-Caveat Lector- from alt.conspiracy ----- As always, Caveat Lector. Om K ----- <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Impeached POTUS America Turns Honest Abe's Birthday into All Fools Day by Mark Steyn TODAY is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the man who said you could fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. America marked the occasion by celebrating Honest Abe's successor, Slick Willie, the man who's fooled all of the people all of the time. Actually, hardly anyone's fooled but all of the people have agreed to pretend that they're fooled. As West Virginia's respected octogenarian Robert C Byrd, the Senate's dean of dignity, solon of solemnity and exegetist of expediency, put it: "It would be very difficult to stand and say 'Not guilty'. Who's kidding whom here?" But, in the end, Senate Democrats decided to kid themselves and everyone else. "Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jnr: we revere these men," said Clinton counsel Cheryl Mills, in one of the President's more ambitious arguments. "But they were not perfect men. They made human errors . . ." This is the post-Clintonian pantheon of glory, a kind of alternative Mount Rushmore of men who rush to mount more. Mr Clinton probably finds this company unworthy: after all, this is a guy who once compared himself to King David. But, if we must co-opt the President's predecessors into his pantheon of pants-droppers, here's an anecdote for Honest Abe's birthday, courtesy of his friend, Joshua Speed. Back in Illinois, bachelor Abe was in bed with a popular prostitute. Before they began, Lincoln remembered to ask her price. "Five dollars," she said. Abe had only three, so the girl offered him credit. But he explained that he was very poor, it would be a while before he could pay her, and then he climbed out of bed, put on his stovepipe hat and left. He did not say, "Relax, honey. After I've won the civil war, I'll get some black guy to get you a job with Revlon. Now take your wooden teeth out and let's get on with this." That pretty young prostitute later described Lincoln as "the most conscientious man I ever saw". If that whore were former Senator Lloyd Bentsen, she'd turn to Bill Clinton and say: "I knew Abe Lincoln and, Mr President, you're no Abe Lincoln." Today's Honest Abe is Dick Morris, the Clinton adviser who devised the election-winning strategy of "triangulation" (a nautical term) but was forced to resign when it was discovered he was triangulating with a prostitute. With hindsight, I can't see why Morris had to quit: he had sex with a hooker, not a Federal employee; he booked a hotel room, not a government office; and he paid by personal cheque, instead of sticking it to the taxpayers via the Justice Department's Independent Counsel budget and running up the biggest tab in history. By the standards of the modern Democratic Party, this makes Morris a paragon of integrity. Instead, it's Senate Democrats who've been reduced to political whores, massaging the body of evidence because the economy's booming. They absorbed effortlessly the ceremonial shift of position by Mr Byrd. This week, he believes the President's actions are high crimes and misdemeanours. It's barely two weeks since he filed a motion to dismiss. But, as the Senate went into closed deliberations, he insisted he would work hard to ensure there were 67 votes for conviction - of which there's been no chance since he filed his motion and irreparably de-stabilised the trial. At that time, a colleague of his told me: "When Robert C Byrd speaks, it behoves us all to bow our heads and listen." Now he says: "The guy makes no sense." If I were the 112-year-old Republican Strom Thurmond I'd be miffed at the way I'm routinely assumed to be non compos when ol' Byrd-brain gets hailed as the oracle for every erratic pronouncement. "Sir, it was an honour to be in your presence," CNN's Larry King told him a couple of nights back. Come off it, Larry! Besides, a man who votes against hearing Monica testify on the grounds that it would damage the dignity of the Senate shouldn't turn up wearing a red bow tie and matching waistcoat. With practised smoothness, he gave the President a close shave, but, as usual, Mr Clinton came up smelling of pomade. The London Telegraph, Feb. 12, 1999 Impeached POTUS Clinton's Calls to Monica Taped by NSA Now, Mr. President. About next year's intelligence budget . . . A U.S. intelligence agency may have taped telephone conversations between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, and information about the tapes has been turned over to independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Sen. Jon Kyl said Tuesday. The information came to light last week as the Senate considered evidence in the president's impeachment trial. Kyl, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said key GOP senators were approached by sources who said they knew of the possible existence of the tapes. The names of those sources were then turned over to Starr for investigation, Kyl said. It was unclear whether the development would affect the impeachment trial, which is scheduled to draw to a close Friday. "There are different agencies in the government that make it their business to tape certain things for certain reasons, and it was one of those agencies" that did the taping, Kyl said. "Incidentally, it may have been more than one of those agencies," he added. Kyl, R-Ariz., refused to identify the agency or agencies involved in the taping. "That's something I absolutely can't get into in any greater detail," he said. Kyl said of the sources: "They are people who claim to have information about those tapes, who by virtue of who they are have some credibility with respect to the information they have come forward about." When asked whether the sources were members of U.S. intelligence, Kyl said, "You can assume that they are people who at