Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Special_Reports/112504Madsen/112504madsen.html
November 25, 2004-According to informed sources in Washington and Houston,
the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives
around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were
posing
as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar
with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting
machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the
results in favor of Bush.
The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from
technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work
but
the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are
revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.
There have been media reports from around the country concerning the
locking
down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one unprecedented
action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked down the facility
where votes were being counted. The officials said this was in response to
a
Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being issued by the Department of
Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren County. George Bush won 72
percent
of the vote in Warren County, much larger than his percentage of victory
statewide.
The money to rig the election in favor of Bush reportedly came from an
entity called Five Star Trust, largely based in Houston but a worldwide
entity that is directly tied to the Saudi Royal Family. Five Star Trust
was
termed "a well-protected vehicle" that has been used to support both Bush
and Osama bin Laden in the US and around the world.
Other money used to fund the election rigging was from siphoned Enron
money
stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands, which was once the base of
one
of the more questionable and Saudi-linked BCCI subsidiaries. Cook Islands
banks also handled some of the weapons smuggling financing of the
Iran-Contra scandal. A former Justice Department attorney who helped
prosecute the BCCI case said the use of the Cook Islands by the Bush
reelection team indicates they wanted the bank arrangements to be a "quick
folding tent" operation that would cease to exist when the election was
over. He said the Cook Islands was notorious for not requiring any
documentation for such operations.
In fact, the Cook Islands has been a favorite location for various covert
intelligence activities. This most recent use of the islands is a
continuation of a scandal discovered in New Zealand in the early '90s
called
the "Winebox Affair." In 1992, a computer dealer named Paul White bought
some secondhand computers and floppy disks from the Citibank office in
Auckland, New Zealand, that had earlier sold them to a scrap dealer.
White later discovered the floppies (and 10 paper files) detailed a scheme
to use the European Pacific Bank in the Cook Islands to bilk foreign
governments and banks for a phony 15 percent tax bill assessed on various
transactions by the Cook Islands government (at the time run by Tom Davis,
a
former US Army and NASA research scientist who was allegedly on the
payroll
of the CIA). European Pacific reaped millions of illegal dollars from the
New Zealand Treasury and a number of Japanese banks, including Mitsubishi
Bank. Paul White later died in a suspicious auto accident.
As detailed in the book "The Paradise Conspiracy" by New Zealand
journalist
Ian Wishart, the Cook Islands scheme also involved several CIA operatives,
including Lawrence John Fahey, who had an interest in InterAir of Nevada,
one of the airlines used by Ollie North to funnel arms to Iran. It also
involved William Raupe, a CIA officer stationed under cover as a USAID
employee at the US embassy in Suva. Raupe had once worked for Air America
in
South East Asia. Another CIA agent active in the Cooks was Robert C.
Allen,
known to New Zealand authorities as a US agent who was formerly with the
CIA
proprietary firm Bishop, Baldwin, Dillingham, Wong Ltd. In addition, along
with the late former Treasury Secretary William Simon, Gerald Parsky was
also involved in the European Pacific Bank's Cook Islands operations.
Parsky
is George W. Bush's chief fundraiser and adviser in California (he led
Bush's 2000 California campaign) and supported Simon's son's unsuccessful
bid for the governorship of California against Gray Davis and then again
in
the recall of Davis. Enron was involved early on with Arnold
Schwarzenegger
at a meeting in 2001 at the Beverly Hills Hotel at the same time Enron was
bilking California utility customers with increases as high as 1000
percent
This scheme eventually led to Davis's recall and his replacement by
Schwarzenegger.
The Cook Islands-Citibank-European Pacific fraud appeared to have been
cooked up to take the place of other "outed" CIA banking activities,
including Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. European Pacific also involved
assets of BCCI, in particular the Commercial Bank of Commerce in
Rarotonga,
Cook Islands, a BCCI subsidiary. MIchael Hand, a former Green Beret who
reportedly served with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in Laos
(and whose partner, Frank Nugan, was found shot to death in 1980 in
Australia) later turned up associated with Euromac (European Manufacturing
Center) Ltd., a British company that tried to sell nuclear trigger
krytrons
to Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War. Nugan Hand's chief counsel,
William Colby, a former CIA Director, was found floating in the Chesapeake
in 1996.
The sale of nuclear material to Iraq was funded through Saudi operations
in
Houston, including those associated with George H. W. Bush, George W.
Bush,
James R. Bath, and Saudis Abdullah Taha Baksh, and Kamal Adham, as well as
Lebanese businessman Ghaith Pharaon (who was also involved in the collapse
of Miami's CenTrust S&L, a bank that had ties to Jeb Bush). This gang,
along
with Salem Bin Laden, the older brother of Osama, funneled over $1 million
into failed Bush ventures, including Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken
Energy.
Some of the Saudi money also financed Enron Oil and Gas Resources (later
EOG
Resources) in the Belspec Fusselman Field in Midland, Texas, a deal in
which
George W. Bush had a financial stake. In fact, Saudi planes in the 1980s
landed in Houston with mountains of cash used to buy nuclear material for
Saddam to possibly use against the Iranians. The money was laundered
through
Houston's Main Bank, a bank close to the Bush family. Skyway Aircraft of
Houston, owned by Bath, was invested in by Abu Dhabi's ruler (the main
owner
of BCCI) and whose parent company in the Cayman Islands was used by Ollie
North to collect foreign money for his Iran-contra enterprise.
Another person involved in the Cook Islands bank defrauding scheme was a
Lebanese-American named Samir Bashout (alias Dr. Khalaf B. Bashout) who
set
up Midland International Bank and Trust Ltd in the Cook Islands with no
real
capital. Bashout's Midland had nothing to do with Midland Bank of the UK
but
may have been named for Midland, Texas, of George W. Bush fame. Bashout
was
later convicted of beating his wife in Rancho Park, Calif., amid a nasty
divorce. She claimed he secreted away much of his money. Bashout's Metro
Bank (Philippines) account in Los Angeles was found to contain only
$10,000,
not the $10 million he claimed to Cook Islands' authorities. US Treasury
agent John Shockey alerted the Cook Islands internal auditor to Bashout's
repeated attempts to bounce a check for $5 million. In January 2002,
Hamilton Bank failed after it lost $500 million due to loan scandals and
money laundering charges. The recipient of a $5.5 million loan was Metro
Bank International, headquartered in Vanuatu, an offshore banking location
similar to the Cook Islands. Metro Bank was thought to contain some of the
billions of dollars laundered by the CIA and the Cook Islands
International
Trust Corp. on behalf of Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos's CIA intermediaries in
the Cooks were Eldon William Morris, James Centers, and Dante Dominigo
Agdeppa. Morris was under investigation by the Queensland Special Branch
and
the FBI in Hawaii and California.
Bashout was also involved in the defunct World Arabic Television News
(WATN), an Arabic television network that attracted the attention of the
Houston-based Arab Times newspaper as not delivering on its promises and
defrauding investors.
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative reporter. He was also
the Operations Officer at Naval Facility Coos Head, Oregon from 1980 to
1982
and assisted the FBI and NIS in the investigation as a temporary special
agent.
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