-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- Click Here: <A HREF="http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/ReportersAlley/thecatbirdseat/Catbird4. htm">THE CATBIRD SEAT</A> ----- THE CATBIRD SEAT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To see where greed and evil meet, climb up in the catbird seat. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Part III - THE PREY It is an old, old story. It goes by various names: Survival of the fittest. Eat or be eaten. The law of the jungle. Might makes right. It is based on an ideology that says taking is better than giving, that compassion is a sign of weakness, that I am better than you. It is the philosophy often embraced by kings and queens, despots and dictators, power brokers and power lawyers, and most notably, power politicians. It is the story of greed, and to what desperate lengths some men will go to gain power over others. It is the story of royalty and their subjects, of masters and servants, of the fabulously rich and the starving poor. It is the story of discrimination, of wars, of crime and corruption. It is the story of the right to kill versus the right to life. It is the story of the predators and their prey. I have seen the prey and, in the words of Pogo, they are us! The irony of it all is that many of us do not realize that we're the prey until its too late. We may face that rude realization only after we lose our jobs through "downsizing" due to a merger; or when our company closes its U.S. operations and moves lock, stock and factory to Mexico, China or to any other country where they can still pay "slave" wages. Or, perhaps this realization hits home when we suddenly find out that our employer has placed our years of hard-earned pension plan money with a dishonest fund manager who has lost it all in high-risk derivatives or other questionable investments. Or, perhaps it is when we invest our money in seemingly prospering companies, only to have the value of our investment rapidly go south due to some secret "insider manipulations" by top management who have just feathered their own nests. Or, perhaps it is when we buy life insurance or annuities from a large, supposedly reputable company -- only to lose it when massive fraud causes the company to go under. Or, saddest of all, perhaps it is the age-old story of politicians who promise us that, if elected, they will faithfully serve our interests and protect our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- only to turn around, once in office, and take away these very rights. They become the MASTERS. We become the SERVANTS. But, is it our elected politicians who are at the top of the food chain? In most cases, no. It is MONEY that buys POWER. It is money that buys politicians. So who has the money? The wealthy, obviously. Does this mean that all wealthy people are buying politicians? No, of course not. But what it does mean is that if you are poor you have absolutely no chance of buying a politician, or a judge, or a regulator of any sort. All that you and I have, politically speaking, is ONE VOTE! But it is this very thing -- this one vote -- that is the great equalizer in our democracy. The one vote of the poorest among us, is worth the same as the richest among us. So, what do the Rich, the Powerful, and the Manipulators need to do - they need to get your one vote, and my one vote, and all our neighbors votes, one by one. But isn't this impossible? How can a small group of people buy all these millions of individual votes? It can't be done, you say. Sadly, it's done every day, all over the world. How do they do that, you scream! First, these birds never work alone, and seldom use their own money. They conspire with other power brokers, and devise ways to use other peoples' money . . . perhaps yours! So how to they go about this? One way is, they buy and control the dominant political parties in critical geographical areas. In localities where there is a strong two-party system, they may buy both major political parties. Once they've bought the local parties, then its a relative simple matter to get the candidates of their choice on the ballots in the primary elections! (Who bothers to vote in the primaries anyway?) Once this is accomplished, then it matters little to the power brokers WHO eventually gets elected. It can be the Republican or Democrat or Green Party or Reform Party candidate. It doesn't matter to the power broker -- because the candidates have already been bought, paid for, and put in their pockets. So, generally by the time the primaries are over ALL the major candidates have been already transformed into . . . "POKECAN" In cases where the power brokers may have made a slight misjudgment and backed the losing candidate, no problem. They just buy the winning candidate a fter the election, as was reportedly the case with George W. Bush, Jr. in