A Few facts
Though they reappear in numerous NCI profiles, at first they
don’t seem related. With further review however, they reveal past and present
connections in a viewable substructure of ingrained conflicts of interest, subtly
understood quid pro quos and malfeasance/dereliction at the nation’s most vital
command posts. Increasingly in recent years, influence buyers place orders with
officials/sellers, in an open marketplace for US policy decisions.- From 1995 until 2002, a top Al Qaeda funder owned the software company (Ptech), that managed the US government's most sensitive IT systems. Those included the Departments of Defense, Justice, Energy, State, and the White House itself. It developed the FAA system in control on 9/11. A version of the software used by Ptech became the program required by the Patriot Act, for international banking compliance. The program's first marketing company was founded by President George W Bush’s brother Marvin. Marvin Bush? Yes.
- According to declassified CIA documents, permission to annihilate Bin Laden at a Kandahar hunting camp in 1999, was denied at the highest level because a Dubai Prince was with him at the time. Leaving office two years later, former President Clinton began receiving millions from that Prince, now Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.
- In August 2001, a Saudi billionaire later cited by the Justice Department as one of al qaeda’s top 20 financiers, bought a US aircraft company (Cirrus), which, now the nation’s largest of high tech small planes. The 911 hijackers original plan was to use small planes.
- The Chinese government controls both sides of the Panama Canal, nearly half the Port of Los Angeles, and its state-owned company is contracted to detect nuclear material entering the US through the Bahamas.
- One of the biggest current US Defense contractors is co-owned by the Bin Laden family. Same company (named Fluor) is among the top 10 in Katrina contract awards,
- In 2000 Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle created a law requiring the FAA to buy half of all new airport scanners from a company (L-3) that just retained his wife’s lobby firm. After 9/11, the scanners were found to be defective and unreliable. The FAA’s Patriot Act compliance was reportedly slowed by nearly two years.
- Haley Barbour, current Governor of Mississippi (and former GOP Party Chairman), is a principal of a major, Iraq contracted, private military company. His partners include the son of the Syrian Baath Party founder, George W Bush's 2004 campaign chairman Joseph Albaugh, and another one of the President’s brothers, Neil.
- Bill Clinton’s biggest lifetime contributor, Jackson Stephens, also arranged the bailouts, through terror-finance linked Saudi bankers, of George W Bush’s failing oil company ventures. Stephens also brokered the plan to bring, what prosecutors called the "largest financial fraud in world history," into the United States.The notorious, international bank was named BCCI. It was controlled by some of those same terror-linked Saudi bankers, most notably the Saudi Royals' personal banker Khalid bin Mahfouz. One of BCCI's lead attorneys was Hillary Clinton.
Not so easy, right?
Overloaded by the info age’s relentless rise of unavoidable incoming data, it's near impossible for us to find and keep track of essential context, let alone retrieve it at will.
National news reports of official wrongdoing, even regarding matters of vital concern, don’t provide immediate access to the relevant histories and relationships of, in New York police parlance, the kingpin “doers” involved.
That’s what the National Corruption Index seeks to provide. A one-stop shopping source for on-point profiles of key figures and companies in major compromises of critical national interest.
Every name, agency, event or term found in each profile can be instantly accessed for all links throughout the Index.
Most profiles describe those involved, whether culpable or negligent. in major events which have harmed or cheated the United States. Also included are some who’ve fought against them - whistleblowers, courageous public servants and those who’ve paid terribly for being in their way.
NCI is anything but light reading. It can be dense, often crammed with slow-going detail, in order to follow and mark trails which those involved have sought to obscure. The subject matter is frightening, and perhaps worse, numbingly frustrating. What can anyone do about imbedded, conscienceless power fiefdoms, whose mutual interest is to further strengthen their never-ending efforts for more control?
Understandably, most people quickly stop asking such questions.
NCI is not a linear narrative with a beginning and an end. Resumed reading needn’t pick up with the last word read the time before.It is a pointillist wordpicture, approached from any direction, ending in no one place, and, at first best viewed in brief visits, scanning details in just one or two profiles. Personal judgment about their overall value should await the reading of a dozen or more.
