing the dirty work of eliminating any dissidents and insurgents and creating a situation defined by the media as incomprehensible tribal warfare. It was reported to me that UPDF will disguise themselves as their enemies and attack villages to provide justification to return & sweep a.k.a. brutalize or rape or pillage these villages. They have also reportedly used these tactics to substantiate their needs for intl support, weapons and funds & military expertise from US & UK backers, funds and equipt which was often diverted to the secret US SPLA war against Khartoum, for example.

But war doesn't seem to be essential to the plan. Multinational corporations, significant U.S. companies &/or U.S. citizens included, are everywhere stripping the resources, leaving pollution & disease and environmental disasters in their wakes. And you might probe into the whole classified nuclear waste transhipments programs. Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Togo, Niger, Madagascar and Burkina Faso provide examples, being massively exploited, where military repression and structural adjustment and the concomitant destitution suffice to enable lucrative western control and exploitation. Zambia, Tanzania, Namibia, Botswana & Ghana are a few more examples where I have similarly witnessed profound human suffering amidst huge multinational profits and SAP. 120 years after the British invasion of western Zambia, an area heavily burdened by refugee flows out of Angola & DRC and the concomitant insecurity of insurgent nomadic military forces, the people have absolutely no possessions. The schools don't exist and even if they do there are no books. You cant buy basic staples. I mean absolutely no food, no medicine, no drugs for malaria. Some 30% of people in Zambia don't even know that malaria is caused by mosquitoes. But you can buy Coca Cola and Sprite and Fanta virtually everywhere, but there are usually no basic foodstuffs, no books, no medical supplies. You cannot imagine the suffering until you live it yourself.
And it is no coincidence that one of the directors of Coca Cola , a US company, is also a Director of Elf, and ELFs corrupt practices have been mildly exposed but very very mildly. These wars are prosecuted by local warlords, military dictators and their elite intelligence & security networks, typically armed, funded & trained by western intelligence &/or ex-military &/or private security companies. These networks are particularly ruthless. However, again, they are directly associated with in-country western military & intelligence advisors & their programs incl Israe, U.S., British, German & French. But IMF/WB and OPIC and ADB funds continue to flow, and they support selective interests & projects and infrastructure which helps their related industries further expropriate the resources, the people & the institutions. Uganda provides a good example at war on three fronts and a significant percentage of the IMF/WB funding which has gone into Uganda has diverted for military objectives. Banks which fund Uganda through intl monetary institutions are often associated with multinationals involved in the plunder of raw materials. Uganda supported the SPLA war in southern Sudan. I took testimony from Uganda dissidents who insist that US military advisors have worked with the SPLA & UPDF against Khartoum.

In Cameroon, Benin, Burkina Faso, Gabon and Niger in 1997, I found abundant evidence of unrestricted raw materials extraction by interests associated with the U.S. Again, on the Niger border with Burkina, famine, disease, despair, political repression for the most trifling reasons while right next door there is a Barrick Gold mining operation. Sumitomo & Japan zaibatsu are all involved. People in these countries know what is going on, but they can't tell their stories because most westerners are completely caught up in the mental illness of colonialism & imperialism, which disallows the simple truth to be seen. In Zimbabwe, the issue of land & elections and Mugabe's intransigence aside, lasting repercussions of the Mugabe "five brigade" genocide against the Ndebele people in Matebelelands North & South and the Midlands provinces are heartbreaking. United States diverted its eyes from this scorched earth campaign from 1981 to 1987 where hundreds of thousands perished, where food was used as a weapon and rape prevailed. Media knew about it but the media diverted its eyes.
This is all very current in Zimbabwe. The 1990's was more of the same in a more subtle form. The Ndebele people have suffered untold injustice & terror. Meanwhile, there was plenty of mining & tobacco farming going on in Zimbabwe and the weapons for Mugabe's dirty little secrets came from where? The IMF and WB funded Mugabe, no matter, throughout his tenure and right up into the late 1990's. Again, these are big banks like Chase Manhattan, First Boston and the Morgan Banks; their directors sit on some of the western media boards and dictate relief operations at a certain level. Supranational multinational corporations like Asea Brown Baveri (ABB), Unilever, Royal Dutch Shell, Lonrho, Citibank, and Bechtel which gets away with raping the system in Boston with $10 to $12 billion dollar overruns in the Harbor Tunnel project, have tight CIA & U.S. govt interconnections, policy interventions, and the orchestration of coups, assassinations, disappearances & wars.

Lonrho is Buckingham Palace; I contend that very powerful U.S. citizens are tied in through companies like Brown & Root and Halliburton to Lonrho and Lonrho interests. This is hidden by U.S. media. Media corporations' directors are the same directors of those raping Africa. But too many people have a paycheck to worry about. And that includes humanitarian organizations and the UN and the OAU and the Intl Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. Special torture centers and death squads and massive repression of the population are the rule in Togo, Cameroon, Kenya, Gabon, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, and were so in Zaire. These thugs Eyadema, Biya, Bongo, Obasanjo, Abacha, Babangida, Mobutu, Compaore, Rawlings, Banda, Kaunda, Moi, Habyarimana, Kagame, Museveni, Garang, and Ratsikira provide the environment for pillage and they are duly rewarded with power & all the perks. Charles Taylor was incarcerated in Charlestown Massachusetts circa 1983 or 1984 and he is the only person, I believe, in the history of the Charlestown jail to have been broken out. Apparently the records no longer exist of his stay there. And now he is President in Liberia?
The whole misery industry profits from the wars, repression and population displacement which their affiliated institutions and their funding banks and materials providing multinationals create. Hundreds of thousands of western aid workers would be out of a job if there were peace in Sudan. Who would buy the US made weapons? The business of feeding, clothing and interning the refugees would be lost by the multinationals who get tax write- offs or whose products are purchased by USAID or other govt agencies. Depopulation is policy in Africa; access to the animals, game parks & trophy fishing, minerals, cheap & replenishable labor pool, access for military adventurism & special forces training and psyops operations. Access to biological & pharmaceutical testing grounds. Access to markets. At times, it seems contradictory; at times; it is. But it's all completely unethical, entirely arrogant & racist, driven purely by greed. The profound human suffering is totally unnecessary.