Texas. Then why do the power brokers continue give both political parties millions to spend on advertising and other campaign nonsense when it doesn't matter to them which candidate wins? Well, it's still a horse race. It's still the Republican vs. the Democrat. Because, the parties themselves have big personal stakes in who wins. The winner gets the spoils! It's just that the power brokers behind the politicians aren't concerned which candidate wins. They happily spend millions to put on the grand show, the grand illusion, the grand deception. The prey can be distracted from the important issues -- such as trust, and truth and honesty -- by feeding them with the usual empty rhetoric, false promises and the shell games that politicians play. After all, it's other people's money -- your money -- so what the heck. So are we powerless to make any changes? No, not powerless. But, as long as you and I, and enough other "ordinary" citizens, don't wake up and begin to question, and to challenge, the incessant lies and propaganda that we are fed daily, we will continue to be food for the wealthy. Today is the day to start the questioning, to begin the challenging. Today is the day for ordinary citizens to start to take back our country, and to use our one vote wisely -- so that this government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. * * * >From the vantage point of the Catbird Seat, we have seen some of the vultures and their nests of power. Are you ready now to see some of their helpless and decimated prey? * * * Warning - some scenes which follow are not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Victims are seldom a pretty sight. Poverty and pain and death are sometimes difficult to behold - especially if the victims are women and children, as they often are. But, if you are up to it, prepare yourself to witness . . . THE PREY: Bernice Pauahi Bishop - the Legacy of a Princess - Princess Pauahi was an ali`i in Hawaii, the last in the royal lineage of Kamehameha the Great, conqueror and first king of the Hawaiian Islands. As was the custom for Hawaiian royalty, it had been planned from childhood that Pauahi would marry her hanai brother, Lot Kamehameha. But she declined to take as a husband the brother upon whom she doted. Instead, the beautiful, young Pauahi met and fell in love with a commoner, a foreigner from the United States, Charles Reed Bishop. . . . The love between Princess Pauahi and the commoner withstood great opposition from her family, other ali'i and members of the community. But the young princess was intelligent and independent, and she soon married the young "haole" businessman. . . . Eventually, the Princess and her husband won over many of their critics and their relationship came to be admired by Hawaiians and westerners alike. . . . Eventually reconciled with her family and the ali`i, Pauahi grew and developed as a young matron and royal hostess, a dedicated teacher and counselor to her people. At the age of 25, she inherited over 16,000 acres of land from her parents. Other inheritances followed as other members of the royal family passed away. The greatest of the inheritances came from Princess Ruth, her first cousin. Ruth had declared Pauahi sole heir to her entire estate. The amount of land was mind-boggling: about 353,000 acres. Ruth's gift to Pauahi made her the largest landowner and the richest woman in the Kingdom. At the same time, she presented Pauahi with the greatest challenge and responsibility of her life. Pauahi now owned a giant estate, and she would have to decide to what ends it would be used. . . . The Bishops had a multitude of blessings, except one. They never had children of their own. Possibly from this emptiness came the inspiration to create schools for all the children of Hawaii. Pauahi's heirs would be the students of the Kamehameha Schools. . . . On Thursday, October 16, 1884, the princess passed away, Charles was by her side. A heavy downpour the rains reached a crescendo just about the time Pauahi died. In ancient days, the Hawaiians said when rain fell at a the time of a person's death or funeral, "Kulu ka waimaka, uwe `opua." (The tears fall; the clouds weep.), for the gods mingle their tears of affection with those who weep in sympathy and aloha. . . . From the pulpits came many eulogies to pay homage to her memory. The reverend J.A. Cruzan, Pastor of the Fort Street Church, spoke of the "last and best of the Kamehamehas" movingly and prophetically: . . . "The great loss which Hawaii sustained last Thursday was not that the last of this great line of High Chiefs died, nor that the possessor of great wealth died, but that a true woman died. . . . True in all times and among all races -- pre-eminently true in these days among our native Hawaiians. . . . That Bernice Pauahi Bishop was such a true woman her life bears witness. . . . Refusing a crown, she so lived that she was crowned. Refusing to rule her people, she did what was better, she served them, and in no way so grandly as by her example. . . . 