-Caveat Lector-
EIR Talks Interview 01/20/99
Author: John Covici <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 1999/01/22
Forums: alt.politics.usa.newt-gingrich, alt.activism,
alt.politics.british, alt.politics.democrats.d, alt.current-events.russia,
alt.current-events.bosnia, talk.politics.mideast, talk.politics.china
Please note this is a rough transcript -- I am sending it out without
proofreading because of its urgency.
EIR Talks
January 20, 1999
Interviewer: Tony Papert
"EIR Talks" can now be heard on the Internet. Tune in on
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PAPERT: Welcome to EIR Talks. It's Wednesday, January 20, 1999.
My name is Tony Papert, and with us in the studio today is
Jeffrey Steinberg, EIR's Counterintelligence editor.
Jeff, on two previous shows, we've spoken about the terrible
danger to the United States if President Clinton should be
convicted, and now Vice-President Al Gore become President. But I
know that more recently, since those shows, EIR intelligence has
accumulated hard evidence which actually closes the circle, and
makes the case indisputable, to say the least.
STEINBERG: Well, the fact is that, as we've been saying for many
years, the now-impeachment process playing out before the United
States Senate against President Clinton, has been from the outset
a foreign intelligence-directed assault on the U.S. Presidency,
which has no basis in law whatsoever. In other words, in the case
of President Clinton, there are no impeachable offenses, and in
fact, to the extent that any kind of "high crimes and
misdemeanors" were committed by anyone, those crimes were
committed by the people who have been working round the clock
since the day Bill Clinton was sworn into office, to destroy his
Presidency.
The reasons for that have everything to do with the vital
national security and foreign policy interests of the United
States, and nothing to do with Paula Jones, or Monica Lewinksy,
or any of that. In fact, the people involved in the assault on
the presidency, today, currently, were involved in that attack,
launched the attack, long before anybody had ever heard of Paula
Jones or Monica Lewinsky.
I think it's instructive that, finally, yesterday, at the
opening session of the President's defense -- the three days of
early arguments presenting the defense of President Clinton --
his attorney Charles Ruff pointed to the fact that, even in last
week's Republican House Manager's presentation before the Senate,
they lied. They misrepresented the evidence. In effect, they
committed fraud upon the court, and they were caught red-handed
doing that, and some of the details of those lies -- the conflict
between what the managers said in the Senate last week, and
what's even contained in the book of evidence, the eye-witness
reports, the depositions and all of that -- shows that they were
using the same exact kinds of abusive methods that were the
reason why the McDade-Murtha bill was introduced, and segments of
it passed, by the House of Representatives after dramatic debate.
So, now you've got the phenomenon of these zealot House
Republicans, having gone in and in effect, committed the very
prosecutorial abuses and crimes that the House debated in very
important and responsible terms, last August.
Now, that having been said, again, about the nature of the
assault on the President, we have a very different situation now
with respect to Vice-President Al Gore.
In the case of Al Gore, we have now assembled at least the
preliminary book of evidence, that Gore was guilty of committing
the precise impeachable offenses that the Framers of our
Constitution {did} consider when they talked about, in Article 2,
Section 4 of the Constitution, treason, briberty, and other
crimes and misdemeanours. Even the President's most fanatical,
insane, psychotic enemies acknowledge that all of the alleged
"crimes" that President Clinton committed, had to do with
personal indiscretions, his private life, his marital life,
things like that, and it's been quite a stretch, even for the
prosecutors in Starr's office and then the House Managers, to
make the link between those private indiscretions and anything
related to the Constitutional duties of the President.
In Gore's case, it's exactly the opposite. What we have is
an open and shut case of Al Gore working, using his authority as
Vice-President, behind the back of President Clinton, to act in
the interests of certain private Wall St and other international
financiers, to bail {them} out at the direct expense to U.S.
foreign policy, and particularly, relations between the United
States and Russia, at a very, very critical moment.
Let me go through the fact of the case, because I think it
really is necessary --
PAPERT: Please ... this is critical....
STEINBERG: -- to go through it step by step.
People remember that in the summer of 1998, the so-called
Asia financial crisis, which Lyndon LaRouche has been saying from
the outset is not an Asia crisis, but is a global systemic
end-game financial collapse, that crisis spread into Russia. And
we had the phenomenon in July of the International Monetary Fund
coming up with a $22 billion package to bail out Russia. And I
think it was the day after the package was finalized, the Prime
Minister at that time, of Russia, Sergei Kiriyenko, basically
said well, even with all of this money coming in, it's going to
barely get us through the end of July. We are so hopelessly
bankrtup, I don't know what to do.
And, in fact, Kiriyenko's remarks were accurate. They also
reflected warnings, and forecasts, that Lyndon LaRouche had made
{months} earlier -- that the Asia crisis would spread, that
Russia was one of the most likely candidates for that to happen.
So, we had the July events. Then, going into August of 1998,
on August 17th, Prime Minister Kiriyenko announced that Russia
was in the throes of a complete debt crisis. And what he
announced was a delay in payment, and the need to renegotiate the
GKOs, the Russian government bonds, and he also put a 90
moratorium on foreign payments of the debt obligations by the
Russian commercial banks.