Best to start with a couple of names you know, accessing one or two others hyperlinked in them. Later on check out a few names or companies that sound slightly familiar, follow the links in them, then set out on any road that (hopefully) draws your interest.
There will be statements, here presented as facts, which you may doubt, dispute or think biased, one way or another. You might question or disagree with some particular assumption or observation. That’s as it should be. All public claims of knowledge about important matters should be skeptically examined, most especially those coming from government officials, any government official.
Individual viewpoints and debated interpretations have been a constant in NCI's development. Differing opinions have often dealt with an underlying question which, at first, doesn't seem too difficult:
Is there a definite point at which coincidence, after a certain number of possibly related occurrences, can no longer be considered a logical explanation?
If so, how can that point be identified? Is there some proven formula, or even a theory, to determine when its been reached in any set of circumstances?
The laws of probability are, for the most part, scientifically defined by objective, controlled frequency studies. There are theoretical variations, which allow some limited subjectivity, such as the computer programs to separate acceptable email from spam.
However, from data such as contained in the following list of occurrences, there seems to be no available mathematical format to gauge whether they could all be coincidental. (Artificial Intelligence programs could surely make a go of it, but they're not readily available to the public). Just a partial list:
- In 1995, Saudi Arabian Omar Bayoumi arrived in San Diego, and five years later, was still receiving no-show job paychecks from the Saudi Aviation Authority.
- The billionaire head of that Authority, Saleh Kamel, is officially identified (though not charged), as one of Al Qaeda's top financiers. Saleh was a client of convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose partner, Grover Norquist, was President George W. Bush's undisputed emissary for Muslim GOP donors.
- In 2000, just after a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, Bayoumi says he began chatting with two strangers in a restaurant. It was a totally accidental encounter, he claimed, and he had no idea they'd turn out to be two of the 9/11 hijackers.
- For no reason besides Islamic hospitality, Bayoumi insisted, he invited them to stay in his San Diego apartment, and they accepted. He housed and fed them, introduced them to the local Muslim community, and looked after them until he arranged for a place of their own.
- Within weeks of the hijackers' arrival, Bayoumi's wife began cashing checks, totaling more than $70,000 through the summer of 2001, from the wife of the Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Prince Bandar. At the same time, Bayoumi's paychecks from the Aviation Authority more than quadrupled.
- The checks from the Saudi Ambassador's wife were drawn on a Washington DC bank (later convicted of money-laundering), whose new Division President was George H.W. Bush's brother, Jonathan. Brother Jonathan had also been US investment manager for the Saudi royals. The Ambassador's wife explained her checks were to help a reportedly sick man, whose wife happened to endorse them over to her neighbor, the Bayoumis.
- In July 2001, Bayoum left the US, and although detained briefly in England after 9/11, the FBI did not object to his returning to Saudi Arabia. His supposedly sick neighbor, Osama Basnan, stayed on in the US awhile, and in April 2002, according to Newsweek, The New York Times and Associated Press, met in Houston with leaders of the Saudi delegation, there for talks with President George W. Bush. Despite revealed FBI records identifying both men as Saudi agents, he too was not deterred from returning to Saudi Arabia three months.
- The 911 Commission Report report says Bayoumi "possibly dissembled aspects of his story to avoid suspicion," but found "no credible evidence that he knowingly aided" the 9/11 hijack plot. The 9/11 Congressional Report did include a 28 page section about Bayoumi, Basnan, the hijackers and Saudi officials, but most of it was redacted by the White House.
Nonetheless, NCI's criteria for claims of fact has been the search for objectivity, though a destination never finally achieved. Ideological or political opinions have been the common enemy.
All those involved, other than myself, hold Master’s degrees from Columbia Journalism School, working writers and reporters trained to pan fact nuggets from opinion dust.
My name is Steve Bauman. I live in New York, and my own career in journalism has enjoyed some recognition over the years.
Of course wisps of personal viewpoint might have slipped through the objective purity filters, but if so, they have had no influence on the overall professional grade of unbiased, verifiable information sought and contained in this index.