Attended Intl Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda, in Arusha, Tanzania 2000
1998 academic paper on western media mythologies of Africa at Univ. of PA
Traveled, worked or lived in 34 countries since 1989. Working independently in 14 African countries. Directly investigated roots of unnecessary suffering and violence
Tokyo assignment, Newsweek   staff writer, photographer & editor Japan Intl Journal
chair 1988-1989, IEEE Syracuse 1988-89   4 research publications IEEE journals engineer & defense pgms business development manager, GE Aerospace Electronics Labs 1985 to 1989
BSEE & MSEE Univ. of Massachusetts

British paper faces suit over Palast investigation 6.29.01   G.Palast In retaliation for the investigative story about the finances of the Geo. W. Bush campaign, Barrick Gold Mining of Canada has sued my paper, the Observer of London, for libel. The company, which hired the elder Bush after his leaving the White House, is charging the newspaper with libel for quoting an Amnesty International report, which alleged that 50 miners might have been buried alive in Tanzania by a company now owned by Barrick. The company has also demanded the Observer and its parent, Guardian Newspapers, force me to remove the article from my US website, a frightening extension of Britain's punitive libel laws into the World Wide Web. The company has also issued legal threats against Tanzanian human rights lawyer Tundu Lissu, one of the Observer's independent sources and an investigator of the mine-site allegations. The attack by Barrick and its controversial Chairman, Peter Munk, one of the wealthiest men in Canada, who boasts of his propensity to sue, also aims to gag my reporting on his company's purchase of rights to a gold mine in Nevada, containing $10 billion in gold, for a payment of under $10,000 to the US Treasury. My Observer story, Best Democracy Money Can Buy , looked into the activities of several corporations linked to the Bushes. It was in that article I first disclosed that over 50,000 Florida voters, most of them Black, were wrongly tagged as 'felons,' and targeted for removal from the voter rolls. My follow-up reports in Salon.com, The Nation, and the Washington Post as well as on BBC-TV's Newsnight provided the basis for the US Civil Rights Commission finding of massive, wrongful voter disenfranchisement in Florida. My entire continuing investigation is in jeopardy. It is difficult to imagine how my paper, owned by the non-profit Scott Trust, myself and human rights lawyer Lissu can withstand the financial punishment of litigation by the centi- millionaire Munk and his corporation. In its latest Annual report, Amnesty says it cannot verify the allegations of the mine killings because the government continues to resist an independent investigation. Yet Barrick wants our paper to state what we know to be untrue: that independent investigation found the charges completely baseless. Yet our quoting Amnesty is no defense. Americans cannot conceive of the medieval operation of British libel law. It does not permit the defense of "repetition", straightforward reporting on the statements of human rights groups are banned, a gag nearly as effective as Burmese law. Independently of Amnesty, attorney Lissu went to the mine site and provided our paper with witness statements. Tanzanians have offered their services to help defend against censorship in Britain, a poignant reversal for our paper which, with imperial pomp, has launched a 'Press Freedom Campaign' to excoriate developing nations over gagging journalists. '10 little piggies,' Adnan Khashoggi & the greatest gold heist since Butch Cassidy Peter Munk's reputation precedes him. Last year, Mother Jones named him one of America's 'Ten Little Piggies' for his US gold mine's literally 'poisoning the water' through what environmentalists consider polluting extraction practices. How Barrick got the gold mine is something they would rather we not report. First, Munk was set up in the gold business by funds from Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. We are being sued for discussing this connection although the information comes from Peter Munk himself, quoted in his biography. Second, Barrick struck it rich when the company used (or misused, say many) an old Gold Rush law to claim rights on a Nevada mine containing $10 billion in gold by paying the US Treasury less than $10,000. They are suing my paper for publicizing this extraordinary transaction, which US Interior Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt called, "the biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy," and "a form of legalized extortion." Barrick's suit claims the Observer libeled them by failing to state that Barrick had to spend money to buy other rights and equipment to dig the gold out of the ground. What an odd misreading of our words. We never said the US government mailed the gold bars to Barrick in Canada. We only said that Barrick got the gold mine and the public got the shaft. The company's CEO has also demanded his lawyers slice a pound of our journalistic flesh for mentioning that he, "made his name in Canada in the 1960s as the figure in an infamous insider stock-trading scandal." Yet, we read this in the Canadian magazine Macleans: "The failure of [Clairetone Corporation] cost Munk his business and his reputation. Most damning were allegations of insider trading that were made after it was discovered that he and [his partner] had sold shares in 1967 just before some of Clairetone's most serious problems became known." lynching by libel law The clear purpose of the suit is, as Barrick says, to force the Observer to say the investigation "should never have been published", an inquiry into those who purchase the favor and influence of the Bush family, not just Barrick. The article was about the blizzard of money whirling around a family of Presidents and their associations. Among other paid favors for Barrick, the former President wrote the dictator Suharto to convince him, successfully, to grant another gold concession to Barrick. And more than Barrick came into our investigative cross hairs. There was Chevron Corporation, and ChoicePoint, the firm at the center of the racially charged voter purge in Florida. This suit with malicious tone attempts to besmirch our entire investigation and to undermine ours and others further investigations into Bush & Barrick. The Observer's official history quotes a media critic's statement that the papers new editor, " … is expected to continue the paper's tradition of crusading reporting as in the Lobbygate investigate investigation." In that 'Lobbygate' story, well known in the UK, I went undercover with my partner Antony Barnett to expose corruption at the heart of the Blair cabinet. But the wrath of a Prime Minister is easy to dismiss and our awards were a pleasant salve. The withering, costly pounding of an enraged corporate power with too much money to spend has chilled reporters' and British newspapers' will to take on the tougher investigative matters. Amnesty is, "silent on the advice of lawyers." And so, the witness statements of those who watched the bodies exhumed, and one who dug his way from the mass grave, will now also remain entombed in legal silence. How much longer I can hold the line if abandoned by the Guardian's Scott Trust - which is cracking under the weight of legal bills, I cannot say. And the consequences of capitulation to our source and defender, Tundu Lissu and his Tanzanian human rights organization, we cannot imagine.

