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Choking on the Enron Pretzel a/k/a Clueless in Guantanamo by Al Martin Like George Bush, more of the American people may be choking on the Enron pretzel. Or, if they're really unlucky, they may end up as one of the Bobbing Head People -- Clueless in Guantanamo. It's not even the Ides of March yet, and Bush is already choking on a pretzel. Supposedly he fainted, but the statement that the White House released was absolute nonsense from a medical point of view. It said he didn't choke on the pretzel, but it somehow went down the wrong way and caused his heart rate to suddenly diminish. Every medical correspondent in the Government-Media also said that from a medical standpoint it made no sense -- a pretzel going down the wrong way would not cause the heart rate to suddenly tail off. They said that he was sitting in a chair, but he supposedly fainted, only for a few seconds, yet he scraped his chin and his cheek pretty hard when he hit the floor. He was out and he must have gone down pretty hard. The story goes that he was watching the Ravens-Dolphins football game, and during a break, he switched over to the interview with Senator Lieberman, who was talking about the increasing support for the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate Enron. They want to know where the money went and why Enron executives, including the Chairman Kenneth Lay, transferred so much of their personal assets to secret offshore accounts before the deal collapsed. Lieberman said that they have new information from undisclosed sources that will put Bush administration people right in the middle of it. And that's apparently when he choked on the pretzel. It reminds you of the time when George Bush Sr. very publicly threw up during a trip to Japan. That was the time, in his pre-Prozac days, when the president found out that sushi and Halcyon don't mix. But what Lieberman was talking about is information that links this Enron debacle to a much larger conspiracy, that the Bush Family actually conspired with Arthur Andersen, Kenneth Lay and other senior people at Enron to keep Enron afloat much longer than it should have been kept afloat. It was an enormous amount of money (around five and a half billion) that the Republicans took out of Enron before it collapsed. Why did Kenneth Lay himself sell $165 million worth of Enron stock in August 2001, when the stock was still trading in the thirties and then immediately transferred the money to one of his offshore accounts? At the very end, Enron gave out huge amounts of money to the Republican Party, Republican National Committee and the Heritage Foundation. Millions were given out. They milked the thing, until they couldn't milk it anymore. The interesting part is to put the Bush Family into a conspiracy with Arthur Andersen. Why is it that Arthur Andersen has consistently dropped the ball in its so-called audits? It should be remembered that Arthur Andersen was the auditor of record for the notorious BCCI. And Arthur Andersen was also the auditor of record for the infamous BNL (Banca Nazionale del Lavoro) in Atlanta, tied to Bush Family intrigues prior to the Persian Gulf War. They were also the accountants for Daiwa Bank, known for its Bush Family connected Daiwa securities and commodities fraud. Why is it that Arthur Andersen keeps dropping the ball in these investigations of corporation that are going down the tubes, while they have such enormous links to the Republican Party? Maybe it's because Arthur Andersen cooks the books - and shreds the documents afterwards. That way, they get Two Services for the Price of One. The implication is that Arthur Andersen actually gave Enron advice on how to cook their own books, how to enter into surreptitious futures and forward contracts to make it appear that the company still had value when they didn't and to mask the crumbling empire. Now the question is -- why is Arthur Andersen falling on its sword and becoming a willing scapegoat for Enron? Who has such power to command the accounting firm to take the heat, which will inevitably end in the complete dissolution of this global giant company? The joke is -- what's the difference between Enron and an offshore Republican slush fund? The punch line is that there is no difference. Kenneth Lay, it should be noted, was a Democrat for a short time. He actually worked as an "analyst" in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara, no doubt analyzing how to waste -- and steal -- money. Lay worked at the Department of Defense, as did the infamous Herbert S. "Pug" Winokur, another member of the Enron Board of Directors, who must have been aware of the many frauds in progress. Winokur is another government insider and former chairman of DynCorp, the infamous government contractor, whose customers include the Department of Defense, NASA, Department of State and other US Government agencies. Most recently DynCorp got a new contract for $51 million to upgrade the FBI's information technology network, as well as an $8.2 million contract to manage SEC information technology. Winokur has been called "An Insider's Insider" and even rates mention in a 1978 book called "The Shadow Government." Both Winokur and Lay must have attended the Department of Defense Finishing School for Aspiring Young Fraudsters. Then I saw a spokeswoman from the Department of Justice, who talked about the impending National Identification cards. They're coordinating it with the states' driver license bureaus. And she said, "The sooner that every citizen has a national security card, the sooner we can protect everyone's privacy." And even some of the people in the audience laughed when she said that. The reporters then tried to ask her afterwards, "What do you mean? If everyone has a national security identity card, how does that mean that you're going to protect everyone's privacy?" And she says, "Oh, that was just a packaged sound bite that was on the script I was told to read." She knew it was complete nonsense. It's only the American people who will believe it. Another US helicopter has crashed in Afghanistan, a CH-53E Super Stallion, the biggest single-rotor helicopter. Two servicemen were killed and five were wounded. It's interesting to note our material losses in this Afghani campaign now equal the losses of the campaign in Iraq, which were actual combat losses. This latest loss is again being blamed on "mechanical failure due to faulty spares parts and poor maintenance." It's the same reason for all previous crashes of both helicopters and fixed wing aircraft in Afghanistan. It's a pretty sad commentary on the preparedness of US armed forces. The readiness status of our armed forces during the past ten years from Iraq to Afghanistan has declined enormously. Past GAO reports stated that in Iraq 53% of our fixed wing and helicopter fleets were serviceable. Now this figure has declined to 38%. Part of the problem is that the budgets for normal maintenance