some period in time have been in the employ of the federal government." As for the motive of the sources, Kyl said he believed they were prompted by the testimony of witnesses in the impeachment trial. "Here you have a case going forward, and at issue are a lot of different interpretations of phone conversations," Kyl said, mentioning in particular diverging memories about details of events in the testimony of Lewinsky and presidential friend Vernon Jordan. Kyl compared the allegations of the tapes' existence to the "smoking gun" evidence in the Watergate scandal, when congressional witness Alexander Butterfield "just blurted out" a reference to former President Nixon's taping system in the Oval Office. "Now you have people who have reason to know that the tapes exist and they say, 'Wait a minute, shouldn't someone know about this?' " Kyl said. News reports Tuesday about the possibility of tapes of presidential conversations focused on the possibility of a taping system in the White House that captured phone calls between Clinton and Lewinsky, but the White House denied the existence of such a system. Kyl was the first to reveal that the conversations had been recorded by the unidentified intelligence sources. U.S. intelligence, including the CIA, the National Security Agency and all of the branches of military intelligence, report to the president and work for the executive branch. The legality of employees of these agencies informing members of Congress of the existence of classified material was unclear Tuesday. Kyl first revealed the role of the unnamed intelligence services in his impeachment diary entry for Tuesday, which is published in today's Republic. Kyl has been writing the diary for his grandchildren, and the newspaper has been printing excerpts of the diary since the impeachment trial of the president began in January. "Public reports are now surfacing about the possibility that a national security agency may have copies of taped conversations of White House calls made by or to the president during the times relevant to this case," Kyl wrote. "I'll have more to say about this as it is officially dealt with publicly." The idea of turning over the records involving the tapes to Starr's office apparently originated with a member of the GOP Senate leadership. "We've been talking about what to do about this, and I suggested why don't we turn it over to Starr," Assistant Majority Leader Don Nickles told the Associated Press. "It's for him to handle; it's not for us to handle." The AP reported that the Republican senators received information about a week ago, raising the possibility that a White House taping system might exist. Eager to finish the impeachment trial, they sent the information to Starr. Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi told reporters Tuesday that the GOP senators played no role in the matter other than to receive the information and pass it on to Starr. "All I've done is make available information sent to me," Lott said. White House spokesman Barry Toiv denied the existence of a White House recording operation. "We're not aware of any taping system," he told the AP. Toiv said there are occasional instances in which Clinton will conduct an interview by phone, and the call is taped to transcribe the conversation. In some other instances when Clinton speaks to groups long distance by phone, those calls are taped and transcribed, he said. The Arizona Republic, Feb. 10, 1999 Russian Follies Controversy Continues Over Russia Central Bank's Offshore Funds Who benefits? Russia transferred a portion of its hard currency reserves to an obscure fund management company based in the tax haven of Jersey, the biggest of the Channel Islands between England and France, between 1993 and 1997, Sergei Dubinin, the former head of Russia's central bank, admitted yesterday. The transfers, which included monies from the International Monetary Fund, were an attempt to shield the funds from foreign creditors, according to Mr Dubinin. Mr Dubinin's comments are the first confirmation of long-held suspicions that the central bank moved money offshore after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Though not illegal, the transfers could complicate the Russian government's talks with foreign creditors as it seeks to restructure its $150bn of external debt and strike a new deal with the IMF. Russia's prosecutor general - which is investigating the affair - has alleged that up to $50bn of central bank reserves may have been transferred offshore over the past five years. But Mr Dubinin said that the highest sum ever held in Jersey through a company called Fimaco was $1.4bn in 1994. The IMF, which was unaware of Fimaco's existence, is understood to have launched its own investigation. It believes the transferred assets were still recorded in official central bank reserve statistics at the time, although many economists have questioned whether the figures are reliable. In an open letter to President Boris Yeltsin yesterday, Mr Dubinin rejected any charges of wrongdoing. He accused the prosecutor general's office of conducting a smear campaign to destroy the central bank's independence. Mr Dubinin, who ran the central bank from 1994-98, said Fimaco had been created in 1990 by Eurobank, a Paris-based bank which is 78 per cent-owned by Russia's central bank. In 1993 the central bank asked Fimaco to manage part of its foreign currency reserves but withdrew all its funds in 1997. Fimaco incurred losses of FFr42m ($7.22m) in 1997. Mr Dubinin said one foreign creditor had been pursuing legal action in Luxembourg and Switzerland in the early 1990s to seize Russian bank assets following the country's default on its Soviet-era debts. The central bank had transferred monies to Fimaco to protect its currency reserves. "We are convinced that Fimaco was an essential measure for the defence of the economic security of the country. And now