So, in that one move, Kiriyenko sort of followed through on
the warnings from July, and at that point said, we can't do it,
we can't pay, something really drastic is going to have to
happen.
Now that created a major international crisis. We know,
looking back on those events, that it caused absolute panic. I
described it in a recent EIR article as a near-death experience
for some of the major players in the international financial
community, who knew that they were heavily over-extended in
Russia, in buying into these GKO bonds that were paying 40, 50,
60 and higher percent interest rates, and in some cases, the
turnaround time was less than a month, less than two months. So,
they were heavily extended into a little Russian debt bubble that
had been forced on Russia through the corruption of their own
financial reformers, so-called, foisted by the IMF.
So, some of the major Wall St. and City of London, and
continental European banks and hedge funds, were on the line in
Russia. You had an immediate dry-up of the whole international
credit market as the result of seeing that Russia was potentially
moving towards declaring a full-scale sovereign default, that
would have blown a hole a mile wide in the global financial
system, just as LaRouche warned.
What happened then?
The Wall St. apparatus, concerned only about keeping the
bubble going, and saving their own hides, struck a deal with Al
Gore. We know enough of the details that a competent
prosecutorial team could fill out the picture.
What happened?
Some time around those tumultuous days in mid to late
August, Al Gore travelled up to Wall Street. He had a breakfast
meeting with a dozen or so of the biggest pirate on Wall St.
People like George Soros, who is a household name in many parts
of the name for his criminality; David E. Shaw, head of a smaller
hedge fund, but engaged in the same kinds of piracy. (D.E. Shaw
was heavily exposed in the Russian GKO market, and they had
borrowed billions of dollars from Bank of America in order to go
into these highly leveraged bets.) You had Maurice Greenberg of
American International Group, one of the biggest insurance
cartels in the world, very close to City of London finance. (A
year ago, two years ago, he bailed out Lloyds of London when
Lloyds was on the verge of going under.)
You had people from J.P. Morgan, and Citibank, and all of
the other players, who would come together a month or so later,
to bail out Long-Term Capital Management, another medium-sized
hedge funds, but whose investments threatened to blow out the
whole financial system.
So, Gore was earmarked as the guy to interceded in the
Russian situation, and make sure that the interests of the
bankers were defended at all costs, even if it violated U.S.
national security and foreign policy interests, and even if it
meant the further impoverishment, and throwing of Russia into an
even graver crisis.
So, we know that Gore was up on Wall St, meeting with these
people. We also know that during this time frame, money was
pouring into Al Gore's pocket, and here is where Article 2,
Section 4 of the Constitution specifies bribery in the carrying
out of official duty, as an impeachable offense. We know that on
July 27 $40,000 went into the account of FRIENDS OF AL GORE,
INC., which is vice-president Gore's pre-presidential campaign
policy action committee. The $40,000 came from David E. Shaw, and
other top executives of the D.E. Shaw hedge fund, and the funds
were basically the maximum amount allowed under law to go into
that account. There may be other deals, quid pro quos, on the
future that will come out with further investigation. But, for
now, we've got a concrete instance of a $40,000 cash transfer,
and then follow what Gore did with his hands and feet after that.
During this same timeframe, as the Russian events went from
an economic crisis into a political crisis, we had President
Clinton pinned down, in effect, with preparation for his
deposition, his grand jury appearance, before Kenneth Starr,
which took place on the 17th of August. Which was the same day
that the Russian Prime Minister Kiriyenko announced that he was
instituting this 90-day freeze on commercial bank payments to
foreign creditors, and demanding that a renegotiation, a total
restructuring, in effect a partial default on the GKOS, had to be
negotiated with the domestic and foreign holders.
So, President Clinton was basically pinned down for several
critical days as the situation was playing out. It happened that
on the 20th of August of 1998, President Clinton went from
Washington, having completed the deposition, right to his
vacation on Martha's Vineyard. Vice-President Gore was already on
vacation in Hawaii. Now, during that criticl period, the
following events happened:
Four days after the announcement by Kiriyenko that Russia
was in this unsalvagable debt crisis, President Boris Yeltsin
abruptly fired Kiriyenko, and there was a question of who would
be appointd as the permanent Prime Minister replacement. The
entire government was fired.
Now, at that point, he appointed Chernomyridin, Viktor
Chernomyrdin, as the acting prime minister. We know that
Vice-President Gore made a series of phone calls the day that
this decision was being made
PAPERT: From Hawaii, I understand.
STEINBERG: From Hawaii, on vacation, he jumped into the fire.
He called up Chernomyrdin at least three times on that
Sunday. We know that he spoke to Kiriyenko; we know he spoke to
Yeltsin. He did all of these things without once consulting with
President Clinton, and from we know from highly reliable sources
in Washington, that when he did this, President Clinton became
furious that Gore had presumed the authority to act on behalf of
the administration, behind the President's back.
PAPERT: And he was trying to assure the re-appointment of
Chernomyrdin as Prime Minister, which ultimately failed. Why?
STEINBERG: Well, what happened is this.