'The world can do without its masters better than it can without its servants.' . . . For fifty-three years her royal life here has borne unswerving witness in favor of virtue and purity . . . She hated that which was impure with an intense hatred. She had only loathing and contempt for that which was coarse and low. Place, power, wealth, nor influence could win her favor or regard if it was joined with degraded character. And her womanly example was all the more potent for good because it was so quiet . . . The things that are most noisy are not the most powerful. Nay, things that make no noise, and make no pretension, may be really the most powerful. This quiet, modest, true womanly life has been for years, and still is, and will be for years to come, a mighty power for good here in Hawaii. Only the God who loveth purity and rightousness can measure this one true woman's influence for good upon her people . . ." It was from Pauahi's legacy that vast amounts of money eventually flowed, until the Bishop Estate became the wealthiest charitable organization in the United States. It is her estate that has been systematically looted over the last decade or so by persons "with degraded character" that the princess would probably have viewed with only "loathing and contempt". In 1997, responding to a growing tsunami of criticism from the faculty, students and alumni of the Kamehameha Schools, and from concerned citizens of all ethnic backgrounds in Hawaii, Governor Ben Cayatano took a historical and unprecedented action and directed the state's attorney general, Margery Bronster, to investigate the practices of the Estate's five highly paid trustees. . . . But the attorney general was not the only one investigating the estate. The Internal Revenue Service had already been auditing the records of the estate for several months -- empowered by the "interim sanctions" regulations which had been passed by Congress in early 1996. At the same time, the court-appointed "master" who is charged by the probate court with oversight of the operations of the estate, was digging deeper into the activities of the trustees than a long line of previous masters. Suddenly the trustee's were, for the first time in the schools' 115-year history, under siege from all sides. The full, sad and sordid story of the looting of the estate is too long to relate here. To give you some idea of the magnitude of the financial losses, however, the Master's Report on the 109th Annual Account of the Trustees revealed that the Estate's investment portfolio suffered substantial losses in 1994, the year under review. The records relating to the various investments held by the Trust Estate and its Pauahi Holdings, Inc. subsidiary, showed that combined losses and loss reserves of $264,090,257 were recognized in FY 1994. This total was made up, in part, of the following los ses and loss reserves: Kukui, Inc. - ($49,395,947); Montrose Group - ($47,205,272); SoCal Holdings, Inc. - ($34,469,800); JMB Cadillac Fairview - ($29,000,000); Rock Real Estate - ($22,535,000); 1211 Acquisition Corp. - ($11,225,420); Kamehameha Investment Group - ($11,225,420); Invexco Inc. - ($8,000,000); Desert Springs Marketplace - ($7,224,319); Best Products Co., Inc. - ($5,052,200); Westfed Holdings, Inc. - ($5,000,256); Northridge/Southridge - ($4,700,000); Meridian Associates LP - ($4,700,000); RHSCI AFCO Notes - ($3,785,285); Home Holdings Inc. - ($3,410,120); Accessory Place Inc./Tribeca Group LP - ($2,810,456); Canaan Ventures, Ltd. - ($2,500,000); Smith Offshore Exploration Co. - ($2,300 ,000); PCA Greentree Mall - ($1,517,854); CIGNA Mezzanine Partners II - ($1,10 0,000); WSGP-USP - ($1,000,000). The long story can be found in the volumes of news articles and court proceedings in the on-line archives of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser, linked to this web-site. The short story is that, after long and hard-fought court battles, the five former trustees were forced to resign, and five interim trustees were selected to take their places until a new trustee selection process is created and implemented. The removal of the five former trustees was one of the non-negotiable conditions of the I.R.S. to prevent the loss of the estate's tax-exempt status. That was the good news, hailed by many as the beginning of the healing process. So, is this the happy ending to the story of the last Hawaiian princess -- the ending where all her children lived happily ever after? Unfortunately, that may not be the case. There is still a hidden, dark side to this story. Many may not realize that the removal of the five trustees was accomplished only because the higher-ups -- the power brokers and the wielders of money -- determined that