Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil-The Blood Politics of George Bush & Co.

Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil-The Blood Politics of George Bush & Co.

by Wayne Madsen
Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil-The Blood Politics of George Bush & Co.

Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil-The Blood Politics of George Bush & Co.

by Wayne Madsen

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Overview

This investigative account details how America's economic and intelligence associations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan led to the devastating September 11 attacks and illustrates the role that private military companies are playing in George W. Bush's "new world order." Based on personal interviews, never-before-published classified documents, and extensive research, this examination details the criminal forces thought to rule the world today—the Bush cartel, Russian-Ukranian-Israeli mafia, and Wahhabist Saudi terror financiers—revealing links between these groups and disastrous terrorist events.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780975290699
Publisher: Trine Day
Publication date: 05/22/2006
Pages: 384
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist and syndicated columnist whose articles have appeared in publications such as In These Times, The Miami Herald, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993–1999 and The Handbook of Personal Data Protection. A former U.S. naval officer, he has appeared on 20/20, 60 Minutes, and Nightline. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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Jaded Tasks Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil

The Blood Politics of Bush & Co.


By Wayne Madsen

Trine Day LLC

Copyright © 2006 Wayne Madsen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9752906-9-9



CHAPTER 1

Shining Light on a Dark Continent


Not All War Criminals Are Berated Equal


Once upon a time, former Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic sat in a Dutch prison awaiting trial for alleged war crimes in Kosovo while former Chilean strongman General Augusto Pinochet enjoyed a convalescent retirement in Chile, after a failed attempt to extradite him to Spain to stand trial for the murder of Spanish nationals during his 1973 coup against Chile's President Salvador Allende. In all likelihood, Pinochet ordered the murder of more innocent people than did Milosevic, but such is the hypocrisy of the international judicial system. Milosevic incurred the wrath of Czech-born former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright while Pinochet enjoyed the protection of Albright's State Department bureaucracy in withholding critical evidence that might have led to his extradition and ultimate conviction. After her service in the Clinton administration Albright was lauded with the title of Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University

In the Spring of 1994, Albright and her co-conspirator UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, chose to promote international thuggery over diplomacy. They ignored warning signs in central Africa that led to a genocide and counter-genocide in Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo that claimed the lives of some three million people — that's right, 3,000,000. If willful negligence were criminalized by the tainted UN criminal justice system, Albright and Annan would certainly be sitting in prison in the Netherlands awaiting trial.

While Milosevic and Pinochet committed crimes against humanity by commission, the acts of omission by Albright and Annan in 1994 resulted in death and mayhem in what could only have been dreamt of by the Serb and Chilean dictators. Albright, then America's ambassador to the UN, and Annan, the head of UN peacekeeping operations, conveniently chose to ignore evidence that a U.S.-trained and supplied guerrilla force — the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) — was responsible for the fateful April 6, 1994 terrorist missile attack on the aircraft carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi home from a peace summit in Tanzania.

Instead, the two diplomats decided to ignore pleas for additional UN peacekeepers to be deployed to Rwanda to forestall the predictable mass murder of Tutsis by revenge-seeking Hutus. Rwanda at that time was a dangerous tinderbox, with Rwanda's President Juvenal Habyarimana negotiating a power-sharing agreement with the RPF. Although Hutus make up 90 per cent of Rwanda's population, Tutsi refugees based in neighboring Uganda had launched a guerrilla war against Rwanda in 1990, an event that had the military backing of the first Bush administration, including Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. The RPF sought to overthrow Habyarimana, whom they claimed to be a dictator backed by French military and economic assistance. The plane's destruction made this a fait accompli.

When the RPF launched its invasion of Rwanda in 1990, U.S. military specialists at the US Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, were training its deputy leader, Paul Kagame. Kagame, freshly armed with knowledge of U.S. military and intelligence tactics, arrived in Uganda to take up arms against Rwanda. After the leader of the RPF was killed in combat, Kagame became the head of the guerrilla army, and his ties with the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department became closer.