this mechanism has been destroyed," he said. Mr Dubinin accused the prosecutor general's office of jeopardising Russia's security interests by disclosing details of Fimaco's operations. Charles Blitzer, a former World Bank economist in Moscow, said reports about Fimaco's operations raised serious concerns about how the central bank had been run. "The answers to the really interesting questions are unknown. How much money was in this fund? How much money was made on it? "And who pocketed it?" he said. The Financial Times, Feb. 12, 1999 Commodities Cobalt Triples in Price Trader buys up stocks A London trading company has become a dominant force in the market for cobalt, causing the price of the metal, an essential element in super alloys and speciality chemicals, to treble so far this year to $18 a pound. MRG Cobalt Sales, a specialist metals trader, is thought to have been aggressively buying stocks of cobalt since the middle of last year when prices were falling. It has signed marketing arrangements with Gecamines, the Democratic Republic of Congo's state-owned mining group, and ZCCM of Zambia, two of the world's biggest suppliers. Industry insiders say MRG now controls about one third of the world's cobalt supply. "MRG controls a lot of the deliverable metal, but they are not selling," one trader said yesterday. MRG, a 10-year-old trader and distributor of specialist metals company controlled by the Weisfich brothers, was unavailable for comment. "Consumers and some traders thought they could keep prices low last year by running down stocks and buying as and when they needed it," a trader said. "Now they can't find any metal and they're getting desperate, pushing prices higher." Cobalt is an element in super alloys used for making engine turbines. It is also used in making batteries, tyres and blue colourings for glass. It is traded openly between buyers and sellers, not on any exchange. Apart from Zambia and Congo, Russia is a big supplier of cobalt but is having difficulty delivering because of cuts and closures at its plants. Smaller producers in Australia, expected to come on stream this year, have also been delayed. Traders said big Canadian mining groups, such as Falconbridge, Inco and Sherritt International, which together provide about 30 per cent of the world's cobalt, had barely enough metal to cover commitments entered into last year and were unable to buy more on the open market. David Elliott, cobalt marketing manager at Falconbridge, said yesterday the company had sufficient stocks to supply its existing customers. But he conceded that the market was tight and said there was no excess material available. Another important source of cobalt is the US Defence Logistics Agency, which stockpiled strategic metals during the cold war but is now disposing of its supplies through monthly sales. Last month's sale, at which MRG acquired all the metal offered, was so heavily oversubscribed that the DLA is to hold an extra one in March. The next sale is on February 23. "As consumers get more desperate, and DLA sales are overbid, prices are likely to rise even further," said Nick French at Quest Metals in London. The Financial Times, Feb. 12, 1999 I was stupid, so give me money Woman Blames Lung Cancer on Smoking for 35 Years Gee. Too bad. Let the bitch die. A JURY has ordered the tobacco firm Philip Morris to pay £30 million to a woman who says her inoperable lung cancer was caused by more than 35 years of smoking. Patricia Henley, 53, was given more than three times the £9 million she had asked for. The verdict is expected to trigger a rush of litigation against cigarette makers. The price of tobacco company stocks fell sharply when the San Francisco jury returned with its award after a three-hour deliberation following a four-week fraud and conspiracy trial. On the London stock market, British American Tobacco fell 24.5 to 588.5p, Imperial Tobacco slipped 9.5 to 707.5p, while Gallaher lost 4p to 422.5p. "This will give incredible new strength to claims against tobacco companies," said Mary Aronson, president of Aronson Washington Research, which follows tobacco litigation for institutional investors. Mrs Henley, who smoked the Philip Morris Marlboro brand, said she would spend the money on educating young people about the hazards of smoking. Mrs Henley, who began smoking at 15 but gave up a year ago, said: "It's a victory for the children. I don't touch blood money." Mrs Henley, of Los Angeles, discovered last year that she had inoperable lung cancer. The lawyers for Philip Morris argued that she had understood the risks of smoking. But she said she had smoked since she was a teenager, before warning labels began to appear on cigarette packets in 1966. The tobacco firms never told smokers that addiction might leave them unable to quit, she said. Analysts said the ruling demonstrated the willingness of juries to base verdicts on the conduct of tobacco companies rather than the weakness or bad judgment of smokers. "It confirms the industry's worst nightmare," said Robert Rabin, a Stanford University law professor. The jury foreman, George Loudis, 37, said: "We wanted to send a message comparable to the money Philip Morris makes. The jury as a whole took into account the suppression of known facts by Philip Morris. That was the basis for a lot of hostility." He said jurors were angered by many of the roughly 1,000 company documents they were shown about addiction, which stressed the importance of denying that cigarettes cause cancer and other issues. Several jurors approached Mrs Henley after the verdict and wished her luck. Her cancer is in remission after chemotherapy and radiation treatments. The Philip Morris lawyer Bill Ohlemeyer said he was "optimistic" that the award would be overturned on appeal. The London Telegraph, Feb. 12, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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