First of all, he contacted Chernomyrdin. We believe
that probably Chernomyrdin contacted Gore, and there's an element
of the chain of events of that critical day, that have not yet
been owned up to by the vice-president, or by his buddy,
Chernomyrdin. What we know is that Gore spoke to Kiriyenko and
sounded him out on whether he was committed to assuring Russia'
foreign creditors, that Russia would pay every penny no matter
how much blood it took to do it.
PAPERT: To Shaw and his friends.
STEINBERG: That's right. Kiriyenko was not willing to say yes.
Chernomyrdin was.
So, Gore made the push to convince Yeltsin that it was the
desire of the U.S. government -- implicitly, speaking for
President Clinton here -- that Chernomyrdin be brought in.
Now, in fact briefly, that is what happened. Fortunately,
though, there were other elements within the political
establishment in Russia, who had a good memory of the kinds of
disasters that occurred during the long period that Chernomyrdin
was prime minister. Remember, there had been a lot of government
shake-ups, Yeltsin's illnesses, and all of this, but from
December 1992 until March of 1998, Viktor Chernomyrdin was the
prime minister of Russia. He was fired at the end of March of
1998, and according to sources that we've spoken with in Europe,
he was fired by Yeltsin because Yeltsin got the very clear idea,
that Chernomyrdin and Gore were in a kind of a mutual admiration
pact, an ambitious pact, to make sure that they were the
successors to their bosses. That Gore would be the President of
the United States, as fast as possible, and that Chernomyrdin
would be the replacement to Yeltsin. In the case of Yeltsin, it
was widely expected that Yeltsin would not survive out the
remainder of his presidency to the year 2000. So it was crucial
that Chernomyrdin be in place, and to be the replacement to
Yeltsin. And obviously now we're seeing events play out in
Washington where Gore is, I would say, panting in the wings...
PAPERT: And actually they both are the constitutional successors
to the President, the Russian prime minister, when Chernomyrdin
was that, and of course the U.S. vice-president.
STEINBERG: That's right.
Now, we know that there was a highly corrupt agreement, a
mutual back-scratching arrangement, between Gore and
Chernomyrdin. We don't know all of the details, but we know one
crucial element of it. In 1995 the Central Intelligence Agency
provided the White House with a very detailed dossier on
Chernomyrdin, demonstrating that he was one of {the} most corrupt
officials in Moscow. The estimate of the CIA was that
Chernomyrdin had stolen personally $5 billion, and siphoned it
off into his own private accounts. A large part of that involved
bribes that he accepted from foreign businessmen, who wanted to
meet with him as prime minister to discuss various business
investments in Russia.
We know, according to a new York Times account in November
of this year, that one German businessman was told that he would
have to pay $1 million, cash up front, to Chernomyrdin just to
get a meeting, without any guarantee that his deal would be
approved. The estimate on the total amount that he stole was $5
billion.
When that report reached Al Gore's desk in 1995, the way it
was described in the New York Times is that Gore scribbled a
"barnyard epithet" across the front page of the report, and
sent it back to the agency. The message was very clear: don't go
there. Don't investigate Chernomyrdin. Don't make this an issue;
Chernomyrdin stays.
So then we have the phenomenon in August of 1998.
Chernomyrdin has been bounced out by Yeltsin, and Gore intercedes
to have him brought back in, not because he's going to do
something for the interests of Russia, not because it represents
a desirable foreign policy, or national security objective for
the U.S., but because the guys on Wall St., who are the
guarantors of the cash flow into Al Gore's 2000 campaign, are
demanding that he cover their backs, and put somebody in there
whose policy will be, pay at all costs.
Now, that is {bribery}. And one could argue, I think, even a
compelling case that this was {treason} against the interests of
the United States. Because the U.S.-Russia relationship is one of
the cornerstones of U.S. international strategic and economic
policy, and, had Chernomyrdin succeeded in staying in office, I
have no doubt that Russia would have been in the throes of chaos
today. We might have been in an even more grave strategic
situation that we already are.
Now, to answer your earlier question, what happened?
There was resistance to Chernomyrdin coming back in,
because, I think, anybody even remotely honest in the Russian
parliament, the Duma, or the Upper House, realized that
Chernomyrdin was the king of crooks -- he was the biggest
kleptocrat in Russia -- and to bring him back in, meant that the
IMF policies, the further looting of Russia, the paying off of
these unjustifiable, speculative debts, would go forward. So, on
two separate occasions, the Duma by overwhelming majorities,
voted down the Chernomyrdin nomination, and finally, on September
10, President Yeltsin decided to withdraw Chernomyrdin. An
agreement was reached to bring in Yevgeni Primakov, the foreign
minister, as prime minister, and we know that since that point,
the Primakov government has made an attempt to develop an
economic policy, or strategy, to rebuild Russia's physical
economy, to pay back wages, to avoid mass starvation this winter,
at the expense of foreign creditors.
Primakov in the last few days has submitted a budget to the
Duma that says that the most that Russia could conceivably pay to
its foreign creditors, is $5 billion out of a total of $17.5
billion in all of 1999. So, that's the difference. Primakov and
the economic team that he's assembled -- which involves many
people who have been in a dialogue with Lyndon LaRouche since
1994 -- those people are at least grappling with Russian
national interest, where Chernomyrdin, and Gore, were out to
satisfy the George Soros', the D.E. Shaws, of the world.