the secret activities at the estate had been exposed to such a degree that they could no longer sweep them under the political rug. The trustees had to be sacrificed to save the estate -- not to save the estate for the children, mind you, but to preserve it for the same politicians and power brokers who have controlled and looted its vast fortunes for the past decade or more. Many of the key players in the conspiracy are still in place. Only time will tell if these power birds of prey can succeed in sinking their talons even deeper into the corpus of the estate and holding on to their control. Let's pray that persons of honor and honesty are selected as future trustees and that Princess Pauahi's legacy is restored for the benefit of all her children. For in this matter, it is her children who are the prey . Connecticut State Treasury - See Paul J. Silvester; Crossroads Group for the story of the looting of the state Treasury. In this case, it's the taxpayers of Connecticut who are the prey. California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) - Like other states who have accumulated large amounts of money in their employees' pension plans, this state's huge pension fund provides a tremendous feeding ground that the power brokers find irresistible. Usually, the feeding frenzy is done under cover of darkness so that the prey is not aware of what is happening. Once in a while, however, one of the predators is exposed and the prey closest to the situation gets a glimpse of what financial carnage is going on. . . . In 1997, CalPERS invested $100 million with Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, an investment partnership with close relationships with George Bush and George W. Bush, Jr., after a recommendation was made by an outside consultant, Christopher J. Bower. A second $100 million investment was approved after less than two years. It was later discovered that Tom Hicks, the founder of Hicks, Muse, had purchased a yacht from Bower for $300,000. This price was $45,000 more than Bower had originally paid for the used boat, and Hicks had made the purchase without ever seeing the vessel. The pension fund's lawyers ruled that there was no serious conflict of interest in the purchase. . . . CalPERS is 8th largest institutional investor in Wilmington Trust. Wilmington Trust See also: Wilmington Trust; Thomas Hicks; George W. Bush; Wayne Berman. Russia - The story of the looting of Russia is just beginning to unfold -- and the full story will probably never be told. From Newsweek, Oct. 4, 1999 - The Incredible Fleecing of Russia . . . As investigators probe the country's financial collapse, the story becomes only more complex, by Bill Powell and Mark Hosenball: In July 1998 the International Monetary Fund was preparing a new "tranche" of financial aid to Russia. It amounted to $4.8 million, and in a departure from its usual practice, the IMF planned to send $1 billion directly to the Russian Finance Ministry for use in the country's budget. The rest would be added to Russia's hard-currency dreserves, where it would be available to privately owned banks trading rubles for dollars in an effort to defend the ruble's value. . . .the $3.8 billion was added to the hard-currency reserves of Russia's Central Bank. The rest is history. . . . The next month, Russia defaulted on much of its foreign debt, and the ruble collapsed. The IMF insists that its money was handled properly . . . But some portion of the IMF loan is effectively unaccounted for . . . since Russia's banks moved billions of dollars abroad in the months after the crash. Accordin g to sources familiar with the investigation, $4.2 billion alone poured through Benex, a company that specializes in funneling Russian money offshore, into the Bank of New York. Meanwhile, President Boris Yeltsin and his family are being dragged deeper into the unfolding financial scandal. In the end, probes in the United States and Switzerland are likely to show that Russia has been comprehensively fleeced. At the heart of the scandal is a tale of the many ways in which Russia's citizens -- and foreign investors -- have been burned during Yeltsin's final years. . . . As Congress began hearings on the matter last week, Republicans blamed the Clinton administration for allowing the Russians to waste -- or loot -- billions of dollars in aid. Rep. Dick Armey, the House majority leader, called the administration's handling of Russia "the biggest foreign-policy failure since Vietnam." . . . NEWSWEEK has learned that two major U.S. investigations related to Russian money laundering are now reaching critical stages. In one, the Manhattan district attorney in New York City is trying to extradite two lawyers from Britain in connection with a suspected shceme to launder money for Benex. In a separate case, the U.S. Customs Service is monitoring the activities of a mysterious Russian