In 1994, Albright and her senior advisers at the UN were well aware of the assistance that had been granted by the U.S. to Kagame and his mentor, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. In fact, Albright argued that Kagame and Museveni represented a new breed of African leader — each was a "beacon of hope" for the future of Africa, in her estimation.

However, two classified UN documents clearly indicate that the RPF planned and committed the terrorist attack on the Rwandan presidential aircraft. The documents, one Secret and the other Confidential, were prepared in 1997 by the National Team for the UN's Independent Oversight Office (a sort of Inspector General for the UN). The documents state that an "Intelligence Network" of the RPF used three rocket sites to shoot down President Habyarimana's aircraft.

The documents also state that "hard evidence" existed that could have be supplied to Judge Louise Arbour, at the time the head of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and now a member of Canada's Supreme Court. Arbour, a friend of Albright, chose to ignore the evidence against the American-backed guerrillas. In addition, the UN oversight team obtained intelligence that the same RPF hit squad also killed three members of the "Doctors Without Borders" group and five staffers with the UN Human Rights Commission. No wonder at the UN Senior Investigator, former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer Al Breau, in the report refers to the findings of his UN team as "sensitive" and "explosive."

The United States, which trained and supplied the RPF, certainly would have known about the plans of its surrogates. The American ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, was a virtual proconsul for the RPF leadership. According to a French National Assembly inquiry and former RPF officials, the U.S. even supplied the RPF with the Soviet-made surface-to-air missiles that were used to shoot down the Rwandan presidential aircraft. Members of the UN investigation team received intelligence that a company linked to the CIA leased the warehouse used to assemble the missile launchers. The team could never complete the investigation because Arbour — reportedly at the urging of Albright — quickly shut down the investigation when the American connection became clear.

Albright, who constantly shared U.S. intelligence with then-UN Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations Annan, but not with Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, did everything she could to block a capable UN peacekeeping force from being dispatched to Rwanda. Instead, according to people close to Boutros-Ghali, Albright consistently referred to the Secretary General as "Frenchie," and conspired with Annan to keep him out the loop. During an interview with me in 1998 in Paris, where he served as the Secretary General for the Francophone Agency, the French-speaking commonwealth of nations, Boutros-Ghali said he was aware that certain U.S. intelligence reports that were shared with his deputies never reached him. On Albright's remarks, the urbane Egyptian diplomat, who cut short a prior meeting with a delegation from Kazakhstan in order to meet with me, said, "I'm a gentleman, and gentlemen don't comment about a lady."

However, the "lady" opposed every attempt by General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian head of the UN Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR), to prevent the impending Hutu-Tutsi conflagration. That charge was made by both Boutros-Ghali and former Rwandan President Faustin Twagiramungu, a Hutu who had agreed to become the first Prime Minister in the post-genocide RPF-led government, and was later living in exile in Belgium. Twagiramungu returned to Rwanda to run in the 2003 elections, which, due to voter intimidation and government-sponsored violence against the opposition, Kagame won handily with 95 percent of the vote to Twagiramungu's 3.6 percent. Twagiramungu was even warned by his supporters that Kagame might have attempted a Benigno Aquino-style reception at Kigali airport, a reference to the murder of the Philippine opposition leader by President Ferdinand Marcos's assassins upon his return to Manila from exile in the United States.

In the event, Twagiramungu received no encouragement from the Bush administration. His visit to the State Department in Washington in February 2003 resulted in his being told that Washington did not look with favor upon a race against its ally Kagame. Dr. Cindy Courville, of the Central and Southern Africa desk at the National Security Council (who later became the "Africa Team Chief" at the Pentagon) was polite and gave Twagiramungu her card, but she was totally noncommittal on his electoral campaign.

Ironically, Twagiramungu's visit to Washington occurred while there was a Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict seminar and exhibition at the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington's fashionable Woodley Park neighborhood. He and I walked through the rows and rows of the sophisticated special operations military equipment that Kagame had at his disposal. The former prime minister seemed truly bewildered at the military machine he was up against. America was no longer the land of the free, but the land of military contractors who sold killing machines to ruthless dictators.