Now, it's interesting to see what happened. When
Chernomyrdin failed to pass the muster, and be voted in, and
Primakov came in, suddenly once again, all bets were off, and in
short succession after that, you had at the end of September the
collapse of LTCM. This created the biggest single crisis moment
in the current financial doomsday process, when we had the
spectre of the New York Fed pulling together 16 of the world's
largest commercial bankers and brokerage houses, to pony up over
$4 billion to bail out LTCM.
On Oct. 14, Bank of America announced that they were going
to have to take a $340 million loss on their Russia investments,
which was all in the form of a loan to D.E. Shaw. Shaw went
under. So, in other words, the very players who were buying the
services of Vice-President Al Gore, for this highly corrupt
effort to pull together a bailout scheme for themselves,
ultimately did lose, because the Gore-Chernomyrdin gambit didn't
fly.
So, what do we have, to just sum it up?
As of no later than 1995, Al Gore is intervening to suppress
hard evidence that Viktor Chernomyrdin is a high-level crook, and
not the kind of person that the U.S. government should be
supporting as the Prime Minister and chief sort-of political
player on the scene in Russis. Gore suppresses that. Three years
later, knowing full well that his partner, Chernomyrdin, is a
crook, Gore intervenes behind the back of the President of the
United States, to get Chernomyrdin re-instated in office, so that
he can turn, and fully pay back the ruble-forward contracts, the
GKO obligations, of this crowd of pirates, Wall St. pirates, who
have been systematically gone after by President Clinton, by
Treasury Secretary Rubin.
Now, it's true that the United States has not taken the
plunge, and actually adopted the new financial architecture
that's going to be needed -- the Bretton Woods system that Lyndon
LaRouche has been speaking about for years. But, nevertheless,
President Clinton, Treasury Secretary Rubin, have singled out the
hedge funds, the commercial banks that are indiscriminately
pouring money into these hedge funds for these highly leveraged
bets, that this is a problem. This is a national security threat
to the United States.
So, in effect, Al Gore is an instrument of that national
security threat. This is an impeachable offense. We've gotten at
least preliminary information out on this issue to a number of
people in Congress, both Republicans and Democrats. And I can
just simply say that the response has been very serious. These
are not frivolous charges. This is not something that represents
a loose thread of pieces. This is the core of a hard evidentiary
case.
Now, what are the consequences of the impeachment of Al Gore
on legitimate, justifiable, real issues -- as opposed to this
"fudge," to use Charles Ruff's words yesterday, that Kenneth
Starr and the House Managers have slapped together in a
disgusting fashion against President Clinton.
Number one, if you remove Al Gore as Vice-president, then
the viability of the assault on the presidency, the impeachment
scenario, or any other means that will be attempted to get rid of
Bill Clinton, really is significantly undermined. There has been
a long-term investment in installing Al Gore as president, over
either the literal, or political, corpse of Bill Clinton. And
there is just simply not another viable option in the wings for
these people.
So, Gore is their man. Gore is the man of Prince Philip.
Gore is the man of the hedge funds, and the other Wall St.
pirates. Gore is the man of the Christian Right. Gore is the man
of the other Republican insurrectionists in the Congress. You
take Gore out as vice-president, and the whole thing doesn't
function, and it becomes almost impossible under those
circumstances, for President Clinton to be removed from office.
The second thing is, that with the albatross of Al Gore's
policy sabotage removed, we have the phenomenon of a President
who is much more unencumbered, and much more free to pursue the
kinds of policies that Lyndon Larouche has been saying are the
only way out for the United States and the world. And I, for one,
am very optimistic that, if the Gore albatross were removed,
Clinton would indeed take up those policies.
And then thirdly, take Al Gore out, through this process, of
impeaching him for these, hard provable crimes, and the issue of
the Year 2000 Democratic nomination is completely wide open, and
is something that could be a real avenue for national debate, for
a revival of the FDR-Kennedy tradition in the Democratic Party,
and other things along those lines.
So, it's a win-win situation for the party, for the country,
and for the world as a whole.
PAPERT: You're listening to EIR Talks, and we'll right back with
the subject of possible regional, nuclear world, expanding to
possible global, themonuclear confrontation, in this context.
TONY PAPERT: Jeff, the Islamic holiday of Ramadan is ending
now throughout the world. There's been a lot of discussion of
whether the U.S. and Great Britain will resume their bombing
campaign of Iraq, which was halted shortly after the holy month
of Ramadan began. Will they? Or what's the significance of this
discussion?
JEFF STEINBERG: Well, clearly there are elements within the
Clinton administration, centered around a grouping known formally
as the Principals Committee, that are anxious to get on with it
again. And clearly the British government is unanimously -- to
say ``enthusiastic'' would be an understatement. They're obsessed
with the idea that this next phase of the bombing must ensue,
must happen immediately, and must be the most provocative kind of
action to further drive a wedge between the United States and
critical allies such as Russia, China, the countries of the Arab
world.
