New/Old News RE: McCain

[Linda Minor]

You can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. (and the Company the company keeps)

Report: McCain Had Private Meeting with Pinochet in 1985

The website Huffington Post has revealed John McCain traveled to Chile in 1985 to have a private meeting with Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet. According to a declassified US embassy cable, McCain described the meeting with Pinochet as "friendly and at times warm.” At the time of the meeting, the US Justice Department was seeking the extradition of two close Pinochet associates for an act of terrorism in Washington, D.C., the 1976 assassination of former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt. During his trip to Chile, McCain made no public or private statements critical of the dictatorship, nor did he meet with members of the democratic opposition in Chile. Meeting with a bloody dictator, without preconditions - ah, but he was our Company dictator....

If you want to understand history, you have to follow the money. That can be a very confusing task, as the following excerpts reveal. You have to forget whose name shows up in public records; keep in mind that the game is to keep the name of the person claiming the money secret at all cost. The money can be moved from one account to another, from one bank to another, put into real estate, sold and then redeposited. Following the money requires you to keep your eye on the money, not the man who holds it. (Maybe I could design a game that would give "Monopoly" a run for the money!:p

(1)
Do the words 1985, Pinochet, and Riggs Bank...ring any bells?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/12/busine...gewanted=3

(Page 3 of 6)
Mr. Aitken described Mr. Allbritton, who remains the single largest shareholder of Riggs, as "Pinochet's biggest admirer in the banking world," and Senate investigators in the United States have found numerous examples of his intervening personally on the general's behalf over the years. Mr. Allbritton, Mr. Aitken said, "promised, and delivered, rates of return that doubled General Pinochet's capital every three years."

A Riggs spokesman said that Mr. Allbritton did not personally manage the general's accounts and that the two men met in person on only two occasions. "The comments published in the El Mercurio newspaper are fundamentally wrong and materially inaccurate," the spokesman said.

Riggs's own records indicate that most of the general's accounts were earning interest of only 2 percent or 3 percent. The general's lawyer, spokesmen for his nonprofit foundation and individual members of the foundation's board either declined interviews or did not respond to repeated requests for interviews about his finances.

"If a high-level public servant tells you he is going to accumulate $10 million to $15 million by the time he is 65 years old, you need to denounce him to the authorities, because most likely he is stealing," Nicolas Eyzaguire, Chile's finance minister, told reporters here recently. "The only way to have achieved those high rates of return," he added, would be "if Pinochet himself and his children were financial geniuses, something which is very doubtful."

In the United States, federal investigations of Riggs's management of the general's funds suggests that the bank was more interested in masking the existence of his accounts than in producing high-octane financial returns. Riggs, according to American investigators, did not inform regulators, as required, about the existence of the accounts when asked about them four years ago. Moreover, the bank, in a maneuver that it has conceded was improper, changed the names on the accounts of the general and his wife from "Augusto Pinochet Ugarte & Lucia Hiriart de Pinochet" to "L. Hiriart &/or A. Ugarte," ensuring that computer searches for Riggs accounts with the name "Pinochet" would not find them. While banking at Riggs, the general also went by the names Ramon Ugarte and Daniel Lopez, two of the aliases that General Pinochet's financial and legal advisers said he used.

General Pinochet became a Riggs client in 1985, according to bank records. Before that, he apparently used Citibank. "In 1964, my father opened an account at Citibank, which was closed in the 1980's," one of the general's sons, Marco Antonio, said in a recent interview with a Chilean newspaper. "In 1984, that bank asked him to close the account, saying that they no longer wanted to have him as a client." Citigroup, Citibank's parent company, declined to comment.

Riggs seemed less concerned about doing business with the dictator. When the bank reviewed the propriety of maintaining the general's accounts after his arrest in Chile in 2001, a memo prepared for Steven B. Pfeiffer, a Riggs board member, observed that the general's indictment "describes with excruciating detail in over 270 pages the facts and lists thousands of people who were assassinated, tortured or disappeared during Mr. Pinochet's tenure." Still, Riggs kept the accounts open.

Some of the Riggs funds, according to Senate records, were registered in the Bahamas under two corporate shells, the Althorp Investment Company and Ashburton Company Ltd. The mailing address for one of the general's Riggs accounts, it turns out, is a park in downtown Santiago, across the street from military headquarters.

WHILE Riggs threw various cloaks around the general's accounts, the spigots filling them have drawn renewed scrutiny in Chile. In addition to the outsized fees and honorariums that General Pinochet may have received from his activities abroad, Chilean officials are now examining whether the general expropriated large sums from government "reserved expenditure" accounts used to carry out covert operations and investigations. General Pinochet's supporters, including members of his own family, have suggested that the reserves may be legitimate sources of the Riggs funds, but others say no.

"If, as some have maintained, one source of Pinochet's wealth is reserved expenditure accounts of the army or the presidency, then we are facing an extreme irregularity," said Mr. Letelier, the head of the congressional commission. "Reserved expenditures have to do with policy actions, and in no case can the person in charge of the military or the presidency just stick that money in a drawer or in his own pocket. That is absolutely illegal."