So hold on to your skepticism. At the same time you’re urged, as the slogan goes, to “Just look it up.”
This effort began in April 2006. Something about the news of Dubai (of the United Arab Emirates) taking over management of the United States’ major ports, struck this old reporter as a startling new level of disdain for the nation’s well being by national leaders with financial ties to several Arab rulers.
As a citizen I was insulted by President George W. Bush's claim that he’d first learned of the $7 billion transaction in newspaper reports, after his Treasury Secretary John Snow had approved it.
Three days later, to quell congressional opposition, he threatened a veto, his first in six years, against any attempt to impede the deal.
I felt an irresistible need to know how this arrangement came about. One of only three countries to recognize the Taliban, Dubai was embarkation point for most of the 9/11 hijackers, criminal hub of criminal and terrorist trade including nuclear technology for Iran, notorious migrant worker enslaver, it seemed clear Dubai shouldn't be managing US ports.
I started by Googling Treasury Secretary John Snow, and two weeks later I’d scribble-filled two notebooks with other names and relationships, many current or former officials whose careers were built on blatant conflicts of interest
I dove into research rabbit holes leading to labyrinths where:
- despotic and dominance-seeking nations smokescreen their ownership of US companies holding defense and homeland security contracts,
- corporate names change constantly and subsidiaries take over scandalized parents to keep government dollars pouring in,
- lynchpin lobby firms are camouflaged traffic cops, at intersections where convoys of bloated government contracts roll in one direction, and cash carrying limousines head back to policy officials in the other.
- international money laundering, huge drug and weapons dealing, information and military technology espionage is ignored or actually aided by top US officials.
As my somewhat justified smartass older son put it at the time. “If you want to get past the mental masturbation you should find a first rate research organizer to arrange this stuff” and suggested an ad on Columbia J School’s jobsite. I took his suggestion. NCI is the result.
Though its cliché, we should acknowledge that corruption can never be eliminated. Part of our nature seeks gain, control, superiority over others.
Only in recent human history have countervailing social instincts emerged.
Notions of mutuality produced attempts at just governance, rules (even for rulers), fairness and equality, all under the prayerful banner of “Right vs Wrong.”
Of course there will always self serving dishonesty at play within society and ourselves. Most all of us err in our own behalf, and make moral compromises, at some time, hopefully only in some small way.
I remember when Gabe Pressman, pure-grain NY reporter/icon I worked with way back, said something like “Everybody sells a piece of their ass sometime. The idea is to make sure you save a piece for yourself that's never for sale.”
It's unlikely that many architects of the structured schemes outlined here will ever face punishment. Perhaps widening public awareness of their systems' inner workings will help defend against their advancement. NCI's profiles describe different degrees of involvement or encounter with government corruption, but all in critical areas that now threaten our nation's vital interests.
Subtle or flagrant, the arrangements have evolved into a graft-fueled subsystem that now largely informs the course of US official business. In creating the index there's been an ongoing commitment to avoid ideological or political bent. However…
Has there been another national administration such as George W. Bush's, in which nearly every single department has been hobbled by top-down scandal? Daily disclosures of officials' roles in orchestrated, massive swindles, often don't even merit front page coverage these days.
There are just so many, they're so complex, and take so long, if ever, for anything to be done about them. For those who remember their high school reading of President Harding's Teapot Dome Scandal, its unsettling to now witness dozens of scandals with greater impact revealed in just the past few years.
The major news media report the latest revelations, disclosed government contract scams, grossly unqualified appointments, glaring conflicts of interest, whistleblowers’ punishment, and occasional prosecution of schemes impossible to ignore.
Some follow-up coverage, then with few exceptions, even the biggest official corruption stories shrink, move to inside back pages, and fade from collective memory. Journalists, prosecutors, legislators and all those genuinely interested, nonetheless move on to other matters. The specifics of important events, and their implications, are lost in the swift-moving mist of competing, daily public attractions.
Most everything contained in DCI has been somewhere reported or recorded in some media, forum or archive, but is then buried and inaccessible under the growing lava flow of information from every direction. DCI is an effort to pull together and reveal the subtle but certain patterns of sinister power barons, sapping our national strength and eroding even once unshakable belief in the system itself.