By contrasting her attitude toward black-populated Rwanda with her hasty willingness to commit NATO troops to war in white-populated Kosovo, we might add racism to Albright's list of atrocities. The UN justice system seems to reward the victors of battles, regardless of the facts. Currently in Arusha, Tanzania, some 50 Rwandan Hutus are imprisoned at a UN Detention Facility for war crimes in Rwanda. Although the evidence against many of them is substantial, for others it appears their only crime was to take on the current Kagame dictatorship. President Kagame, backed by the United States, has purged all Hutus from his government, including the former Hutu figurehead president. Anyone who disagree with Kagame is branded as a genocidal murderer of Tutsis back in 1994 — a genocidaire — and at the snap of Kagame's finger the UN law enforcement mechanism, backed by the FBI and Interpol, issues international arrest warrants.

Meanwhile, those who virtually got away with murder sit at Georgetown University and at UN Headquarters in New York, where Annan was re-elected Secretary General for another five-year term. For his part, Kagame, who enriches himself with stolen minerals from neighboring Congo, and who was accused in a Congolese report of being behind the January 2004 assassination of Congo's President Laurent Kabila, uses the "genocide" card to justify his brutal dictatorship.

French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguière, who successfully prosecuted Carlos the Jackal and Libyan and Corsican terrorists, had every intention of bringing charges against Kagame for the terrorist attack on the French-crewed Rwandan aircraft. Kagame temporarily continued to enjoy the protection of Arbour's successor, Carla del Ponte, but when she began to investigate the role of Kagame and the RPF in the aircraft attack and other human rights abuses, Kagame succeeded in having her removed as UN prosecutor for Rwanda in August 2003. Even the UN's General Dallaire voiced his concerns about Kagame's duplicity and involvement in the attack, stating, "The RPF rebel movement, now in power, did not have the well-being of the people as its first priority, but a long-time hatched plan that would allow the Tutsis to return from exile and control power. I could see that the RPF wanted to take control of the whole country, and was not necessarily ready to establish an ethnically balanced government."

There was more than enough evidence to bring Kagame to trial but Rwanda and the United States signed a mutual treaty granting each other's leaders immunity from any prosecutions by the International Criminal Court. Any apprehension of Kagame would bring France face-to-face with the Rwandan terrorist's main protector, the United States.

* * *

In early 2004, French anti-terrorism Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière completed his five year investigation of the terrorist missile attack on the airplane that carried the Presidents. The families of the plane's three-man French crew, who were killed in the attack, had requested the investigation. Bruguière's final report, which was sent to French President Jacques Chirac, concluded that the plane was shot down by the guerrilla forces of the current Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, a client and ally of the United States.

Investigators close to the case reported they uncovered a link between the terrorist attack and a previously unknown and shadowy organization said to be a "front" for powerful interests comprising influential members of the Republican Party and major U.S. oil companies. Their investigation of the American group, simply known as the "International Strategic and Tactical Organization," or "ISTO," was prompted by the uncovering of evidence primarily in Africa and Canada. From the evidence, ISTO was tied to the attack.

In addition to the French crew and the two heads of state, many cabinet ministers and other important officials were killed in the crash. The missile attack, termed an "act of international terrorism" by UN police investigators, was blamed on militant Hutus but, in fact, was carried out by mercenaries and troops loyal to the Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA).

Initial reports of CIA involvement in the shoot-down now appear to have been a false flag to deter investigators from the ISTO link to its own U.S. corporate interlocutors. By 1994, the CIA had closed a number of stations in Africa and did not maintain a heavy presence on the continent. Therefore, European law enforcement investigators began looking at the covert world of brass plate companies and mercenaries. ISTO was subsequently identified as a main culprit behind the 1994 aerial assassination.

The attack on the plane triggered a massive wave of genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, which was used by Kagame as a reason to seize power, and then later to attack neighboring Zaire, since renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Since Rwanda's and Uganda's two invasions of the DRC, in 1996 and 1998, respectively, the country has been divided into fiefdoms controlled by warlords who act on behalf of Western mining and oil companies.