Bush family finances Best democracy money can buy ¹ 11.26.00   Greg Palast London Observer Last week, I mailed my overseas ballot for the US presidency, and you can wipe that smug little grin off your face. I won't put up with condescending comments about America's democratic rituals from a nation with an unelected House of Lords occupied by genetic fossils and, soon, Chris Woodhead. In fact, you could think of the $3 billion spent in the US campaign in positive, New Labour terms. Call it 'the efficient privatisation of the democracy', though an outright auction for the presidency would be more efficient still. If the guy who lost the vote, George W Bush, nevertheless wins the White House, he'll have surfed in on a crushing wave of nearly half a billion dollars ($447 million), my calculation of the suffocating plurality of cash from corporate America, a good 25% per cent more than Al Gore's take. George W could not have amassed this pile if his surname were Jones or Smith. The key to Dubya's money empire is Daddy Bush's post-White House work which, incidentally, raised the family's net worth by several hundred per cent. Take two packets of payments to the Republican Party, totalling $148,000, from an outfit called Barrick Goldstrike. That's quite a patriotic contribution from a Canadian company. They can afford it. In 1992, in the final hours of the Bush presidency, Barrick took control of US government-owned property containing an estimated $10bn in gold. For the whole shooting match, Barrick paid the US Treasury only $10,000. Barrick made deft use of an 1872 gold rush law meant to allow pan-and-bucket prospectors to gain title to their tiny claims. In 1992, Clinton's newly elected administration was ready to prevent Barrick's stunning grab. But Barrick is a lucky outfit. Bush's Interior Department expedited procedures to ram through Barrick's claim stake before Clinton's inauguration. Ex-Pres George Bush was lucky, too. When the electorate booted him from the White House, he landed softly - on the Barrick Goldstrike payroll, where he comfortably nested until last year. Who is Barrick? Its founder, Peter Munk, made his name in Canada in the 1950s as the figure in an infamous insider stock-trading scandal. Munk headed a small speaker manufacturer that went belly-up, just after he sold his stock. This is not quite the expected pedigree for an international minerals mogul. If we look in the shadows behind Munk we can see the more accomplished player who provided the capital to set up Barrick, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. During Bush's presidency, Khashoggi was identified as conduit in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. He had already run into trouble with US lawmen when, in 1986, he was arrested and charged - but not convicted - of fraud. He was bailed out of the New York prison by Munk, who provided the $4m bond. Bush performed an even bigger favour for Khashoggi: as his last act in office, the president pardoned Khashoggi's alleged co-conspirators, key members of Bush's own cabinet. As a result, no case could be made against Khashoggi. In 1996, a geologist prospecting in Indonesia, Mike de Guzman, announced his discovery of the world's richest gold field. Munk rapidly deployed his president. Bush, on behalf of Barrick, contacted officials of the former dictator Suharto who were in control of mining concessions. Thereafter, De Guzman's company was told it would have to turn over 68 per cent of its claim to Barrick. Barrick didn't have long to gloat. Jim-Bob Moffett, the tough, old, Louisiana swamp dog who heads Freeport- McMoRan Mining, had a private meeting with his old benefactor Suharto. At the end of the meeting, Jim-Bob and the dictator stood on the steps of the presidential palace to announce that Freeport-McMoRan would replace Barrick. (Ironically, Barrick lucked it again. The gold find was a hoax. After Jim-Bob learnt he'd been suckered, his company invited geologist De Guzman to talk it over. Sadly, on way to the meeting, De Guzman fell out of a helicopter.) While Mr Munk's president did not pay the cost of his rental in Indonesia, Bush could redeem himself in Africa. In 1996, as genocide in Rwanda fomented civil war in Zaire, Barrick smelt opportunity. We have learnt that, at that time, Bush spoke with his old golfing buddy, Mobutu Sese Seko (then dictator of Zaire) about diamond concessions. I don't know what ex-CIA director Bush told the panicked dictator, but we do know that Mobutu granted Barrick exclusive rights to mine gold in north-west Zaire. Maybe Bush talked about Barrick's mining experience in neighbouring Tanzania where, according to Amnesty International, Barrick's subsidiary carried out 'extra-judicial killings'. Amnesty reports that 50 independent miners who refused to move off the Barrick unit's concession were buried alive in the pits by company bulldozers. Barrick denies the allegations. Beyond Barrick, Daddy Bush has many other friends who filled up his sonny-boy's campaign kitty while Bush performed certain lucrative favours for them. In 1998, Bush père created a storm in Argentina when he lobbied his close political ally President Carlos Menem to grant a gambling licence to Mirage Casino corporation. Bush wrote that he had no personal interest in the deal. That's true. But Bush fils did not do badly. After the casino flap, Mirage dropped $449,000 into the Republican Party war chest. The ex-president and famed Desert Strormtrooper-in-Chief, also wrote to the oil minister of Kuwait on behalf of Chevron Oil Corporation. Bush says honestly that he, 'had no stake in the Chevron operation'. Following this selfless use of his influence, the oil company put $657,000 into Republican Party coffers. Most of that loot, reports the Center for Responsive Politics, came in the form of 'soft money' That's the squishy stuff corporations use to ooze around US law which, you may be surprised to learn, prohibits any donations to presidential campaigns in the general election. Not all of the elder Bush's work is voluntary. His single talk to the board of Global Crossing, the telecoms start-up, earned him $13m in stock. The company also kicked in another million for his kid's run. And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas of US church leaders, Daddy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organisations run by Rev Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat and, formerly, the guest of the US federal prison system. There are so many more tales of the Bush family daisy chain of favours, friendship and campaign funding. None of it is illegal, which I find troubling. But I don't want to seem ungrateful. After all, the Bushes helped make America the best democracy money can buy. Blackout in Florida Vice-President Al Gore would have strolled to victory in Florida if the state hadn't kicked up to 56,000 citizens off the voters' registers five month ago as former felons. In fact, only

a fraction were ex-cons. Most were simply guilty of being African-American. A top-placed election official (not a Democrat) told me that the government had conducted a quiet review and found, surprise!, that the listing included far more African-Americans than would statistically have been expected, even accounting for the grievous gap between the conviction rates of blacks & whites in the US.
The source of this poisonous blacklist: Database Technologies, a division of ChoicePoint, and under the direction of Gov. Jeb Bush's frothingly partisan Secretary of State, Katherine Harris. My thanks to investigator Solomon Hughes for informing me that DBT, a division of ChoicePoint, is under fire for mis-use of personal data in state computers. ChoicePoint's board is loaded with Republican sugar daddies, including Ken Langone, finance chief for Rudy Giuliani's aborted Senate run against Hillary Clinton.

Maurice Templesman World's #1 10%
sovereign wealth funds Alan Greenspan Shaul Eisenberg Geo. Soros domestic brands nabobs Lloyd's Poppy Bush David Rubenstein Shrub DATA Eurasia Fdtn (USAID) flipside national debt Onassis Citizen Hughes Armand Hammer Milner Group bio Acheson, et al Cyrus Eaton Robt Eringer ibid Daniel Estulin Maurice Greenburg Donald Kendall Perfectly Legal David Rockefeller Edw. Bennett Williams Robt Speisman Secret Parts of Fortune Manhattan Passions Travels With Dr. Death

Maneuvering to Control Congo
2.12.01   Post of Zambia

UN, U.S. still hesitate on peacekeepers for Congo
1.27.00   EVELYN LEOPOLD Daily Mail & Guardian

105.   The UN embargo effectively stopped this legitimizing trend for several months, and pushed traders back into their old & time-tested smuggling routes. Because there was no embargo on diamonds from any of Sierra Leone's neighbouring countries, the ban actually punished the victim & rewarded its enemies. This has now changed, and it is to be hoped that the new system will attract a significant volume of diamonds back into legitimate channels. …

G. Conclusions on Sierra Leone diamonds
…
111.   At the beginning of 1999, the industry denied the problem of conflict diamonds, and govts appeared to be taking decisive action. The situation has now changed, with the most specific initiatives coming from industry. Despite the 12.1.00 passage of General Assembly resolution 55/56 on the need for a global system of 'rough controls', the intergovernmental process may take several more months of negotiation. For this reason, where Sierra Leone is concerned, it will be imperative for the Security Council to take early steps on broadening the existing Sierra Leonean certification system throughout West Africa at least. …

CIA figure lobbies for secret warriors' widows
10.15.00   Vernon Loeb WashPost pA16

LKI Polished Diamond Sales up 59 Percent
11.00   Mazal U'Bracha

Govt in gem shuffle
11.14.02   Tangeni Amupadhi The Namibian ¹ ²

By not implementing that part of the law, Govt appears to have followed the advice of the U.S.' foremost diamond merchant, Maurice Tempelsman, who strongly lobbied against the decision, even going as far as offering to raise a loan that would cover the national Budget shortfall in return for such a move.
Iyambo indicated at a press conference that there was frantic lobbying from various industry players wanting a role in future diamond sales after the Cabinet had issued an "action letter" on section 59. "Cabinet did discuss the possibility of invoking section 59 and, immediately after Cabinet discussed that, many people approached the Ministry saying they will give Govt more than it is getting [for diamonds sold through De Beers]," said Iyambo. He later explained to The Namibian that Cabinet's decision was not confirmed as final, thus leaving it up to the Minister to "to implement or not".