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Do these names--Keating, Connally, McCain--in 1985 ring a bell?

http://osdir.com/ml/culture.discuss.cia-...00214.html
...On the deed of Keating's HQ property it stated "When recorded mail to AMERICAN CONTINENTAL 2621 East Camelback Road, Suite 150, Phoenix, Arizona." This was just across the hall from General John Singlaub's U.S. COUNCIL FOR WORLD FREEDOM, the American affiliate headquarters of the WORLD ANTI-COMMUNIST LEAGUE.

General Singlaub's long CIA career goes all the way back to when he was an OSS agent under the direction of William Casey in France and China during WWII. By purchasing UNITED BRANDS Carl Lindner set himself up to become the world's greatest financial beneficiary of the CONTRA/HONDURAN aid program which poured billions in U.S. aid into Honduras to the direct enrichment of Lindner's plantations. Did Lindner send his water boy, Charles Keating, out to Phoenix to facilitate the Contra war with General Singlaub so that Lindner could multiply his fortune?

The summer preceding Keating's purchase of his headquarters property, Keating headed the media relations group for the JOHN CONNALLY FOR PRESIDENT campaign. With Keating in this section was Jim Brady (soon to become Ronald Reagan's Press Secretary) and Joyce Downey. Upon arriving in Phoenix, Downey went across the hall to become General Singlaub's top executive. Former Texas Governor Connally's son Mark later became an AMERICAN CONTINENTAL executive after serving as an aide to "Keating Five" Senator John McCain.

In a very complicated way all this bleeds into Keating's transactions with BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL (BCCI). It is beyond dispute that before it was exposed, BCCI was the largest corporate crime network the world had ever known.

Even TIME MAGAZINE ran a cover story explaining how BCCI had become the favored means of moving dirty money for not only the Medullin Cocaine Cartel, but for the PLO, MOSSAD, Abu Nadal and the CIA as well as various countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

For anyone looking for the possibilities that Keating was laundering illegal funds for Singlaub's Contras campaign, any transactions with BCCI would set off all kinds of bells and whistles.

In early 1986 Keating met a Pakistani in Switzerland named Abbas Gokal. Gokal belongs to a family of shipping magnates who started the downfall of BCCI by defaulting on $700 million in loans. Gokal introduced Keating to Alfred Hartmann, a BCCI director and president of the Bank's Geneva branch.

Steven Pizzo reported in the NATIONAL MORTGAGE NEWS that Hartmann provided $3 billion in loans to Saddam Hussein for nuclear, chemical and ballistic missile programs just preceding the Gulf war and is the director most closely linked to the laundering of Meddelin Cartel drug money.

In 1986, Keating, Hartmann and other BCCI directors met in London, Paris, Zurich, Phoenix and the Bahamas where they founded a corporation known as TRENDINVEST. All this was well known by lower level federal regulators who could not get an appropriate response from higher ups. ...

In summary, did Keating have both the motive and the opportunity to launder illegal funds for CIA operations in Latin America and elsewhere? Yes. Yes. Yes.

It is worth mentioning that when Keating moved out of suite 150, POST\NEWSWEEK moved in. Remember, this was just across the hall from where General John Singlaub ran the Nicaraguan Contra campaign. This was the operation that led Ollie North and General Secord into so much temptation. With the parade of mercenaries that processed through Singlaub's office one must conclude that POST\NEWSWEEK was one amon g many news organizations that never had the slightest inclination to cover any of these stories.

In as much as an animal is undefinable apart from its environment, it is worth analyzing the political setting of Charles Keating. During the high points of Keating's reign the big man in Arizona was Kemper Marley. Marley was the first and only billionaire in Arizona. His wealth was based originally on a liquor monopoly conferred upon him by Sam Bronfman of the SEAGRAMS family.

In Arizona Marley was all powerful.

In 1948, fifty-two employees of Kemper Marley's wholly-owned company, UNITED LIQUOR, went to prison on federal liquor violations ? including Gene Hensley, the father-in-law of Arizona Senator John McCain.

Gene Hensley was Kemper Marley's UNITED LIQUOR general manager. On the basis of so many prosecutions some people might feel UNITED LIQUOR could qualify as organized crime. The slick attorney who kept Marley out of this trial and sent McCain's father-in-law to prison in his place was William Rehndquist ? currently the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was the judgment of the court that Gene Hensley would be prohibited from ever working in the liquor industry. Of course such judgments meant nothing to Marley. When Gene Hensley got out of prison Marley arranged a BUDWEISER distributorship for Hensley which is now in the hands of Senator John McCain and reported to be worth $50 million!

(3)
So here's the question: Were Allbritton and Keating just two hands of the same hydra--competing for control of Pinochet's money when Citibank kicked him out in 1985? Was that hydra the World Anti-Communist League?

Second: Were Allbritton (a man from Houston, who was close to Connally and a wealthy network of Texas oilmen Connally courted in 1968 under the umbrella "Democrats for Nixon" in 1968 and 1972 that won Connally the job as Secretary of the Treasury and the privilege of separating gold from the dollar in 1973, allowing the value to float) and Keating (Connally's campaign manager when he ran for President in 1980). Wiki says: "Connally quickly endorsed Reagan and helped him win a narrow primary victory over Bush in the latter's adopted home state of Texas." So that would have put Connally-Keating-McCain at odds against the Bush-Baker faction of Republicans, no?

The real maverick spirit.