Now, the question, I think, that's really on the table --
and this has been the question repeatedly on the table for well
over a year -- is: Will President Clinton act sensibly and defy
the advice and pressure coming from Tony Blair, and from inside
his own administration through the Principals Committee, and will
he simply say, ``No, there's no viable military objective to be
achieved here. The international strategic fallout from further
action will be disastrous, and we're not going to do it.''
Now twice before, President Clinton did have the courage and
foresight to make that kind of decision. Late January, early
February of 1998, there was enormous pressure coming from the
same circles that are pressuring him right now to go ahead with
the bombing. And at that point, he opted to work through Russian
then-Foreign Minister Primakov and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, to reach some sort of agreement to avoid military action,
and to reinvigorate the inspection process inside Iraq.
And that basically worked, with a lot of carping and
objections, right up through to the fall of 1998, when again
there was a concert of action from inside the administration,
from London, from Israel, the Netanyahu crowd, to force Clinton
into taking military action. And at that point again, on November
15th, 1998, to be precise, President Clinton said ``No, we've got
an agreement from Saddam Hussein, again extracted through the
good offices of Primakov and Kofi Annan. We're going to get the
inspections back on track.''
The president basically grilled his military advisors on
what would be the civilian casualties of a military action at
that time. And he was told that there would be, at minimum,
10,000 Iraqi civilians killed. And he said ``No, it's not worth
it.''
We've talked in previous shows about the fact that within 30
days, the president had been beaten down and boxed in. And at a
point that he was not even in the United States, but was off in
the Middle East, first meeting with Netanyahu and Arafat, and
then in Air Force One flying back, he was finally basically
armtwisted into giving the green light to a military action that
had no rhyme or reason.
TONY PAPERT: Now, what is the Principals Committee?
JEFF STEINBERG: When President Clinton came into office in
January of 1993 -- remember under the Reagan and Bush
administrations, you had this elaborate alphabet soup of Cabinet
and sub-Cabinet, different working groups. You had the RIGS, you
had the TWIGs, you had the SIGs. You had basically a bureaucratic
apparatus which during that period was also interfaced with
out-of-government circles, what was referred to at the time as
the secret parallel government.
So President Clinton came in, and he basically thought to
streamline the structure of his Cabinet. And so he created,
through National Security Decision Directive -- one of the very
first things he signed as President -- something called the
Principals Committee, which was basically the National Security
Advisor, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State. And
then they could call in the CIA Director and the head of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, as appropriate. And the vice president,
I'm sorry.
Interestingly -- and this was a kind of a harbinger of the
problems that would continue to erupt around Al Gore
subsequently. Al Gore's National Security Advisor, in other
words, a staffer, someone who had never been elected to any
office in his life, a man named Leon Fuerth, was given
full-status membership on the Principals Committee.
So this was a high-level national security working group,
that included everybody of importance in the decision-making loop
on national security, defense, and foreign policy in the
administration, except the President of the United States. This
was basically to be an advisory group, to put together
preliminary thoughts and ideas and evaluations, and go to the
president with it.
During the first Clinton administration, you had some people
in there who were by no means, you know, great historical
figures, but who were at least not actively conspiring against
the President. You had as Secretary of State Warren Christopher,
you had as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General
Shalikashvili, who at least attempted in his writings as a
military senior ranking officer, to discuss strategic matters.
Now we've got General Shelton, whose only literary output
involved writing about tactical special forces matters. The guy
is not a strategic thinker, and is in fact a kind of believer in
this utopian idea of air power, information warfare, and special
forces as the new strategic triad for American military policy.
It's utopian insanity. It's something that you could expect to
hear from Heidi Toffler, or Al Gore, or Newt Gingrich, but, my
God, not from the mouth of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.
So it's clear that the dominant voice -- in fact, the only
consistent members of the Principals Committee from the beginning
of the Clinton administration through to the present, have been
Al Gore and Leon Fuerth. So, this is their sort of vehicle for
attempting to jam the president on policy issues where there are
wide gaps between President Clinton and Vice President Gore.
Iraq has been the symbol and the most extreme instance,
where there has been a policy divergence, and where pressure
through the vehicle of the Principals Committee, has had an
insidious impact, specifically President Clinton's disastrous
decision mid-December, to basically capitulate to the consensus
on the Principals Committee and allow that 70 hours of bombing to
occur.
Now, one would hope that the President is in enough of a
combative mood at this point, and actually sees more clearly the
folly of listening to these advisers, who are not acting in his
best interests, or the best interests of the country. And one
would hope that the President would not take the next plunge
forward, because the next phase in the attack on Iraq is not just
simply a new round of aerial bombardment. The demand is: get rid
of Saddam Hussein.
And so you've got people running around, like Trent Lott,
who rammed through a bill in Congress during the 105th Congress,
called the Iraq Liberation Act. And as we speak today, President
Clinton has 10 days to decide on which groups among the Iraqi
opposition are going to get what share of $97 million voted up by
Congress courtesy of Trent Lott and company.