As it turns out, the Republicans have been the majority party for the past ten years with a Bush in the White House for twenty of the past twenty eight years.
Of course they weren’t the first to embrace infamous conflicts of interest. In all disheartened fairness…
The Clinton years were certainly splattered with lies and nation damaging deceit. The worst ones weren’t about stupid sexploits or fraudulent real estate deals, but as revealed years later, were part of an arguably treasonous compromise of our nation’s well being by a meglomaniac President bought out cheap by the Chinese.
For a few million dollars in hidden campaign contributions and other payments, that government dictatorship gained billions of dollars from fundamental shifts in economic policy, and access, both public and secretly, to this nation’s most advanced nuclear weapons technology. A few clickable names include John Huang, Yah lin “Charlie” Trie, the Riady family and Jackson Stephens.
However, the number of recently formed corporations, many of them international, in the defense, energy, and information industries, have grown at warp speed during the Bush years. Their “pay to play” modes of operation have grown so explosively lucrative and so flagrant that the actual power sources appear to shift back and forth between:
- the corporations political treasure chests and waiting Directors’ chairs for the transition from government procurement positions, or
- the highest elected leaders and their top advisors who can and do modify national policy and actions that feed the corporations’ forever hungry fortunes.
These are intricate, patiently paced, subtle and long developed relationships involving black-belt power traders, greed crazed executives , time tested expert functionaries and an endless line of unquestioning, lockstep eager sycophants waiting their turn at the window.
Even when reported national swindles appear blazingly obvious, there’s a torturous road before “swindle” becomes proved and convicted “crime.”
The word “crime” itself, despite its historically grounded meaning, still in many areas depends on current lawmakers’ perspectives as they create or revise laws, law enforcement interpretations and judicial judgments.
Appointed government officials, whether directly ordered or acting on what is silently expected, regularly change the rules and regulations of their agencies . Law enforcement guidelines for prosecution of wrongdoing by government employees need to keep pace with the changes, as well as their own superiors’ shift on enforcement priorities.
Its harder to punish a “crime”, as well as its harder to commit a “crime,” if you’re one of those involved in defining that term at the time.
The late Senator Patrick Moynihan once coined a phrase regarding the '70s American society's acceptance of individual behavior. He called it "defining deviancy down." A less erudite but perhaps apt phrase for recent government oversight might be "lowering lawful leadership." It might be, in some cases almost entertaining to retrace the last few years' intricate, professionally planned plots, if the results weren’t so draining on our nation’s lifeblood. Cynical opportunists teaming with sanctimonious hypocrites to share unchallengeable control. Not so funny.
So please do question the credibility of the information presented. Do some source checking yourself. As the information is confirmed you'll better understand why NCI was created. If there are any mistakes, they're unintended, hopefully small ones easily corrected. The facts shriek for themselves.
Back in March '06 the story broke that a company named Dubai Ports (DP) was buying out the British firm that managed the operations at six major US ports and nine smaller ones. Since DP is owned by Dubai, largest of the seven United Arab Emirates, more than just eyebrows were raised.
The autocratic UAE, one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban, has long established ties to terrorist funding, as documented by several US agency reports. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were born in the UAE, and in the attack's final preparations, 11 of them flew directly from Dubai into the US.
In '05 our State Department's Report on Traffic in Persons listed the country among the world's twelve worst (alongside others such as North Korea, Cuba, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) of those permitting various forms of human slavery or indentured servitude. Human Rights Watch reports that at any time in the UAE, passports of nearly a half million foreign migrant workers are being withheld for months while the migrants are forced to work under atrocious conditions. Those with Israeli passports needn't worry. Dubai doesn't allow them in.
The UAE is Iran’s main trading partner. The mideast marketplace in nuclear technology, buyers including North Korea and Iran, according to official US reports was headquartered in Dubai till '04. Such is the country that was about to manage the operations of US ports.
Several weeks after the announcement, amid a growing national furor, the UAE agreed to sell the operation. Nearly one year later they reportedly sole their interest Actually they also own other companies impacting US security, including those with current US Defense contracts. One of them actually services US Navy ships in foreign ports. The facts are just a click away. But first..
