|
ADNAN KHASHOGGI LINKED TO 911 TERRORISTS |
|
PART 11: BEING AN ACCOUNT OF THE
"ENTERPRISE" BEHIND "TEAM BUSH" & A FIRST GLIMPSE AT THE BLACK HEART OF
THE 911 OCTOPUS [Draft] by Alex Constantine
Richard Armitage left ChoicePoint in March 2000 when government beckoned. He will always be one for the books, but before we move on to the White House for a looksee, there is a dangling question to address: What sort of company would take aboard this corrupt, mass-murdering-drug-smuggling-money-laundering pimp? Any company that would pay Dick Armitage good money to direct it could bear some examination. So you click in the business pages on the Internet and you search, downloading any intelligence lead, every key buy-out announcement, director profile, loss statement, press release and SEC reprimand. You wade through trite press releases and confusing math. It takes awhile. When you are finished, you know the meaning of shame. ChoicePoint is much more than a corporate safe-house or pack-station for Dick Armitage. And it isn't historically significant because he worked there prior to taking the State Department appointment as Powell's deputy. Just the opposite - Armitage's place in 911 history is assured because he was a director of ChoicePoint. ChoicePoint is the explanation of everything and nothing, the means justifying the means, founded on the sort of motives that turn some men, when they dwell on it, into hermits or existentialists. ChoicePoint and 911 were inseperable, "joined at the hip." It is no exagerration to say that ChoicePoint has determined the country's leadership, sacrificed thousands of innocent lives, moved the country into a police state and paved the road to war. AN AGGRESSIVE TAKEOVER The founder of the company "fell" off a roof in 1998. His name was Rozar ("Razor" reversed). The obituary noted that Rick Rozar, a "former private investigator," was a "benefactor to needy children." He "fell from the roof at his Newport Beach home." He was 44 years old. The tiny computer company Rozar started up in 1978 would evolve into one of the nation's leading public information brokers. "Rozar, 44, was found by his fiancee about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday outside the front door of his $3-million home on Bayside Drive, overlooking Newport Bay, police said." Cause of death: "'It appeared that Rozar was working on a satellite dish system when he fell,' said Newport Beach police Sgt. Mike McDermott." Rozar started-up CDB Infotek "as an insurance investigations business. He foresaw a growing marketplace for computerized databases that would automate the process for investigators. Equifax's Insurance Services Group bought a majority stake in the business in 1996, with Rozar staying on as president and chief executive. "The company was later spun off as part of ChoicePoint Inc., a publicly traded company. He resigned when he sold his remaining interest this year."1 It was reported that Rozar "engineered the sale of 70% of the business two years ago for more than $32 million, and sold his remaining interest this year for an undisclosed amount." (Unfortunately, he only lived long enough to spend a little of it - a $100,000 contribution to the Republican Party.) Two years later, ChoicePoint purchased Database Technologies (DBT). This company, based in Boca Raton, was founded by Hank Asher. The FBI had accused Asher of hob-nobbing with drug peddlers from the Bahamas. The Bureau went so far as to cancel its CBT data management contract for this very reason.2 That was a hint that something might not be quite right at ChoicePoint. It wasn't CDBInfotek anymore - ChoicePoint was an Orwellian octopoid in the works. The Guardian's Tim Wheeler let drop his reporter's instinctive caution in May 2003: "ChoicePoint Inc, a data-processing firm ... is notorious for purging Black and Latino voters in Florida to help George W Bush steal the 2000 election..."3 "To help George W. Bush steal the 2000 election..." But there is no other way to interpret the documented interactions between Katherine Harris and the executives of Database/Choicepoint ... in the last analysis, it wasn't Ralph Nader or even the Supreme court. ChoicePoint decided the election. Greg Palast, with Katherine Harris's e-mails and financial documents in hand, reported on the causes of the 2000 election after the event. Recall the chaos in Florida when ChoicePoint, inadvertently or not, "glitched" the votes: "Recent studies say nearly one-quarter to 31 percent of black men in Florida cannot vote ... The state's voter-purge project has critics doubting both the accuracy and the motives of the state's contractor, Database Technologies." "Election supervisors in some counties -- including Palm Beach County -- declared the company's information too dubious to use." In a single glitch, "the company mistakenly listed 7,972 people as possible felons, only to acknowledge later that they had been convicted of misdemeanors..."4 This is not a portrait of a thriving democracy. This is fascism. Most Americans are accustomed, even habituated, to living with it, but this is what fascism looks like. "Glitches" do not discriminate along racial lines. Palast's contemporaneous reports from Florida stated clearly that the purged black and Latino votes were NOT the result of a mishap. Laura Flanders at FAIR reported in late 2000, "many Floridians who found themselves scrubbed' off the voting rolls WEREN'T PURGED ACCIDENTALLY.... Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris paid a private firm, ChoicePoint, $4 million to cleanse' the voting rolls, and the firm used the state's felon ban to exclude eight thousand voters who had never committed a felony. ChoicePoint is a Republican outfit."5 "I am disappointed that, to my knowledge, the culprits haven't been legally pursued to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, ChoicePoint continues to get government contracts..." - Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Lithonia Most native observers, swayed by media opinion formation, were unaware that the fix was in, and concluded that the purged votes could be explained away as computer error or KeystoneCop programming, or something else ... if it weren't a step in an accelerated process of fascist imposition on the United States, not isolated or incongrous by any means. ChoicePoint is the product of privitization - like scores of other "independent" contractors that serve the classified sector - and performs many of the "dirty tricks" that were once the province of the FBI, NSA, CIA and other clandestine agencies... "I think clearly the government is now turning more and more to private industry to do its dirty work, to gather information on people, manipulate that information on people and, in so doing, circumvent the Privacy Act." - former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, R-Smyrna "Dirty work" turns a handsome profit. Within a decade since its founding, ChoicePoint's fortunes are swelling. The company's "market capitalization grew by $500 million in the year from Oct. 1, 2001, to $3.1 billion," according to the Atlanta Business Journals web site. A year after 911, ChoicePoint was the eward winner in the public-large company category (public companies with annual revenues exceeding $150 million)."6 The company pulled in nearly $800 million in fiscal 2002 revenue.7 MADAM BUTTERFLY The Bush administration rewarded ChoicePoint handsomely for the hand up in Florida. But the company had help down in Palm Beach from Theresa "Madam Butterfly" LePore, the local ballots chief. Palm Beach was one of the key problem areas during Florida balloting. On Dec. 1, 2000, the Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire" let on that LePore "wasn't always an embattled Palm Beach ballots chief. In the 1980s, she moonlighted as a flight attendant on private planes owned by Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a middleman in Reagan administration arms sales to Iran." Slate.Com's Timothy Noah did some background checking and reported, "Khashoggi has close ties, from Iran-Contra and elsewhere, to the Republicans, and vaguely defined ties to Dubya's father. (In a 1990 court case, Khashoggi's phone records revealed that Khashoggi had spoken at least twice with George Bush's vice-presidential office during 1985 and 1986.) LePore worked for Khashoggi during the 1980s, when, according to her official biography, she was chief deputy supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, a job she held until 1996, when she was elected supervisor of elections."8 The Theresa LePore "Fan Club" web site offers a few pertinent morsels of her biography: "Terry has been married for many years. Twice, even. Her second husband is Mike Lally, heir to the Lally family adverb fortune.... Terry got her first courthouse job at the age of 16, and worked her way up to PBC Elections Supervisor (with that arms smuggling gig on the side). Her salary in 2000 was a bit over $100,000. When I ran, I chose Democrat because the incumbent was Democrat and the county registration is predominantly Democrat.' Is Terry a Democrat? It depends on what the definition of "Democrat" is.... You might say that Terry was a Democrat in the same way that Bill O'Reilly is an Independent." There were a grand total of 261 defective machines in Palm Beach "that should have been decertified and replaced, but instead remained in use. After the fiasco, Terry bought a new computer-based voting system that can't be verified. Great way to avoid a messy recount -- make it impossible to do! The new Sequoia system may have ruined the 2002 Primaries. But Terry promises that the votes were correct, because the machine says so."9 During the recount, Noah read that the Palm Beach County's manual count was duly turned in to Katherine Harris by the 5 p.m. deadline, and only 1,000 out of 462,000 ballots had been counted. "It just isn't possible that this partial recount failed to cover ... at least one percent of the total votes." Noah phoned Bruce Rogow, "lawyer to Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore. There is nothing in the statute that precluded her from accepting the partial recount,' Rogow confirmed. Did she just cite the wrong law? Is there some other statutory language that forbids a partial recount? Nope, Rogow said."10 Now, Rogow's response is noteworthy in its own right, but his name is only raised here to point out that Theresa LePore's attorney was on retainer by the University of Southern Florida, and also represented accused terrorist Sami Al- Arian, George W. Bush's chum (see Khashoggi, parts II & III). (At a faculty question-and answer session at USF, where Sami taught, Rogow answered quesions regarding the university's decision to fire Al-Arian. "Where has the money to pay for the Al-Arian case come from?" they asked. Turns out that Sami's legal fees, $54,000 all told, were "taken from a fund held by the general counsel ... for the extra money, realizing there will be a certain amount of legal fees each year." In other words, the same university that was trying to fire him was tapping a slush fund to cover his legal fees, a weird conflict of interest.11) The Bush family's warm relationship with Khashoggi, Al-Arian and other Middle Eastern terrorists was not so unusual down in the CIA's covert underground. After all, the Muslim Brotherhood, Lois Battuello affirms, "had been funded by clandestine services as early as 1954-56." [See Miles Copeland, The Gameplayer, also Richard Labeviere's Dollars for Terror] "Gul Hekmatyar, now on the most wanted list, is a Muslim Brother and received support both financially and technically from them and from clandestines like Kermit Roosvelt as early as 1977. There was no presidential directive for support in Afghanistan signed by