emigre' based in Philadelphia (officials won't divulge his name). Over the past two years, sources say, the Russian has moved an estimate $500 million through accounts in 15 to 20 banks in the Northeast. The money comes from Russia, spends a day or two in American banks and then is transferred to tax havens offshore. Sources told NEWSWEEK that some of the funds handled by the Russian may have been diverted from the Kremlin's coffers. . . . The Yeltsen family is connected to the scandal partly through a Swiss construction company called Mabetex, which is owned by businessman Behgjet Pacolli, an Albanian Kosovar. Swiss investigators are looking into charges that Mabetex paid $10 million in bribes in exchange for $300 million in contracts to renovate the Kremlin and other official buildings in Moscow. Last January Swiss authorities raided Mabetex's headquarters in Lugano and found records documenting credit-card purchases in the names of Boris Yeltsin, his daughter and close adviser Tatyana Daychenko, and her older sister, Yelena Okulova. The bills for the American Express card in Yeltsin's name were small, but the Eurocards purportedly held by the daughters ran up charges of nearly $600,000 in 1993 and 1994. . . . There is no sign that any laws were broken in the disposition of the vast sums received from the IMF. The purpose of the July 1998 loan was to increase the amount of dollars Russia's Central Bank had on hand to support the ruble and pay creditors. A recent review by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers s hows that the $3.8 billion went, as planned, to the Central Bank, which later sold $4.1 billion of hard currency to about 20 of Russia's major private banks, though most of them were virtually insolvent by then. Apparently the IMF -- and the Clinton administration, which pressured the IMF into making the loan to Russia -- were naive enough to think that it would stave off devaluation of the ruble. With the West sending good money after bad, Russia's wealth was simply frittered away. . . . A chart entitled The Money Trail: Where Did Billions in IMF Aid to Russia End Up?, which accompanied this article, indicates that $2.9 billion of the remaining money is unaccounted for. The article then states: Some of it no doubt remained in the accounts of Russian banks held at banks in the West, most likely including the Bank of New York. These are normal procedures -- the IMF money wasn't stol en. [The Catbird Muses: Hmmmm. Maybe it depends on what your definition of stolen is . . . or, what your definition of definition is. . . . I wonder what if an accounting firm other than Pricewaterhouse were to audit the deal? How can you not account for $2.9 billion and say these are normal procedures? Who audits the auditors anyway? Why am I musing?] Sierra Leonean, West Africa - From Human Rights Watch: . . . The Sierra Leonean civil war began in March 1991, when the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) entered Sierra Leone from Liberia, launching a rebellion to overthrow the one-party rule of the All Peoples Congress (APC). The RUF accused the APC, which had been in power since 1967, of rampant corruption, nepotism, and fiscal mismangement. Despite the fact that Sierra Leone is extremely resource-rich, with large deposits of diamonds, gold, rutile, and bauxite, it is estimated to be one of the poorest countries in the world. . . . From 1991 until the present, the RUF has fought with great brutality to overthrow the successive governments of both military and elected civilian regimes. . . . In June 1997, Nigerian troops, claiming to act under a defense pact with the Sierra Leonean Monitoring Group, moved to reinforce colleagues from the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) already based at the Freetown airport to defend it from RUF rebels, where they remaimed based throughout the AFRC regime. . . . In March 1998, President Kabbah was reinstated as president and over the next several months ECOMOG forces were able to establish control over roughly two-thirds of the country . . . However, once expelled from the capital, the rebels tried to consolidate their own positions in other parts of the country and through a series of offensives toward the end of 1998, managed to gain control of the diamond-rich Kono district and several other strategic towns and areas. . . By the end of 1998, the rebels had gained the upper hand militarily and were in control of over half of the country ... From this position, the RUF launched the January 1999 attack on Freetown. . . . The war in Sierra Leone has seen considerable involvement of both foreign governments and mercenary forces which have usually provided support in exchange for lucrative contracts and mining concessions. . . . In the early hours of January 6, 1999, rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) launched an offensive