When the Dubai Ports story broke, President Bush at first denied any knowledge of the pending $6.8 billion deal. Within days, however, he recalled that a special multi-agency group named CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) had approved it. He also realized that the deal was so important for our nation he'd exercise his first veto in five and a half years if congress tried to stop it.
That's when an old-time reporter, namely me, got a bit more than curious.
Formed as a national security review panel, CFIUS (which includes reps from Departments of Defense, Justice, State, Homeland Security and Commerce) is for some reason headed by the Secretary of the Treasury. At the time, former railroad and shipping executive John Snow held that office. The company he'd run before his appointment in January '03 is called CSX. And wow how interesting...just months before his appointment, he'd sold a billion dollar chunk of the company, to the very same Dubai Ports. Another smaller piece had gone to the Carlyle Group equity firm, George Bush among its founders.
Among the major transportation companies, CSX hadn't kept up with industry growth or profits since Snow became company president. In one area CSX did excel. They accounted for more than 80% of the entire railroad industry's GOP political contributions, $..... Despite John Snow's lackluster history, he left for the Treasury job with a severance package of nearly sixty million dollars, including a twenty eight million dollar loan that was simply forgiven.
As for other CSX executives, there seems to have been a prerequisite that they graduated from White House positions during the first Bush presidency. One of them had just gone over to Dubai Ports along with the first CSX sale, and then President George W. Bush had nominated him to come back as the United States Maritime Administrator. All this while Dubai was buying US ports operations.
That's when this reporter felt hooked to look much further. Impossible that this was all coincidence squared. This was a glaring chain of carefully arranged pieces. All considered, snugly fitted parts, of a much larger pattern.
Dubai Ports investment arm is called Istithmar, and they've recently been very interested in US investments. A bunch of New York office buildings and hotels suchas such as the Knickerbocker, the Essex and W Hotel Union Square. Also the Helmsley, sitting right on top of Grand Central Station. Just before they signed the deal for our ports, Istithmar (Dubai) bought a company (named Inchcape) that services United States Navy ships in foreign ports.
I'm computer illiterate, but Google I can do. Search Istithmar and you'll find comparisons with another enormous arab financial hub named Arcapita. Formerly the First Islamic Bank, this one run according to the "sharia" rules of the Koran, which prohibits the payment of interest on borrowed money. They work around it by the bank taking title to a property with a recorded price higher than what the buyer paid. The buyer gets title back when he's finished paying off the higher amount. See, no interest. Arcapita has also purchased a large number of US companies. One of them, a communications company, did take a little longer than usual to get the CIFIUS stamp of approval, because of reports and evidence linking the bank chairman's link to terrorist funding.
Seized during a Bosnian anti-terror raid in 2002, was a document entitled "The Golden Chain." Introduced as evidence by Federal prosecutors, its a list naming the top 20 Arab backers of al qaeda from 1996 on. One of the names is the same as Arcapita's Chairman, Mohammed Abdulaziz Al Jomaih. Not so common, especially among Arab banking billionaires. But eventually CFIUS let that one through too, apparently taking the word of the bank's president that it really was a different guy, one who'd just died recently. It turns out the name did also belong to the Chairman's father before Jr's recent inheritance of the bank.
A top Department of Homeland Security official involved in the review turned out to be the former spokesman of an Islamic group shut down for terrorist funding. How did he get into the DHS, and as a ranking official? For a quick look click onto the name Faisal Gill, or his mentor Grover Norquist. In the news regularly as a major DC power dealer, Norquist was one of President Bush's close confidantes, despite the co-founder of his own Islamic Group being a convicted terror conspirator, direct relationships with other terror funding suspects, and his partnership with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Arcapita and other Arab states' financial giants have acquired control of many large companies with contracts in US defense, energy, homeland security and information technology. Perhaps notable that Social Security now gets all its information on disability claims processed through an Arcapita subsidiary.
One of the nation's largest natural gas storage fields belongs to them. It has formed partnerships with at least two conglomerates controlled by the government of mainland China.