Now, we're talking about an attempt to lure President
Clinton into a Contra or Afghansi operation, Take Two. And in
fact, the current issue of {Foreign Affairs} magazine has an
article by a National Defense University scholar, a staffer at
the Council on Foreign Relations, and a guy formerly CIA, now
with the Rand Corporation, warning that there's no way that the
Iraq opposition could muster up the ability to overthrow, no
matter how many U.S. Special Forces you throw in there on the
ground under cover.
So, they say that what's in the works here is a new Bay of
Pigs or Vietnam fiasco, and it's to be avoided at all costs. One
would hope that President Clinton would avoid it and would
reassert the kind of independent judgment that he's briefly shown
in certain flashes over the last several years on this Iraq
issue, and that he won't go down this path.
TONY PAPERT: I think there's one other thing we should note,
which is the possible local/regional nuclear war implications, at
least, of trying to run an Afghanistan or Iran-Contra in the
middle of the Middle East.
JEFF STEINBERG: Well, you have got two aspects of that.
You've got the British, who during Operation Desert Fox, which
was the 70 hours of bombing last December, acknowledged that they
had tactical nuclear weapons forward-deployed, ready to use
against Iraq, if Iraq took any offensive action using so-called
weapons of mass destruction against the allied forces or against
Israel.
The bigger phenomenon is that you've got a growingly more
and more desperate Netanyahu-and-Sharon combination in Israel
that would like nothing better than to squirm out of their
election crisis by having some grave strategic military showdown
erupt in that region. And Israel is prepared -- they've said it
openly, they've said it publicly -- to use nuclear weapons,
neutron bombs, other theater-area nuclear weapons, against Iraq,
against Yemen, against Iran, against Sudan, if they make some
credible claim that they're threatened with weapons of mass
destruction.
So, this is no joke. This is a situation fraught with
dangers that could cascade out of control very easily. We have
the phenomenon of the Russians, now faced with the U.S. tilting
more and more towards an alliance with Britain against the
directionality that had been being pursued by President Clinton
in seeking out a partnership with Russia, seeking out a
[relationship?] with China. We had the phenomenon during the
first administration of President Clinton reaching out to
then-German-Chancellor Kohl to form a U.S.-German cooperation to
help Russia get through the crisis, the economic crisis of the
post-communist period.
Now we've got a concert of effort, and we can see clearly Al
Gore, Leon Fuerth, being the sort of point people inside the
administration--
TONY PAPERT: For foreign powers represented by Tony Blair.
JEFF STEINBERG: Right. For Tony Clair, for the Hollinger
Corporation, for that apparatus, to lock President Clinton into
this revived Anglo-American trap -- you could probably more
precisely call it ``British-American-Canadian trap.''
So, the stakes are enormous. Russia, because of this
phenomenon of the tilt in Washington, has been forced to openly
say that they're in a situation where their last line of defense,
if they feel militarily threatened, is to resort to their still
very capable and large thermonuclear capability. Their regular
military has been hollowed out, has been gutted. So there's no
credible Russian conventional military capability. All they have
is the button.
Again, that's fraught with dangers. And the Middle East is
the cockpit of the Great Game. It's been that way for over a
century, it's playing out right now as a ticking time bomb. And,
as you say, Ramadan is now ended, the Holy Month of Islam. And so
at any moment now, the issue of, will President Clinton cave in
again to the Gore/Neo-Con/British-Israeli complex and go with a
bombing operation that could go way out of control, and would
certainly be a complete disaster for his presidency.
TONY PAPERT: It's a horror show. And if you don't like it,
the answer is join us in getting Al Gore out of there. That puts
off the danger, at least for the moment.
Now, at the same time, during this month of January, we've
seen, as LaRouche forecast, the third phase of the world
financial collapse open in Brazil. Could you tell us about what's
happened since we were here last?
JEFF STEINBERG: Well, we knew months back, going back to the
time that Helga Zepp LaRouche went to Brazil in August of 1998,
she met with leading policy makers. She gave a series of public
addresses. She was interviewed by the major Brazilian press. And
at that time, she said that the IMF deal is death for Brazil. And
she warned that ultimately, the direction being pursued by the
IMF and by the international financiers was to force Brazil into
a currency devaluation that would open up the country for an even
more phenomenal level of looting.
She warned about that, and had a very strong impression on
some very important policy-makers inside Brazil at the time. We
knew, on the basis of that trip, and our ongoing work in Brazil,
that there were patriotic forces in the country that were not
going to simply roll over and play dead, and let the IMF dictate
policy. We knew that the Cardoso government was in lock-step with
the IMF, but that they were going to meet resistance. We don't
know precisely how it's going to happen. Would the Brazilian
Congress vote down the IMF austerity measures? You know, what
else would occur?
Well, it happened that the action was taken up by some of
the key governors, beginning with a former president of Brazil,
now the governor of Minas Gerais, one of the larger industrial
provinces, Itamar Franco, who a few weeks back, as we talked
about on the show, said ``We can't pay our state debts to the
Brazilian federal government.''
So, what happened at that point, is that this was the first
sign that the whole IMF package was not viable, was not going to
go forward. Immediately, the international financiers escalated
the pressure on [President] Cardoso. What did they do? They
launched massive flight capital out of the country. They said
``Our confidence has eroded,'' and so you had a billion dollars a
day fleeing Brazil over the course of last week.