Iyambo said his Ministry had assessed whether the Budget deficit warranted the implementation of section 59 esp. considering that "we are getting more money [from diamonds] this year than any other year". The plan to put section 59 into action was based on the notion that open sales of diamonds could have raised more money and helped reduce the Budget deficit. But under the existing system Govt income from diamond mining has increased this year.
"My conclusion is that, taking into account the prices of diamonds and what we are getting and what diamonds have been able to do for the treasury, there is no need to invoke section 59 as of now," Iyambo told the journalists.

Nyamu in April informed De Beers about the plan to invoke section 59. The London-based diamond cartel that controls 60% of the world's diamond market indicated that it opposed the move. The section allows for a percentage of the production to be sold independently of De Beers, with which Govt has a 5 year agreement to be the sole marketer of the bulk of Namibian diamonds.
Soon afterwards Tempelsman, old friend of Swapo leaders from the days in exile, flew into Namibia and met with Nujoma to argue that the Cabinet decision was ill-advised. He then sent a letter offering to arrange a N$500 million loan to cover the budget deficit, while warning that the section 59 should be like a nuclear weapon: "worth more when threatened than used, and the threats themselves can be made neither too lightly nor too frequently."
The letter was secret; details of its contents and the Cabinet decision were first published in The Namibian in late July.

James Barnes, a representative of Tempelsman, and tycoon Aaron Mushimba, Nujoma's brother-in-law, also met with the President, though the content of their discussions remain secret.
Iyambo denied yesterday that outside pressure was exerted on Govt to rescind its own decision. Though admitting to meeting with Tempelsman, he said the issue of the loan was not discussed. Permanent Secretary Joseph Iita earlier dismissed suggestions that pressure had been applied, saying the issue of section 59 did not come up when Iyambo met with top De Beers officials.
While the secret offer of the loan was rejected, DeBeers & Tempelsman have got what they wanted. Some officials now speculate that the invocation of the controversial section may have been the reason that Nyamu was removed from the Mines & Energy portfolio.

Diamond dealer turns peacemaker 8.15.97   Chris Gordon Weekly Mail & Guardian Maurice Tempelsman … Now the president of Lazare Kaplan International (LKI), … is intervening in Angola's peace process with U.S. govt approval to broker a diamond deal between Angolan govt & Unita. His plan is for the two sides to set up a mining consortium, comprising Unita's mining company Sociedade Generale Miniero (SGM) and Endiama, the parastatal. LKI, largest American diamond manufacturer, would buy the diamonds & facilitate financing, according to WashPost. Tempelsman wanted US Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank to provide financial support for the project, which would be used to buy deep mining equipment. This proposal is virtually identical to a 10yr agreement Tempelsman brokered in Russia late last year. LKI agreed to build a cutting factory in Russia and to sell the polished product. In exchange, the Russian supplier, Almazy Rossii-Sakha (ARS) would supply rough diamonds valued at a minimum of $45million a year. Ex-Im provided the guarantees for a $60million loan made to ARS to buy mining equipment. Whether this same deal can succeed in Angola is unclear. It is the only way the US can offer Savimbi a guaranteed additional income, but the plan has several drawbacks. It will not give Unita the same level of guaranteed or immediate income as the alluvial mines. Part of the plan is to mine a kimblerlite pipe; lead time for these mines is 3 to 5yrs long. Plus, the quality of Angola's kimberlite pipes is variable, with many quite low grade. US sources say the Angolan govt rejected Tempelsman's intervention at first but agreed to consider it last month as the scope of the crisis in the peace process became clear. If anyone can broker the deal, it's Tempelsman. The 67-year-old diamantaire is close to President Bill Clinton and a substantial contributor of more than $150 000 in 1996 to Democratic Party funds directly & through his companies. He first met Onassis and JFK in 1957. His political influence goes back a long way while his interests in Africa date back to the 1950s. In Angola, Tempelsman has been active in diamonds since 1988 and is close to President dos Santos. His company has offices in Angola, which buy & export diamonds produced by small miners. LKI started a new venture with Endiama last Nov. when Templesman met both Dos Santos & Savimbi. At that time, Tempelsman was reported to be urging Dos Santos to consider the idea of an increased share in the Cuango Valley mines for Unita. The Angolan govt has agreed to 2 mining concessions for Unita's diamond company, SGM, and the company is free to negotiate partnerships with foreign mining companies. Unita wants to keep the valuable Cuango mines, which have provided the organisation with an income of at least $2.5billion since 1992. This is a concession the govt says it will not make. Also in Nov., LKI announced it was setting up a cutting factory in Angola to process $40million worth of diamonds a year, provided there is stability in the country and it is assured of an adequate supply of diamonds for cutting. The successful conclusion of a deal between Unita & the govt would satisfy both requirements. Tempelsman's Angolan interests extend to the US- Angola Chamber of Commerce, where he is a director. The ties between commerce & diplomacy in Angola are so tight that the chamber exec. dir. is Edward DeJarnette, first US ambassador to Angola. The current US ambassador, Donald Steinberg, is a member of the chamber's advisory council. Steinberg has supported Tempelsman's initiative to the extent of lobbying Dos Santos in May this year to consider the proposals. Chester Crocker, architect of the US's Southern Africa policy under former presidents Reagan and Bush, is another council member. Whether the links are strong enough to persuade Unita to accept the deal has yet to be seen. Tempelsman met Savimbi last month to put forward the proposals. His strong business ties with the regime of ex- president Mobutu Sese Seko in the former Zaire make him more acceptable to Unita than a company linked solely to the MPLA. Negotiating a successful diamond settlement in Angola might also improve LKI's standing in the new Congo, where the govt does not favour diamond companies with links to the old Mobuto regime. So far, there is no indication that Unita will accept a deal & surrender military options. Unita's diamond trading faces possible sanctions when the UN Security Council meets to discuss the crisis in Angola. Unless Unita agrees to disarm & quarter its army and surrender the territory it occupies, the UN has signalled it will place draconian sanctions on the organisation's freedom of movement & financial dealings. The last time sanctions on diamond trading were attempted was in 1988, when the US govt proposed to ban diamond imports from South Africa but the Bill was never passed. SA diamond group De Beers believes sanctions would merely drive diamond smuggling underground and might undercut the market price of rough diamonds. This is especially true of Angola's high- quality gem output. Cruising with the Kennedys 8.21.97   Elizabeth Rau Providence Journal-Bulletin … Clinton's fondness for the Kennedys dates back to his youth in Arkansas. When he was a teenager, he shook hands with Pres.JFK during high school trip to WHouse. During 1993 Vineyard vacation, he went sailing with Jacq.Onassis on 70ft yacht Relemar belonging to Jackie's longtime love Maurice Templesman. … With her husband & now several Kennedy men yelling at her to jump, Hillary was about to take the plunge when suddenly she heard Jackie's voice above the others. From down in the water, Jackie yelled, "Don't do it, Hillary! Don't do it! Just because they're daring you, you don't have to!" Heeding Jackie's advice, Hillary slowly descended the ladder to a less harrowing height before making the leap into icy water. The details of that day would remain etched in Hillary's mind forever: the cool breeze and brilliant sunshine, lunch on the deck of the Relemar , the visit to Jackie's seaside compound, and the long walk along her pristine private beach. Throughout it all, the two First Ladies spent hours sharing their thoughts, dreams & fears. Hillary later used just one word to describe the visit: "magical." 9 months later, May 1994, Jackie died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 64. But in the months before Jackie died the two women spoke on the phone   [ Did J.O get the WmCasey black marble treatment for horning in on a future candidate's conditioning ? ] Clinton's 1993 party was hosted by Vernon & Ann Jordan. 3 dozen guests incl Jacq. O & escort Templesman; Wash.Post chair Kath.Graham; former U.S. Austria Amb. Henry Grunwald; former Time Inc. chair Ralph Davidson; MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault; Clinton media adviser Mandy Grunwald; author William Styron; Washington lawyer Donald Brown; former Carter admin aide Franklin Raines; National Endowment of the Humanities head Sheldon Hackney and NY sex crimes prosecutor Linda Fairstein w/ husband NY atty Justin Feldman.