against the Sierra Leonean capital, Freetown, capturing it from government troops and the soldiers of the Nigerian-led peacekeeping force known as ECOMOG . . . The battle for Freetown and the ensuing three week rebel occupation of the capital was characterized by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of atrocities against the civilian population, of over one million inhabitants, and marked the most intensive and concentrated period of human rights violations in Sierra Leone's eight-year civil war. . . . As the rebels took control of street after street, they turned their weapons on the civilian population. By the end of January, both government and independent sources estimated that several thousands of civilians had been killed. The rebels dragged entire family units out of their homes and murdered them, hacked off the hands of children and adults, burned people alive in their houses, and rounded up hundreds of young women, took them to urban rebel bases, and sexually abused them. As the ECOMOG forces counterattacked and the RUF retreated through the capital, the rebels set fire to neighborhoods, leaving entire city blocks in ashes and over 51,000 people homeless. And, while the RUF took with them almost no prisoners of war, they withdrew to the hills with thousands of abductees, mostly children and young women. . . . This latest rebel offensive brought to the capital the same class of atrocities witnessed in Sierra Leone's rural provinces over the last eight years and is the latest cycle of violence in an armed conflict that has claimed an estimated 50,000 lives and caused the displacement of more than one million Sierra Leoneans. Since launching the rebellion in 1991, the RUF has fought to overthrow successive governments it accuses of widespread corruption, nepotism, and mismanagement of the country's vast diamo nd and mineral resources. However, since its inception, the RUF has failed publicly and clearly to articulate an alternative political agenda and has consistently committed gross and large scale atrocities against civilians. . . . The RUF's incursion into Freetown was built around the use of civilian human shields . . . Upon gaining control of a neighborhood or suburb, the rebels went on systematic looting raids in which families were hit by wave after wave of rebels demanding money and valuables. Those who didn't have what the rebels demanded were frequently murdered. Civilians were also executed for resisting rape or abduction, trying to flee, trying to protect a friend or family member, or for refusing to follow instructions. . . . The largest number of killings took place within the context of attacks on civilians gathered in houses, compounds, and places of refuge such as churches and mosques. A study carried out in Freetown's biggest hospital found that some 80 percent of all war-wounded were survivors of mass killings and massacres. Human Rights Watch took testimonies from scores of witnesses to such atrocities including a January 6 attack on a family in which all but one of their seven children were killed; a January 19 attack on the church of the Brotherhood of the Cross and Star in Wellington, in which twelve people were gunned down; a January 21 attack on a compound in Kissy in which seventeen people were murdered and later burned; and a January 22 attack on the Rogbalan Mosque in Kissy, in which sixty-six people were massacred. . . . There were also frequent accounts of people being burned alive in their houses, often after having been wounded. Children and the elderly were particularly vulnerable. Witnesses described rebels throwing civilians, sometimes children, into burning houses and shooting at those trying to escape. Family members trying to rescue their children or other relatives from a burning house were threatened with death and forced to abandon them to the fire. . . . The rebels carried out large numbers of mutilations, in particular amputation of hands, arms, legs, and other parts of the body . . . In Freetown, several hundred people, mostly men, but also women and children, were killed and maimed in this way. Hospitals registered ninety-seven victims of hand and arm amputation, including twenty-six civilians both of whose hands were hacked off. Among those who had reached a hospital were a two-year-old toddler who had lost one arm, and at least twelve children under the age of eleven who had either lost a limb or suffered serious lacerations from these attacks. . . . Throughout the occupation, the rebels perpetrated organized and widespread sexual violence against girls and women. . . . The sexual abuse was frequently characterized by extreme brutality. Young girls under seventeen, and particularly virgins, were specifically targeted, and hundreds of them were later abducted by the rebels. . . . While most victims were seemingly chosen at random, the rebels directly targeted