President Carter until March 1979, and that was to provide limited support in Afghanistan - to Shah Massoud and the more moderate Northern Alliance." [See George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War, and Ghost Wars by Steve Coll.] "Any authorized' aid to Hekmatyar would have been underwritten by G. H. W. Bush as DCIA, as the CIA began funding The Safari Club when it was created on September 1, 1976..." [See Cooley, Holy Wars] "Under Bush, Nelson Rockefeller as VP watch. "Since the Safari Club consisted of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Iran to serve as a false flag for U.S. operations in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia and its cadre of operatives consisted of Muslim Brothers, the CIA funding went through backchannels, much as funding in the early 1980s in the MAK program run by G. H. W. Bush as VP was filtered through Al Khalifa Refugee Center." [See Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud, and Cooley.] With the election won, "Team Bush" headed for the Reichstag with gold-plated lighters in their back pockets. _______________ Notes: 1) Scott Martelle, Barbara Marsh, "Rick Rozar, Founder of Internet Firm, Dies," Los Angeles Times, October 2, 1998. 2) Greg Palast, Best Democracy Money Can Buy excerpt, November 26, 2000. http://www.GregoryPalast.com 3) Tim Wheeler, "Collecting data on everyone," Guardian, May 21, 2003. 4) http://www.bushwatch.com/bushdec1.htm 5) Laura Flanders, "A racist elephant in our living room," Working for Change web site, 2000 http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=10383 6) http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2003-12-04/cover_news.html 7) Charles Davidson, "ChoicePoint churning data into revenue," http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2002/12/16/focus4.html 9) Timothy Noah, "Did Adnan Khashoggi Throw the Election to Dubya?" Slate.Com, Dec. 4, 2000.http://slate.msn.com/id/1006609/ 10) Timothy Noah, "Katherine Harris Pulls the Helpless Routine‹Again!" Slate.Com, Nov. 27, 2000. http://slate.msn.com/id/1006559/ 11) Rob Brannon, "Faculty questions USF lawyers on Al-Arian," The (USF) Oracle Online, September 26, 2002. http://www.usforacle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/09/26/3d92ff350d0e1 Appendix Re: Hank Asher of DataBase/ChoicePoint July 16, 2004 Friday Broward Metro Edition SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1D BODY: Life keeps getting better for Hank Asher. As founder and a major shareholder of Seisint Inc., a Boca Raton company that makes a counter-terrorism computer program, Asher will make about $250 million from the sale of Seisint to LexisNexis, a subsidiary of information services giant Reed Elsevier Group. Started in 1998, Seisint now has more than 300 employees, most of them in the Boca Raton office. The company also has offices in London and in Reston, Va. The $775 million deal, announced Wednesday, culminates a remarkable comeback for Asher, a onetime cocaine smuggler who now dedicates much of his time and money to cancer research. "The sale makes me feel great about the fact that my inventions will be utilized in responsible, large-scale and important ways," Asher said. "I believe in doing good and doing well. Both have happened." Asher admits to having smuggled cocaine into the United States during an eight-month period more than 20 years ago. He was never charged with a crime, but a cloud of negative publicity has hung over his head for years, even prompting his resignation from Seisint's board last year. Asher has tried to make up for his misdeeds. He has poured millions of dollars into his JARI Research Foundation for cancer research. Asked if he plans anything entrepreneurial following the sale of Seisint, he said, "I think everything I do from here on in will be philanthropic." Asher did say, however, that he would also do some fishing in the South Pacific from his 100-foot boat, whose satellite equipment allows Asher to communicate as if he were at home in Boca Raton. Ironically, the company that will more than double Asher's net worth will also ensure that he never escapes his drug-smuggling past. LexisNexis databases are used by most major U.S. newspapers and magazines for research. Entering "Hank Asher" and "drug" brings up about 100 articles. A Seisint database tool called Matrix has grabbed the attention of the Bush administration. Matrix, which Asher showed off to Vice President Dick Cheney and the heads of the FBI and Homeland Security during a visit to the White House last year, can quickly analyze data on millions of people. Law enforcement officials use it to compile lists of possible terrorists. "The tools and technologies that were developed by Seisint because of 9-11 should prove to be invaluable to Lexis and to national security," Asher said. However, civil libertarian groups have complained that it is an invasion of privacy. Another Seisint product, Accurint, gives online access of public records to help government agencies and businesses with due diligence, identity and pre-employment screening. Reed Elsevier said in a statement that Seisint's revenues are projected to grow more than 40 percent this year, to $115 million. Seisint officials would not comment on the future of the company. Executives from Reed Elsevier were unavailable for comment. "I believe it was a fair price to us, but an extraordinary deal for Lexis," Asher said. "When they open Seisint's products up to their distribution, I believe they will immediately more than double the current sales of Seisint and more than triple the profits. This makes Seisint the deal of the century for Lexis." Asked how much he will make from the deal, Asher confirmed that the number is around $250 million. But he quickly added, "I don't like to talk about it. It sounds like I'm bragging." Ian Katz can be reached at [email protected] or 954-356-4664.
|