"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few" G.K. Chesterton, 1921 The super rich are out of sight ¹ ² ³   º ª 12.27.02   Michael Parenti CommonDreams.org The super rich, the less than 1% of the population who own the lion's share of the nation's wealth, go uncounted in most income distribution reports. Even those who purport to study the question regularly overlook the very wealthiest among us. For instance, the Ctr on Budget & Policy Priorities, relying on the latest U.S. Census Bureau data, released a report Dec. 1997 showing in the last 2 decades "incomes of the richest fifth increased by 30% or nearly $27,000 after adjusting for inflation." The average income of the top 20% was $117,500, or almost 13 times larger than the $9,250 average income of the poorest 20%. But where are the super rich? An average of $117,500 is an upper-middle income, not at all representative of a rich cohort, let alone a super rich one. All such reports about income distribution are based on U.S. Census Bureau surveys that regularly leave Big Money out of the picture. A few phone calls to the Census Bureau in Washington D.C. revealed that for years the bureau never interviewed anyone who had an income higher than $300,000. Or if interviewed, they were never recorded as above the "reportable upper limit" of $300,000, the top figure allowed by the bureau's computer program. In 1994, the bureau lifted the upper limit to $1 million. This still excludes the very richest who own the lion's share of the wealth, the hundreds of billionaires & thousands of multimillionaires who make many times more than $1 million a year. The super rich simply have been computerized out of the picture. When asked why this procedure was used, an official said that the Census Bureau's computers could not handle higher amounts. A most improbable excuse, since once the bureau decided to raise the upper limit from $300,000 to $1 million it did so without any difficulty, and it could do so again. Another reason the official gave was "confidentiality." Given place coordinates, someone with a very high income might be identified. Furthermore, he said, high-income respondents usually understate their investment returns by about 40 to 50%. Finally, the official argued that since the super rich are so few, they are not likely to show up in a national sample. But by designating the (decapitated) top 20% of the entire nation as the "richest" quintile, the Census Bureau is including millions of people who make as little as $70,000. If you make over $100,000, you are in the top 4%. Now $100,000 is a tidy sum indeed, but it's not super rich, as in Mellon, Morgan, or Murdock. The difference between Michael Eisner, Disney CEO who pocketed $565 million in 1996, and the individuals who average $9,250 is not 13:1, reported spread between highest & lowest quintiles, but over 61,000:1. Speaking of CEOs, much attention has been given to the top corporate managers who rake in tens of millions of dollars annually in salaries & perks. But little is said about the tens of billions that these same corporations distribute to the top investor class each year, again that invisible fraction of 1% of the population. Media publicity that focuses exclusively on a handful of greedy top executives conveniently avoids any exposure of the super rich as a class. Reining in the CEOs who cut into the corporate take would well serve the big shareholder's interests. 2 studies that do their best to muddy our understanding of wealth, conducted respectively by the Rand Corp. & the Brookings Institution and widely reported in the major media, found that individuals typically become rich not from inheritance but by maintaining their health & working hard. Most of their savings comes from their earnings and has nothing to do with inherited family wealth, the researchers would have us believe. In typical social-science fashion, they prefigured their findings by limiting the scope of their data. Both studies failed to note that achieving a high income is itself in large part due to inherited advantages. Those coming from upper- strata households have a far better opportunity to maintain their health and develop their performance, attend superior schools, and achieve the advanced professional training, contacts, and influence needed to land the higher paying positions. More importantly, both the Rand & Brookings studies fail to include the super rich, those who sit on immense & largely inherited fortunes. Instead, the investigators concentrate on upper-middle-class professionals & managers, most of whom earn in the $100,000 to $300,000 range, which indicates that the researchers have no idea how rich the very rich really are. When pressed on this point, they explain that there is a shortage of data on the very rich. Being such a tiny%age, "they're an extremely difficult part of the population to survey," pleads Rand economist James P. Smith, offering the same excuse given by the Census Bureau officials. That Smith finds the super rich difficult to survey should not cause us to overlook the fact that their existence refutes his findings about self-earned wealth. He seems to admit as much when he says, "This [study] shouldn't be taken as a statement that the Rockefellers didn't give to their kids and the Kennedys didn't give to their kids." (7.7.95 NY Times) Indeed, most of the really big money is inherited, and by a portion of the population that is so minuscule as to be judged statistically inaccessible. The higher one goes up the income scale, the greater the rate of capital accumulation. Economist Paul Krugman notes that not only have the top 20% grown more affluent compared with everyone below, the top 5% have grown richer compared with the next 15%. The top one% have become richer compared with the next 4%. And the top 0.25% have grown richer than the next 0.75%. That top 0.25 owns more wealth than the other 99¾% combined. It has been estimated that if children's play blocks represented $1000 each, over 98% of us would have incomes represented by piles of blocks that went not more than a few yards off the ground, while the top one% would stack many times higher than the Eiffel Tower. Marx's prediction about the growing gap between rich & poor still haunts the land and the entire planet. The growing concentration of wealth creates still more poverty. As some few get ever richer, more people fall deeper into destitution, finding it increasingly difficult to emerge from it. The same pattern holds throughout much of the world. For years now, as the wealth of the few has been growing, the number of poor has been increasing at a faster rate than the earth's population. A rising tide sinks many boats. To grasp the true extent of U.S. wealth & income inequality, we should stop treating the upper-middle class "top quintile" as the "richest" cohort in the country. But to do that, we need to look beyond the Census Bureau's cooked statistics. We need to catch sight of that tiny, stratospheric apex that owns most of the world. Let's not forget people in the middle of the rich, poor spectrum   op ed   Salt Lake Tribune   ß ¹ 8.11.03   Gwynne Dyer London-based independent journalist When the Human Development Report 2003 came out 2 weeks ago, there was obviously something wrong with it, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Today, sitting in a campsite at the southernmost point of Turkey (even journalists take vacations), I know what it was. The document virtually ignored the whole middle of the world. The Human Development Rpt, annual jeremiad issued by UN Dev. Pgm, is always a contradictory mix of rhetoric that says the sky is falling and statistics that tell a more hopeful story. This year, the rhetoric says that the richest 1% of the world's population, some 60 million people, now receive more income than the whole bottom half. Western Europeans, we are told, were 3 times richer than Africans in 1820; now they're 13 times richer. Life expectancy at birth in Britain is 78.2 years; in Zimbabwe, former British colony, it has fallen to 33.1 years. All true, and about as helpful a statistic as the fact that the richest 100,000 Americans have more money than the poorest hundred million. A more relevant fact is that U.S. is so rich that all but the bottom 30 or 40 million Americans actually live quite well by global standards. Income distribution may be less equal in America than in most other developed countries, but when there's enough to go around, trickle down works.   [ False logic. If U.S. wealth were distinct from, let alone independent of, global wealth, esp. property, this deduction, presented as induction, might have some validity. U.S. wealth is not at all distinct from global wealth generation. Proper euphemism is leak, or flood, in, not trickle up or down. U.S. military campaigns have slaughtered many foreigners and armed the massacres of far more on behalf of "national" interests measured by those interests' wealth generation for the U.S. ¹ But beyond U.S. & Euro courts' jurisdiction, life IS cheap. ] The same is true elsewhere; a lot of countries are now nearing the point where there is enough to go around. Sitting here in Anamur, one of the poorer parts of an upper-range developing country, I realized what the UNDP report was missing. Most of the people around here live in ugly concrete boxes now, much less attractive than the traditional dwellings they have come to despise, but the ugly boxes do have electricity & indoor plumbing and the roof doesn't leak. They drive like maniacs, but many of them have cars. They complain about their poverty, but they do have cash incomes. And their kids live to grow up and go to school, and will have very different lives from their parents. The only resources in this region are bananas and a bit of tourism, but compared to when I first saw it 30 years ago it has been transformed. This is not because Turkish govts have been very good over the past 30 years; they just haven't been completely terrible. Even modestly competent govt, almost regardless of the resources available, will produce a reasonably healthy, fairly well educated population in only one or two generations, and in one more generation they will probably have decent social services as well.   [ Thereby increasing their competition with a prevailing status quo much practiced at destabilizing foreign nations. Thomas Sankara was no threat to anyone, but he was highly effective competition. Again, the false unspoken premise is that national economies are sufficiently independent of one another to nurture their own citizens even in benign neglect. Turkish stability is a direct result of vast U.S. subsidized armaments and German emigre labor force repatriating wages, not "modestly competent" Turkish govt, but Turkish govt usurped beyond precedent by prevailing foreign wealth. Even Kipling mocked privilege's self-delusion of white man's burden. ] Read the statistics of the report rather than the rhetoric, and it's quite clear: During the 1990s, proportion of world population living in absolute poverty, less than a dollar a day, at purchasing power parity, fell from 30% to 23%. Alas, we are told, most of this change was due to improving living standards in China & India, as if that were surprising, given that these 2 countries alone account for over half the population of the developing world, and as though poor Indians & Chinese were somehow less deserving than poor Africans, for example.   [ Disparaging an isolated element doesn't logically demean the whole report. The fundamental injustice is not a proportionally diminished purchasing parity. Individual consumption capacity is no measure of wealth in a global economy of retail credit indenture. Fault lies in vastly increased disparity in proportionment of wealth. Despite all modest middle class gains touted here, they are insignificant by comparison to the increase in wealth's height. This false unspoken premise is that the median remains roughly centered between immutable minimum & maximum proportional values. The roof has risen beyond view and continues to do so ever faster. This crest is not logically sustainable and the impact of its tidal fall is entirely capable of eliminating our species and even the global ecosphere. ] Squeaky wheel get greased; in this case the wheel that gets everybody's attention is the accelerating decline of most African living standards. Some Latin America & MidEast countries also went backward economically in the '90s and most of the former Communist bloc in Europe experienced falls in living standards (although everybody assumes that that is merely transitional). But it is sub-Saharan Africa, with a tenth of the human race, whose plight causes near despair in the development community and drives the kind of crisis rhetoric that infects the report. The crisis in Africa is real, but its major cause is truly awful govts.   [ Those govts were made truly awful by corruption of developed nations' bribes & weapons on behalf of wealth expropriation, not, as falsely, albeit unspoken, premised failure of Africans to attempt legitimate govt. ] Even more than the AIDS epidemic,   [ Yet another unexamined false premise; "AIDS" as field diagnosed in Africa is malaria & malnutrition, not HIV plague. ]   it is corruption & war that drove Africa to the bottom of every index of human development during the past 40 years.   [ Far more often externally & intentionally imposed rather than the implied internal malfeasance ] Nobody except Africans remembers it now, but in 1960 most African countries had higher incomes and better public services than most Asian countries. [ When Thos. Sankara & Patrice Lumumba attempted alliances then w/ those Asian nations for mutual development, they were assassinated by U.S. secret police aka CIA which recruits its leaders primarily from Wall St a la ex-SEC head nee OSS founder Wm Casey and Prescott Bush & his heirs. ] Even the AIDS plague is far less devastating in countries like Uganda that have moderately competent govts.   [ Modestly competent because most corrupted by oil corp. bribery & foreign aid in the form of munitions in exchange for mercenaries deployed to neighboring nations, esp. Congo, the single richest prize in SubSahara. This citation exposes the commentary's oxymorons. ] Extreme rhetoric about collapsing living standards and growing gaps between rich & poor is meant to galvanize people in the richer countries into action, and maybe it is needed in order to persuade them to do painful but necessary things like opening their markets to agricultural exports from Africa, but it is also deeply misleading.   [ Falsehood re falsity. Measurably quantified facts are not rhetoric, however extreme their truth. The attributed motives of white man's burden are implied to be ideologically political, despite their non-partisan source. ] About one-fifth of the world is rich, and another fifth is desperately poor and getting poorer, but the middle three- fifths is actually making solid progress, not because of foreign aid or some special political or economic formula, but because it only takes security, sensible govt and time for people anywhere to climb the ladder.   [ This commentary is naive nonetheless unabashed liberalism predicated on meretricious mortgage to plutocrats' undeclared class war. ] •   Jackie O.'s Russkie Mata Hari ¹ ²   another sparkler for the Gemstone file

