-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: November 13, 2006 8:34:31 AM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Palast
Palast the Iconoclast
By Ed Rampell, AlterNet
July 17, 2003
Greg Palast, author of "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" and
investigative reporter for the UK's The Guardian, The Observer and
the BBC, is once again raking the muck for the truth about our
current leaders, using English media platforms to report stories
the mainstream American press won't touch. His latest foray, a one-
hour BBC3 special, "Bush Family Fortunes," which first ran June
19th, allowed British audiences to watch reportage virtually
forbidden to American viewers – but revealed, in part, here.
...
"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," subtitled "The Truth About
Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters," helped
put Palast on the U.S. map, particularly the first chapter, 'The
Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida.' Palast
returns to the scene of the crime in Bush Family Fortunes, wherein
G.W.'s kid brother, Sunshine State Gov. Jeb Bush, and fellow GOPer,
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, disenfranchised 57,000
citizens by removing them from election 2000's voter registries.
Supposedly deprived of voting rights because they were felons,
Palast asserts that 90 percent of the would-be voters were innocent
– their real "crime" was voting while black, and probably for
Democrats. BBC researchers found Gore lost 22,000 votes due to this
computerized voter scrub for Shrub; the Democratic contender lost
Florida's electoral votes – and the presidency – by only 537
ballots. Palast reported these findings on BBC's Newsnight, but
contends the story was largely censored in the U.S. corporate
press, although he repeated the charges in the powerful independent
documentary "Unprecedented" (www.unprecedented.com).
Palast's rise has been fuelled by his probes' panache – both in
content and style, as he backs his investigative work with a
colorful private dick/Sherlock Holmes persona, complete with
breathless descriptions of the crimes of the powerful. His status
as one of the new People's Pundits has been magnified by articles
like this one in the alternative media, as well as through the
support of cultural icons as disparate as Jello Biafra and Hustler
magazine.
Palast was born into a working class family in Los Angeles and grew
up in the San Fernando Valley. His mother worked in a school
cafeteria; his father sold furniture. Palast attended mostly
Chicano Valley High. "I was marked for Vietnam cannon-fodder; I
never outgrew resentment over that," he grouses. Jailed for anti-
war activities, Palast says he got a high lottery number, and
wasn't drafted. He earned a biz/econ master's from the University
of Chicago, probed corporate corruption for labor unions in the
Americas and Europe, directed government investigations and
prosecution of racketeering by builders of nuclear power plants,
and examined allegations of oil company fraud vis-à-vis the Exxon
Valdez tanker oil spill for Alaskan natives.
"Democracy"'s American edition came out this year, updated and
expanded to include material the British Officials Secrets Act and
libel laws prohibited Palast from printing in the original English
edition. The Plume edition links the Barrick Corp --and president
Bush's father-- to human rights crimes.
"Richard Perle had to resign as chief of the Defense [Policy Board]
because of his relationship with the bloodthirsty arms dealer,
Adnan Khashoggi. But no one said a word about George [H.W.] Bush,
after his presidency, going to work for a Canadian gold mining firm
founded by Khashoggi." According to Palast, the ex-president used
his oval office connections to lobby ex-dictators Suharto of
Indonesia, and Mobutu of Zaire, to get mining concessions for
Barrick. And in Tanzania, miners inhabiting a piece of land
rendered it worthless, so another Canadian company that owned the
concession unleashed bulldozers and military police firing guns on
them, Palast alleges. When Palast reported in the Observer that the
miners' houses were destroyed and up to 50 of them died in the
pits, Bush's mining colleagues sued.
He continued jauntily: "There's no freakin' First Amendment in
Britain ... I said, 'borrow ours, because we're not using it...'
Truth is not a defense in Britain in libel [cases]." The Observer
sent Tanzanian human rights advocate and attorney Tundu Lissu to
the mine and he produced corroborating photos, videos, and witness
statements. After Lissu called for an investigation into the
alleged deaths, he was charged with sedition by the Tanzanian
government. "If I signed [a retraction], they could hang him," said
Palast. Although it cost The Observer dearly, after human rights
groups testified, the case ended in what Palast calls "a tremendous
victory."
He observes, "The further out you go from the accepted, the more
risk you take ... People always ask me if I fear for my life – I
fear for the lives of my sources, and for their jobs. The only
thing I've directly gone through has been the lawsuit ... and they
tried setting me up with some woman to say I was harassing her.
They fabricated this huge story about me being a sex pest. The
front page of The Mirror [ran headlines]: The Liar... then, Sex
Maniac. It was exposed as a complete fabrication," insists Palast,
a married father, who adds: "When one of Bush's power company
buddies repeated the story in a Dutch paper, I sued the Reliant
corporation ... and they were hit with one of the biggest libel
awards ever in Holland."