procedures have been cut in favor of buying a lot of high tech weaponry systems that don't work. We rush new weapons systems into production -- systems that we know have design flaws because contractors can't meet their deadlines. They're built with sub-standard materials because the budget for inspectors has been trimmed back. And there's no more quality control over the materials being used to make these weapons systems. And there's the problem with spare parts and mechanical problems, which are all ongoing. The commentator in the media calls these new weapons systems that don't work -- "political gravy weapons." (See previous Spare Parts Fiasco story) Meanwhile in Afghanistan, the United States is continuing its new fraud, cleverly disguised as a war. CNN showed an Afghani guy trying to eat a piece of peanut butter fudge -- and it was hilarious. He didn't know you were supposed to eat it at first. There's evidently been a campaign for school kids to send stuff to Afghanistan to help the starving Afghanis. So some kid in New Jersey sent twenty boxes of Mother's peanut butter fudge. The guy's dressed like Ahab the Arab and he takes a piece of fudge out of the box and he's looking at it. Then he smells it - and immediately he rears his head back. Then he takes a bit of it, chews it twice and spits it out. He's holding this little square trying to figure out what to do with it. This camel's standing next to him, so he feeds it to the camel, and the camel starts chewing on it. It's so rich and gooey and buttery that the camel's tongue gets stuck to the top of its mouth. The camel then starts shaking his head back and forth and salivating, trying to dislodge the gooey mass from his mouth. The Afghan tries to take the camel by the leash. The camel lunges forward and tries to kick him. At the end of the clip, you see all these boxes of peanut butter fudge. The guys back in his village, and he's smiling now because they finally figured out what to do with this stuff. He says, "What you do is you mix it with a little water and sand and it makes a wonderful putty." Then he shows that he's puttied all the bullet holes in his hut with this stuff. He says, "Look, when it dries out, its as hard as cement." Then they showed a row of huts with all these old Afghani men smiling because the peanut butter fudge putty had fixed all the bullet holes in their huts. They couldn't wait for their next shipment of peanut butter fudge from some place called New Jersey. On the home front, there was the story about the US Air pilot who was arrested at the Philadelphia airport. Apparently he got tired of having to show his identification, having to get patted down and searched and having his cigarette lighter and nail clippers confiscated every day. The guy simply got fed up. Here he is a blond-haired blue-eyed American wearing a US Air captain's uniform. He has to pass through the same guards and police every single day - and he got fed up with it. He said it costs him five dollars every day because he has to go out and buy a new lighter and nail clippers. (By the way, what is the government going to do with the millions of cigarette lighters and nail clippers they confiscate every day at our nations airports?) The reason he got arrested is he got pissed off and decided to tell a joke. He said, "I got a bomb in my briefcase." But he said it in a humorous way. The police immediately jumped him, threw him on the ground. He got dragged out to the security office and strip-searched. He got his shot of Thorazine and was immediately stuffed into one of the new Office of Homeland Security Civilian Detainee dark green jumpsuits, strapped into a high security control chai,r and wheeled out the back door. Now he's probably waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo. What struck me funny is that this apparently the government's new modus operandi, that is, if you become a problem or if you disagree with any of the security measures, you too are going to be made a BHP (Bobbing Head Person) and become Clueless in Guantanamo. (See previous prisoner story) And that is the Government's new threat. If you create a problem or disagree with anything, you will be turned into a Bobbing Head Person, shot up with Thorazine, with a hood put over your head, with your head bobbing back and forth out of control. Since the stockade at Guantanamo has such a small capacity to house prisoners and there wasn't enough time to build a new facility, these "detainees' are being held in animal cages that the US Army bought from the Cuban government. They're second hand circus cages that used to belong to the Cuban State Circus. They're completely out doors, completely exposed to the elements. Rumsfeld said that this was "much better than where we had found them." In other words, they're "Clueless in Guantanamo," pumped up with Thorazine and given high protein, high fiber food wafer rice cakes. The Red Cross had complained about the situation -- using circus cages for Afghan prisoners of war. Also they're not allowing access to any independent body to see the situation first hand. Retired General Bernard Trainor, the chief military analyst for Fox News, talked about the "detainees," who were shown lined up between two barbed wire fences, kneeling with their heads toward the ground. He pointed out that we are forcing these people to spend twelve hours a day on their knees. It's done to punish and to control them. O'Reilly then asked Trainor if this wasn't considered cruel and unusual punishment, and Trainor actually said on the air, "These are just towel heads. This isn't punishment for them. They're used to spending a lot of their time on their knees in prayer." He actually used the word "towel head" and referred to these people as if they were sub-human. And I thought to myself after he said that - and we wonder why they hate us so much? The Human Rights Watch Report is asking the same question - why did they get sent to Guantanamo in the first place? Why did they get sent to a place where there were no facilities to house them? There's no court of law. There's not even a court building. And they're not even classified as prisoners of war, yet they're being held on a military base The Department of Defense made up a new term for them-"Non-Classified Combatants." Rumsfeld said these are people who have threatened to kill an American before they leave, and I'm thinking to myself, "they got five hundred guys dressed in Homeland Security red detainee jumpsuits. As part of psychological warfare, they even changed the color from green to red because red is considered by the Muslims to be the unlucky or evil color. They're loaded on Thorazine, living in animal cages with their heads bobbing up and down - how dangerous could they be? What are they going to do - start throwing their rice cakes?! Beware all "Patriots." If you start questioning the government, you too may join the ever growing ranks of the Bobbing Head People -- Clueless in Guantanamo. |