Just Jackie Her private years Oct. 1998   Edward Klein Ballantine Books chapt.13 The mysterious M.T. winter 1977-fall1978 "In trust for Jacqueline Onassis" Maurice Templesmann came out of his office and waved a long Dunhill cigar at teh 3 men waiting in his all-beige anteroom. "Gentlemen,: he said, "forgive me for having kept you like this. Please, come in." He led the way into his inner sanctum. It was filled with maps, heavy tomes on international relations & Oriental religions, a photograph or two, and some mementos. His desk was on one side, a long mahogany conference table on the other. The room looked more like the study of a university don than the office of a CEO who ran a multimillion dollar diamond trading corporation. Tempelsman was as plain as his office; 5'8", baldish, with a long sharp nose and a potbelly that bulged beneath his dark double breasted suit. When he smiled, his moon shaped face became suffused with a radiant glow, giving him the look of a picturesque character in a Dickens novel. He was one of only 160 "sightholders" throughout the world, which allowed him to make direct purchases of diamonds from the DeBeers cartel. He was also a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in the Democratic Party, a mover in the world of Jewish philanthropy, an important collector of museum-quality Roman & Greek antiquities, an active NY club man (Century, Council on Foreign Relations, African-American Institute), a legendary wheeler dealer throughout black Africa, and long rumored elusive player at the fringes of the American intelligence community. He took a seat at the head of the conference table and, using his cigar as a baton, orchestrated the seating arrangement. On his right, he put Alexander Forger, Jackie's patrician private attorney. Once seated, Forger introduced Ken Starr, a man as outgoing & hearty as Forger was stiff & formal. Starr was a pre-eminent NY tax accountant. His roster of clients included famous show-business personalities, Morgan Guaranty banking executives, and Paul & Bunny Mellon. Starr, in turn, said a few words about the man sitting next to him, Sheldon Streisand. The older brother of Barbara Streisand known to all as Shelly was a successful real estate entrepeneur who specialized in tax shelters for rich people. … Jacqueline Onassis … would take the entire limited partnership in … net leases on 3 Safeway stores in western Utah and 2 in N.Carolina. Her part would come to ($750k) … less than 5% of the money she inherited from Aristotle Onassis. She would get a very big loss, which would function for years as a profitable tax shelter. From time to time, Tempelsmann interrupted to ask a question. He had exquisite European style manners, and there was not a misplaced word in what he said. But it was clear from the way he cut to the heart of things that he was made of stern stuff, and was not someone to be trifled with. … They had drawn up all the necessary papers, but of course they could not proceed without the approval of Tempelsman, who had known Jackie for some 20 years, and was closer to her than any of the other men in the room. At Jackie's request, the documents for the deal were titled "Maurice Tempelsman in Trust for Jacqueline Onassis". Tempelsman was not involved in actual hands-on management of Jackie's money. He left that task to others. But, since Onassis' death, Tempelsman had taken complete control of Jackie's finances and became the chief strategist behind all her investments. He had already made brilliant use of Jackie's millions. When inflation was at a low ebb, and the price of gold had sunk to about $100/oz, Tempelsman had ordered Jackie's money managers to invest a substantial portion of her funds in gold futures. When inflation took off like a rocket, and the gold's price soared to more than $800/oz, he told the managers to sell Jackie's options. Tempelsmann got up from the table, signaling to the 3 men that the meeting was over. They rose from their chairs and looked at him. He waved his cigar one last time and said, "Let's do it." Jackie had her first tax shelter. a clandestine life Not long after this meeting, Tempelsman boarded a plane for Belgium. There, he was scheduled to make a connecting flight to Zaire, former Belgian Congo, biggest producer of diamonds in the world. He was invited to attend the funeral of President Mobutu Sese Seko's wife, Marie Antoinette, who was known to her adoring countrymen as Mama Mobutu. There were rumors that Mama Mobutu was the victim of her husband's wrath, that she was brutally beaten by his secret police while she was pregnant, and she went to a private Swiss medical clinic but died. Official cause of death was given as heart attack. Mama Mobutu became a national heroine since her death, a Congolese Eva Peron. As friend to her husband, the man who controlled the world's chief source of diamonds, Tempelsman did not think it wise to skip the funeral. It was not a convenient time for him to leave Jackie. His involvement required them to be in touch daily. He became her chief confidant, friend, companion, escort, and travel partner. When Prince Stanislas Radziwill, now divorced from Lee, died suddenly of a heart attack, Tempelsman accompanied Jackie, Caroline, and Lee to London for the funeral at St. Anna's Chapel. Tempelsman did not leave Jackie's side during the entire time they were in London. At first, they were hardly ever seen together in public in NY. However, Tempelsman was a frequent visitor to Jackie's apartment, where they spent hours conversing in French about poetry, literature, and Mediterranean & Mideastern history. … Tempelsman was met at the airport in Kinshasa by a limousine sent by Pres. Mobutu then whisked to the presidential guest house, where he was served a sumptuous French meal flown in the same day from Paris. Before he retired, he was told to be ready the next morning for the long flight to Gbadolite, Mobutu's ancestral village 700 miles of rain forest from Kinshasa, flight over the equator & Congo river basin where some trees rose 180 ft. Except for Mbandaka, chief town of Equateur Province, there was nothing but forests of oak, mahogany, red cedar and walnut. The only living creatures were leopards, elephants and chimpanzees. Tempelsman first came to Africa little more than a boy. Born in Antwerp Belgium Aug. 1929 a month later than Jackie, his father owned flour mills and traded commodities, spoke Gallician Yiddish at home. He fled from the Nazis with his family and eventually became a NY diamond broker. "His father was a trader in industrial diamond, an unsophisticated man, very hardworking, somewhat on the crude side." said an old-timer in the diamond business. "Maurice's mother was a traditional Jewish mother. Maurice's father worked for several important diamond merchants in America, incl reknowned Sydney Lamon, elegant well-educated Dutchman who decorated his office lobby with Mogul paintings. Lamon left lasting impression on Maurice. When Maury was 16, he dropped out of school and went into business. A couple of years later, he traveled alone to S.Africa and wrangled a private meeting with Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, uncrowned king of the Central Selling Organization. Sir Ernest christened him "boy wonder"; from then on, Tempelsman had direct pipeline to world's chief source of diamonds. "Maurice never bought or sold a diamond himself as a trader," said a knowledgeable source in the business. "That wasn't his forte, to be a diamond dealer. He was a diamond thinker." … In the mid 1950s while Tempelsman was still in his 20s and a budding millionaire, he retained Adlai Stevenson as his lawyer. The former Democratic presidential candidate was viewed sympathetically in the soon to be liberated colonies of black Africa. Tempelsman asked him to go on a get acquainted tour. "We visited several countries," said someone who was on the trip, "and stayed on in Ghana, trying to get a diamond license for Tempelsman. I finally hired a local lawyer and we got the license." By then, various heads of state were indebted to Tempelsman, who had better connections in black Africa than most of their ambassadors. In addition a Democratic Party contributor, in the late 1950s with another of his lawyers, Ted Sorenson, Tempelsman arranged a meeting with the skinny presidential hopeful JFK who wanted to know Oppenheimer. Tempelsman arranged the meeting and JFK brought exotic wife Jackie, personification of everything M.T. dreamed of. Building on this relationship, Tempelsman devised a commodities scheme requiring heavy lobbying for a bill to barter several hundred million dollars of U.S. surplus wheat & other ag produce for industrial diamonds, cobalt, and uranium to replenish strategic U.S. emergency stockpiles.