a few groups, namely Nigerian nationals, unarmed policemen, and journalists. At least sixty-three Nigerians, most of whom were traders or businessmen, were hunted down and murdered in particularly brutal ways. The rebels also killed at least eighty-five unarmed police officers, and several local and one international journalist. . . . The Catholic archbishop, four Xavierian fathers, and six Sisters of Charity were abducted and held for over ten days. The rebels later killed four of the sisters and wounded one Xavierian father. . . . During the rebel incursion, children were both the victims of serious abuses committed by all parties to the conflict and, in some cases, the perpetrators of these abuses. RUF rebels raped girls as young as eight, singled out children for mutilation, and murdered children alone and with other family members. RUF child combatants, armed with pistols, rifles, and machetes, were witnessed actively participating in killings and amputations. . . . Since the January occupation of Freetown, there have been the first signs ... of a possible negotiated resolution the conflict. . . . there was considerable diplomatic activity among a number of parties interested in the resolution of the conflict in Sierra Leone, including the current chairman of ECOWAS, Pres. Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo; the ECOMOG troop-contributing countries, namely Nigeria, Guinea, Ghana, and Maile; the governments of the U.K. and the USA (the USA being represented by the United States presidential special envoy for the promotion of democracy in Africa, the Rev. Jesse Jackson ); and the U.N. secretary-general's special representative for Sierra Leone, Francis G. Okelo. . . . Human Rights Watch concluded the "unthinkable atrocities" conducted during the RUF offensive against Freetown and ECOMOG's counterattack "constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity." [Catbird Musing: Perhaps I missed it in the news, but I don't recall the Rev. Jesse Jackson making a big issue of these crimes against humanity, or of any plea to the American people to help these desperate people who were suffering unthinkable atrocities. I do remember the Reverend Jackson making a grand media event out of a few kids being expelled from school because they were involved in a riot at a football game. Why are the feathers on the back of my neck rising? ] Timor - Timor is an island a few hundred miles north of Australia's western provinces, at the very end of the islands once called the "Dutch East Indies" or "Spice Islands." The Portuguese established an outpost in Timor in 1586 and by 1974 the western half of the island, which had been a Dutch colony, was being administered by Indonesia. The eastern half of the island, then called Portuguese Timor, is about 7332 sq. mi. and in 1974 had a population of about 660,000 people, most of them Catholics. In 1975, Indonesian President Suharto sent troops into East Timor and completed take-over of the island. Approximately a third of the Timorese people were slaughtered. The remaining were largely "resettled" under military control. In the 10/14/96 edition of The New York Times, William Safire talked about illegal foreign contributions to the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign solicited by Democratic finance vice chairman John Huang from Indonesia's Lipp o Group banking empire. Safire asks, Why did an Indonesian gardener with a green card, related to a Lippo partner, pass along $425,000 and then race home, avoiding inquires? And, how about John Huang - in 1992 a Clinton Asian fund-raiser, in 1993 the recipient of a million-dollar payment from Lippo on the eve of being appointed by Clinton to a sensitive foreign economic post, and in 1996 wringing more campaign money out of Asian executives through fronts here - why is he hiding from reporters? I think wrongdoing is why. . . . Could the "wrongdoing" have anything to do with the fact that the senior executive with the Lippo Group, billionaire Mochtar Riady, has close ties with the military junta that has killed hundreds of thousands in East Timor? Could the suspicions of wrongdoing have anything to do with the fact that Mochtar, his son James Riady, and John Huang were the key persons Clinton and Ron Brown met with when they visited Indonesia in November 1994? Could it have anything to do with greed for the money to be made from the natural resources which East Timor is rich in, and greed for the profits which can be made from the production of goods made by cheap labor working in slave-like conditions? * * * Construction of this chapter has just begun . . . BEFORE LEAVING, PLEASE SIGN OUR GUEST REGISTER AT THE BOTTOM OF OUR HOME PAGE, AND SEND US YOUR COMMENTS! VISIT US AGAIN SOON IN . . . THE CATBIRD SEAT ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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