* * *

According to European law enforcement officials, ISTO was connected to the consulting firm Armitage and Associates LC, which is now known as "AALC." AALC was founded by Richard Armitage, George W. Bush's first Deputy Secretary of State, who stepped down early in 2005. Armitage had turned over the operation of the company to his partners when he assumed the post at State in 2001. Other AALC principals included other top level State Department officials, including Heather A. Conley, who was a Senior Associate of AALC and is now the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Lincoln P. Bloomfield, a former Partner of AALC and now the Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs. Conley is a particular focus of the European law enforcement probe.

Another AALC principal is Dr. Paul A. Jureidini, an Associate of AALC and an active participant in the anti-Syrian Lebanon Study Program. Jureidini, according to a long-time U.S. Middle East specialist, is a veteran Maronite activist who has opposed Syrian influence in Lebanon. Through his work with the Lebanon Study Group, Jureidini is close to such neoconservatives as Donald Rumsfeld's Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Center for Security Police head and former Reagan administration official Frank Gaffney, and Daniel Pipes, a Director of the U.S. Institute of Peace. In addition, there are close ties between the Lebanon Study Group and the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL). The latter, headed by Ziad K. Abdelnour, consists of a "Golden Circle" of top neoconservatives, including David Wurmser, the former assistant to Counter Proliferation Assistant Secretary of State and now-UN ambassador John Bolton; Richard Perle; Michael Ledeen; and Douglas Feith. Former Lebanese Army Commander and Prime Minister Michael Aoun, a harsh critic of assassinated Lebanese leaders Elie Hobeika and Rafik Hariri, was also a top mover and shaker inside the USCFL.

According to CIA sources, another link in the ISTO ring is F. Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American who has been tied to both Imad el Hage, a Lebanese-American businessman who was arrested at Dulles International Airport in early 2003 for suspicion of arms smuggling, and to Douglas Feith, the main force behind the creation of a CIA-rivaling intelligence operation within the Pentagon. El Hage carries a Liberian diplomatic passport and was close to former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. In what would become yet an additional nexus of activity between the neoconservatives and Al Qaeda, the UN Special prosecutor for war crimes in Sierra Leone, David Crane, charged in May 2005 that Taylor was harboring Al Qaeda members and training rebels throughout West Africa in exchange for blood diamonds. Taylor was also a business partner of Christian televangelist Pat Robertson, who was also a strong supporter of Israel's Likud government and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Maloof, who worked for the Office of Special Plans under Feith, had twice lost his security clearance for suspicious activities involving foreign intelligence agents and people connected to terrorists. Maloof was eventually put on paid leave after Pentagon security officials trumped an intervention by Feith on Maloof's behalf. Maloof and David Wurmser, a neoconservative staffer first under the State Department's Counter-Proliferation chief John Bolton and later under Vice President Dick Cheney, ran a parallel intelligence disinformation shop in the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which challenged CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyses of the situation in Iraq. Armitage reportedly ordered U.S. troops into Monrovia, the Liberian capital, before the fall of Taylor in order to capture incriminating documents linking Taylor to El Hage, Maloof, and AALC. Armitage had often been described as a close Colin Powell ally and at loggerheads with the neoconservatives within the Pentagon. As a result of the Rwanda terrorism investigation, it was discovered that Armitage's business activities had probably been part of the neoconservative agenda for quite some time.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Jaded Tasks Brass Plates, Black Ops & Big Oil by Wayne Madsen. Copyright © 2006 Wayne Madsen. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Title page,
Copyright page,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Quotes,
Introduction,
Foreword,
Chapter One Shining Light on a Dark Continent,
Chapter Two America's Disinformation Factory,
Chapter Three Business as Usual ... and Unusual,
Chapter Four Dealing With the Devil,
Chapter Five Diamonds are a Terrorist's Best Friend,
Chapter Six Coups 'R' U.S.,
Chapter Seven Mercenaries Inc.,
Afterword,
About the Author,

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