"In Africa, wealth often buys only trouble" 1.25.98   Howard W. French NY Times "The Man who loved Jackie" 7.11.94   Elizabeth Gleick People magazine "The Man at Jackie's side" 5.26.94   Paula Span Wash.Post "Onassis' longtime companion was considered family" 5.24.94   Susan Baer L.A.Times "Sorry Mr. Oppenheimer" 12.15.93   Vladimir Kvint Forbes magzaine "M.Tempelsman's African connections" 11.15.82   Fortune magazine

"Maurice stood to make $50 million on the deal.", said Kennedy administration member who dealt with him. "He went to Jackie who went to JFK who asked me to see him. In my office, I told him ' We'll never get your scheme past Congress. There are 35 members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which is headed by Sen. Anderson NM'
M.T. said 'Who's going to raise objections?'
'All of them'
'Let me talk to them'
'I can't prevent you from doing that.' He went to every committee member and got their approval, then came back to me. I told him 'You've taken care of one problem, but there is still the press'
He said 'What would it take for the press to like it?'
I said, 'If you cut your fee, no one would object.'
He said, 'I might be willing to do that, but I've worked on this for 2 years. I deserve something.'
I said, '1% or ½ of 1% would not be objectionable to anybody'. He agreed to cut his fee from $50 million to under $5 million. We approved the deal and it went through Congress and was done."

Tempelsman landed on the Gbadolite airport runway cut from the brush to accommodate Mobutu's private Concorde, which Zaire leased from Air France to ferry the president and his family to shop in Europe. Gbadolite was once a modest Ubangi river market town. Mobutu transformed it into a thriving jungle city with its own CocaCola bottling plant, modern telephone system, luxury hotel and presidential palace. This gaudy white marble retreat was often called "Versailles of the Jungle" though modeled after the Belgian royal family's Laeken Palace. It had its own casino and was surrounded by lawns where lions & elephants roamed freely. There was also a moat which Mobutu stocked with crocodiles. The funeral took place in a crypt of white marble that evoked the royal crypt of Laeken. Mourner M.T. was described in secret State Dept cables as a key intermediary between the Oppenheimers & Mobutu. Although M.T. denied he was Oppenheimer's agent, competitors saw him otherwise. … In particular, farsighted Tempelsman established personal ties with the "Binza Boys", powerful informal caucus of high-ranking officials who lived in Kinshasa's exclusive Binza residential area and dominated Zaire politics. As his man in Kinshasa, M.T. hired former CIA station chief Larry Devlin, implicated in assassination plot of Patrice Lumumba, democratically elected PM. … "The CIA wanted to have an invisible presence in Kinshasa, and that, as far as most of us could tell, was M.T.'s office. It was supposed to be a diamond buying & export office, but during those years not one diamond was bought or sold. It was entirely a front." … M.T.'s fortune worsened in 1970's. … DeBeers told him to negotiate with Mobutu to get the diamond concession back. On behalf of DeBeers, he offered Mobutu $5 million, $1 million per month." … Tempelsman held luncheons in his office and invited politicians, artists, editorialists, and academicians as guests around a mahogany table of food prepared by his private chef. … "valuable to DeBeers for the charm, many languages," …

chapt.14 Single working woman April 1979 - fall 1985 "an unhealthy bond" … "I had a hard time stringing together Maurice's syntax. He indulged in linguistic gymnastics, and inserted German terms in the middle of his sentences." … Martha's Vineyard … Gay Head … 3 ramshackle buildings, the town hall, the library, and the fire station, and none of the understated glitz of neighboring Chilmark, where barefoot New Yorkers in self conciously aging Volvos lunched on designer pizza at the country store owned by James Taylor's brother Hugh." … Menemsha Harbor, where Tempelsman kept his 37 ft schooner, the Relemar. on the street where she lived Tempelsman's relationship with Jackie was complicated by his wife. In the late 1940s, barely out of his teens, he married 17 year old Lilly Bucholz, observant Polish Jew similarly a Nazi refugee. Her father dealt diamonds in Antwerp before the war and was a minor U.S. player. Maurice & Lilly were from close knit Jewish immigrant community in Washington Heights on NY upper west side. Over the years while he traveled the world, Lily stayed close to her roots. She birthed 3 children and the family moved to a 14 room apt in prewar Normandy building at 8th & Riverside in Manhattan. … "My wife & I traveled with M.T. & wife to Israel after the 6 Day War, 1967, He & Lilly weren't showing any sign of affection. I was surprised that Lilly went to France by herself. When I visited them at their apt, I could tell they didn't have a good marriage." "Maurice was very young when he married. He outgrew his wife." He was attracted to well groomed, well spoken, well off women who moved in highest social levels. Tempelsman made it a point to see a good deal of Jackie when she was First Lady. She made frequent private unannounced trips to NY to be with UN amb. Adlai Stevenson. M.T. called to ask to join them at dinner. Tempelsman continued to see Jackie as a friend during her marriage to Onassis. … After Onassis died and Jackie returned to NY, Tempelsman decided to leave Lilly, who'd become a marriage counselor with Jewish Board of Family & Child Services. He moved out of his family's sprawling Normandy apt into a suite at the Pierre Hotel on the street where Jackie lived. reading & blood diamonds tinfoil hats, et al Steven Sora APIC roundtable ECA

Carroll Quigley author & Milner Group bio Wikipedia Robt Eringer   theorist of rise & fall of civilizations per a 7-stage model (Mixture, Gestation, Expansion, Age of Conflict, Universal Empire, Decay, and Invasion) integrated into a framework of analysis including dimensions of power (military and political), wealth (economic and social) and outlook (intellectual and religious). Bill Clinton named Quigley as an important influence during his 1992 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, saying: "As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. As a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by prof. Carroll Quigley, who said America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in 2 things, that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so" [ Victorian mores construed as immutable natural law refuted by historical triumph of satanic realpolitik ]

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