Soros and others have been ranting and raving for some time
that Brazil is going to have to devalue its currency, in order
to, quote, ``restore confidence.'' Well, Cardoso caved in last
week after having gone up to New York with his finance minister
and central bank head -- new central bank head -- to talk with
the bankers and the IMF. He went back, he announced first an
initial eight-percent devaluation, and then a few days later, a
complete free-float of the real.
As the result, precisely what Lyndon LaRouche warned about,
precisely what Helga LaRouche talked about explicitly when she
was in Brazil in August: you've had, within a matter of days, a
30 percent devaluation of the real, as the result of which --
TONY PAPERT: So we have the Asian crisis right here, south
of our border.
JEFF STEINBERG: That's right. That's right. And the result
of that devaluation is that the cost to Brazil of paying their
foreign debt has suddenly gone up by 30 percent, because these
are largely dollar-denominated debts. So we're talking now
hundreds of billions of dollars. It was unpayable a month ago,
and it was even more clearly unpayable today, with the added
costs to it. And who knows where the real is going to bottom out?
Now, this is going to spread like wildfire throughout the
continent. It's going to hit the United States dramatically. And
we've got the phenomenon, though, inside the country, on the
encouraging side, that the governors, beyond just simply Itamar
Franco, are coming together. And they're saying ``we cannot
pay,'' and they're singling out not just Cardoso, but the entire
international speculative system as being the source of the
problem.
TONY PAPERT: Yes, the opposition governors rallying around
Itamar Franco met two days ago, the 18th, in the city of Belo
Horizonte. Their meeting was surrounded by demonstrations in
support of them by thousands of Brazilian trade unionists. And
they issued an open letter to the president of the country which
said, among other things, ``The Brazilian Federation is in
crisis. The Country is living a dramatic moment as seen in the
grave disequilibrium in foreign accounts, fragility of public
finances, dismantling of productive structure, unemployment at
alarming levels, the impoverishment of the states and
municipalities which find themselves incapable of meeting the
basic demands of the population.
``The impasse in which we find ourselves worsens the social
situation day by day, leading families to desperation,
frustration and anxiety, stemming from their lack of opportunity
and lack of participating in the process of production and
consumption.
``The difficulties of the moment are the sad result of the
cruel and unjust economic policy adopted by the Union,'' i.e., by
Brazil, the government. ``This has only benefitted international
speculative capital, which throughout the last years has been
getting the highest interest rates on the planet. Brazil with its
natural and human resources potential has all the objective
conditions necessary to get out of the crisis immediately. It is
necessary, before anything else, on an emergency basis, to stop
the bloodletting caused by the artificial rate of return for
financial capital which is responsible for the intolerable levels
of indebtedness reached.''
So that's the opposition governors of Brazil. But frankly,
the governors who support President Cardoso are, most of them, no
more able to pay their debt to the central government than the
governors who oppose him.
Now, move from that situation to a moment -- let me again
read, if I may. To give Americans some glimpse -- and our last
weeks' show would have helped to do this also on the Eurasian
Land-Bridge -- some glimpse of what's really happening in the
world outside of the lies of our press and mass news and
entertainment media, the current issue of a prestigious Chinese
newspaper, {Reference News}, runs a prominent article under the
headline ``Unite With China, Not with London,'' with the subtitle
``American Publication'' -- that's {EIR,} which sponsors this
program -- ``Discussed the Strategy of the U.S. Government in
Dealing with the Financial Crisis.''
``...The Clinton administration is dangerously delaying
resolving the world financial crisis....'' They're counting on
the European Social Democrats, led by Tony Blair. ``...Washington
is leaning towards the British in opposing the measures taken by
Asian countries against ... speculators,'' especially those taken
by Malaysia.
``Besides this tendency, which will lead to disaster, there
is fortunately another opposite choice,'' says this leading
Chinese newspaper. ``The U.S. should form a strategic alliance
with China to deal with the crisis. As Lyndon LaRouche recently
pointed out, Washington must choose between London and China.
There is no middle road.''
And the article goes on to detail that, largely relying on
{EIR}, the magazine which produces this program. Any comment?
JEFF STEINBERG: It's back to Gore all over again. Remember
again the chronology of treason by Gore. And again, the Gore
relationship to the biggest speculative pirates on Wall Street,
the people who the Brazilian governors are referring to.
Remember that as the result of the Iraq crisis playing out
in November, it was Vice President Gore, and not President
Clinton, who went to the APEC summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaysia. And this was another one of those moments where Gore
demonstrates that he represents interests completely contrary to
those of the United States and is speaking not on behalf of
President Clinton, but these Wall Street and City of London and
continental European financial interests.
Gore launched into a tirade against Mahathir for the precise
policies -- the Prime Minister of Malaysia -- for the precise
policies of imposing capital and exchantge controls that were
supported by China, supported by Japan, and which are frankly now
the only measure that Brazil can take to deal with the present
crisis that we were just discussing.
So Gore is the pivotal figure in the move to drive the wedge
between President Clinton and China and into bed with Tony Blair.
TONY PAPERT: And Russia. I mean, this group is going for a
whole new Cold War of some sort.