Despite these successes, the newsman without a country regrets
American mainstream media won't hire him. "Maybe in the end I'll be
allowed to come back home," reflects Palast, who divides his time
between New York and London, but still does most of his reporting
for British-based news outlets. "Another thing that stops me from
breaking into US news, is I simply can't write – or stand-up in
front of a camera – in that solemn, straightforward style required
of news reports here. It's a lie, giving a false gloss of
objectivity," jabs Palast, who reports, writes, and speaks with a
barbed wit and visible passion.
"I get pissed off about something – I kind of have Orwell's old
job ... I get whipped up, I want to go after these guys, let's go
and get them!" Palast proclaims. And nothing seems to rile this son
of the proletariat up more than suspected links between the
dynastic Bushes, Saudi royals, and Islamic extremists. Denying he's
a "conspiracy nut," as right-wingers have dubbed him, Palast's
sleuthing has nevertheless taken him to where few have gone.
"I was concerned with why we weren't following the money," he says.
"The same Saudi money that funded G.W.'s oil companies, [financed]
Osama and terrorists ... The bin Laden family's financier in
America [James R. Bath], was the backer of George W. Bush's
earliest oil patch ventures." According to Palast, Bath represented
the interests of "Osama's daddy, Sheikh Salim bin Laden, and Sheikh
Kalid bin Mahfouz, who had a connection to BCCI," the scandalous
Bank of Credit and Commerce, a.k.a. the "Bank of Crooks and
Criminals," tied to arms trafficking, money laundering, etc. In
Bush Family Fortunes, Palast contends: "Bush's oil capital came
from Bath and Bath's money came from the bin Ladens."
"I know bin Mahfouz has been under investigation by European
intelligence agencies as a possible funder of Al-Qaeda," asserts
Palast. He adds that according to a European intelligence agency
and arms dealer, after the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi
Arabia, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh (who'd helped fund G.W.'s troubled
oil firm in the 1980s) and Khashoggi attended a meeting with Al-
Qaeda's financial arm and Saudi billionaires. In essence, Palast
claims the Saudis paid protection money to the terrorists.
In this reporter's interview with him, Palast said: "Don't forget
Osama was our boy, created in the Bush's Frankenstein factory. We
were proud that the bin Ladens gave America one of its eldest sons
to go fight the evil empire in Afghanistan." Most of the anti-
Soviet jihad took place while ex-CIA chief George Herbert Walker
Bush was vice president and president. In the documentary, the
investigative reporter asks, "Were the Bushes too close to the
Saudis to see the dangers emerging from that nation?" The question
is followed by 9/11 footage of the Twin Towers pandemonium, as a
woman shrieks: "Oh my god!" (Nobody has ever accused Palast of
subtlety.)
During the Reagan-Bush era, the State Department allegedly gave
visas to unqualified applicants in Saudi Arabia – supposed
"engineers" with no engineering backgrounds – who were really
Osama's terrorists, off to America for CIA training they'd use in
Afghanistan. After taking office, the current president's
"administration blocked key investigations" pertaining to the bin
Ladens, and let stateside members of the family return to Saudi
Arabia shortly after Sept. 11th.
To be sure, Bush has vigorously – some would say overzealously –
prosecuted the so-called "war on terror." Yet Bush Senior remains a
paid retainer of the Carlyle Group, a defense contractor which the
bin Ladens previously invested in. (According to "Bush Family
Fortunes," Dubya is also on Carlyle's payroll.)
In the documentary and his book, Palast also reports on how Enron
and the energy industry ripped off the Golden State during the 2000
energy crisis in the chapter 'California Reamin': Deregulation and
the Power Pirates.' Palast tells this reporter he recently received
two letters from Enron ex-CEO Ken Lay to then-governor Bush (the
younger), proving that when Bush became governor, Lay named his own
state and then federal regulator – clear conflicts of interest.
Palast continues to speak out about current news stories, such as
what he calls the "corporate coup" underway in Baghdad. "On May 1,
The Wall Street Journal announced the discovery of a 100-page
document, outlines for contracts reorganizing the Iraqi economy ...
what appears to be a massive invasion by corporate lobbyists.
"Iraqis used to fear Saddam's police, now they have to fear Sony's
lawyers, if they get caught with an illegal dub of a Madonna CD.
Hillary Rosen, of the Recording Industry of America, is rewriting
Iraq's intellectual copyright laws. Microsoft and American Express
lobbyist Grover Norquist is rewriting Iraq's tax laws ... They're
creating a new lobbyists' corporate Disneyland. Iraq's becoming a
corporate client state ... Apparently, it's what the American
government's been accused of: A plan to privatize and take over
Iraq's oilfields. An armed corporate takeover is what's occurring,"
insists Palast.
Palast says Bush Family Fortunes is the first in a series of BBC
exposes, "culminating with a feature-length film on the cowboy
empire. We've now taken this weird mixing of Bush family finances
and our nation's foreign and domestic policies, to a new level,
that is armed and dangerous." As he continues to broadcast truth to
power on BBC-TV, we can only wonder when he will be allowed to do
so back home, in "the land of the free."
http://www.disinfo.com/site/modules.php?
op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=126
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