JEFF STEINBERG: Exactly. In other words, a kind of a replay
of Churchill, maybe without the cigar. But for all other
practical purposes, Blair is pushing this British-America-Canada
against the world, the ``clashi of civilizations'' idea.
Now, what's going on here? What's happening, is that
President Clinton had developed a certain profound policy
initiative towards China. And now, in hindsight, the move by Gore
in Malaysia to create this ugly diplomatic incident with his
public attacks against the host of the conference, Prime Minister
Mahathir Mohamed, created the conditions to cut off the
effectiveness of the U.S.-Asia coperation, at the same time that
the Iraq events were creating the diplomatic break-point.
So, Gore, here as well, is the instrumentality for forcing
President Clinton into bed with Blair over and against the
national security interests of the U.S., and over and against
President Clinton's own best instincts.
Now what's coming up in the next few days? End of January:
Vice President Gore has now announced that he's going to Davos,
to the World Economic Forum. And by the way, I should point out
that the chairman of the Davos World Economic Forum is one of
Gore's old mentors, Maurice Strong, Mr. World Government, Mr.
World Federalist.
So, Gore's going to be giving the keynote speech at the
Davos conference. And it will be very important to see what he
says there. It will clearly be another attempt to lock the United
States into self-destruct policies.
From Davos, before he returns to the U.S., Gore is going ot
London for further private consultations with Tony Blair. And
again, these kinds of moves are an integral part of the
insurrection against the Clinton Presidency.
TONY PAPERT: Now just before we are forced to end here, I
understand that among Gore's close allies, unbeknownst to most
Americans, is one of our best-known sexual perverts, also a
political consultant, Dick Morris, who was fired by the Clinton
administration.
JEFF STEINBERG: Right. This gets us to key exculpatory
evidence proving President Clinton's innocence in all of the
bogus charges that have been thrown up against him. In the
beginning part of 1996, there was a tremendous fight within the
Democratic Party and within the White House over the efforts by
Dick Morris and Al Gore, in particular, to force President
Clinton into adopting the Republican Party's Contract On America.
Specifically, it came down to a fight, in the first half of
1996, over whether the President would veto the Republicans'
welfare-to-workfare/slave-labor legislation. And there was
momentum building in the Democratic Party at that time, among
Senator Kennedy, Senator Daschle, Senator Bingaman,
Representatives Gephardt and Obey -- Senator Kennedy was leading
the charge, in a sense -- to go back to the traditional policies
and constituenciesof the F.D.R./J.F.K. Democratic Party.
Those forces said to Clinton, ``Veto the welfare bill.'' We
know, from Dick Morris's autobiography, that he went to Gore in
1995 at a point that both Gore and Morris were isolated from most
of the major policy advisers at the White House. And Morris said,
``I recruited Gore to be my man, arguing with the president for
my policy of caving into the Republicans.''
In the late spring of 1996, President Clinton caved in and
agreed not to veto the welfare bill. This created a disaster.
Gore has been on that track ever since. Morris was kicked out of
the administration for his sexual scandals, but then went on to
the payroll of Kenneth Starr. In his new edition of his book,
Morris admits that since the day he left the Office of the
President, he's been an informant for Kenneth Starr.
Now, we know that he was already part of the Republican
assault on the Presidency. Now, we know he's part of the frame-up
apparatus and that Gore was his partner on the inside--another
issue of perfidy by Gore. He's gotta go. There's no two ways
about it.
TONY PAPERT: So, we've shown you that there's hard evidence
that Al Gore has committed an impeachable offense, unlike
President Clinton, whom the American people know is guilty of no
impeachable offense, and that this is man is a danger, and quite
simply, he has to be removed from influence, if possible from
office entirely. You've been listening to ``EIR Talks.''
We are currently entering into one of the most
turbulent and dangerous periods in world history. Without
{EIR,} you will simply not know what is really going on.
The success of the LaRouche movement, and the worldwide
influence of Lyndon LaRouche personally, are essential,
if mankind is to find a way out of this crisis.
The forecasts and analyses published in this
magazine, over the past 24 years, represent the
most consistently effective economic forecasting in modern
history. Why is this so? How can we account for the
superiority of LaRouche's economic forecasting, over the
babblings of other economists and government officials?
``Behind our qualitative advantage over this
publication's putative rivals,'' LaRouche wrote in {EIR}
of Jan. 2, 1998, ``there was no `crystal ball,' no
statistical pseudo-science, but only superior science:
that of Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl Gauss,
and Bernhard Riemann, most notably.''
It is just not a matter of pride in {EIR'}s
outstanding accomplishments, LaRouche continued: ``This is
the crucial issue upon which the survival of the U.S.A.,
and of this global civilization now depend.'' If
governments and other relevant institutions fail to heed
LaRouche's warnings, and to adopt the policies he
advocates, then we are heading for a new Dark Age.
Escalate the fight. Help bring others on board.
Redouble your own efforts to achieve victory against the
British-led financier oligarchy. Your future, and that of
your posterity, depends upon it.
Call 8883473258
Sincerely yours,
Susan Welsh
Associate Editor
********** NEW **********
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