Carlucci, F

<a href="http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=101&name=Frank-Carlucci">http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=101&name=Frank-Carlucci</a>

--The latest flurry of right-wing consternation over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while Secretary of State has crossed over into the ludicrous.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that in a year dominated by Donald Trump’s excess the Wall Street Journal’s editorial team and others would <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-and-bill-clinton-inc-1471908017" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">parse</a> through the latest batch of emails obtained through federal Freedom of Information requests by longtime Clinton foes at Judicial Watch and fabricate outrage over her State Department staff’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">deliberations</a> over granting access to businessmen, pop stars and foreign leaders who previously donated to the Clinton Foundation.

Beyond the fact that in most cases Clinton's State Department staff said no—frustrating fundraisers at a foundation whose primary work was global humanitarian missions—there’s a bigger point to be made other than calling out these fake moralists when it comes to protesting the oldest game in Washington: working the channels of political access. (This week, the AP also <a href="http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/82df550e1ec646098b434f7d5771f625/many-donors-clinton-foundation-met-her-state" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">reported</a> that 85 of 154 foundation donors from outside government also met with Secretary Clinton, which her campaign <a href="https://twitter.com/albamonica/status/768215767087140864/photo/1" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">said</a> painted a false picture of innuendo when some of those cited included Nobel laureates and philanthropists and were a fraction of the 1,700 meetings she had.)  Despite Judicial Watch’s finger-pointing, pop star Bono <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">asking</a> the Clinton Foundation for help to work with NASA to record a segment with space station astronauts they could replay while on tour is not political corruption. The State Department’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">rejection</a> of a foundation-funneled request to help a wealthy sports businessman get a visa for an international athlete whose criminal past prevented it is not political corruption. And the crown prince of Bahrain, a Gulf state military ally, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/emails-reveal-how-foundation-donors-got-access-to-clinton-and-her-close-aides-at-state-dept/2016/08/22/345b5200-6882-11e6-8225-fbb8a6fc65bc_story.html" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">seeking</a> a meeting with Madam Secretary, funneled through all of the available channels, at the department and Clinton Foundation, is not political corruption.Real political corruption, Washington-style, is what happened under President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney, after their invasion of Iraq. That war allowed the international investment firm that W’s father, former president George H.W. Bush, was associated with, the <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2004/11/18/6624/investing-war" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">Carlyle Group</a>, and the international defense and oil industry conglomerate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">Halliburton</a>, where Cheney had been CEO, to wrest wartime profits and government contracts yielding billions. In 2004, the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity <a href="https://www.publicintegrity.org/2004/11/18/6624/investing-war" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">summarized</a> the Carlyle Group’s revolving door to wartime profiteering:<blockquote style="line-height: 25px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It was under the leadership of former [Reagan-Bush administration] Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci—first as a managing director, from 1989 to 1993, and as chairman from 1993 to 2003—that Carlyle grew from a small private equity to a global investment giant, and became a major player among defense contractors.“Other former government officials who have recent or current ties to the firm include former British Prime Minister John Major and former Philippines President Fidel Ramos; former [Reagan-Bush] Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman; former [Bill] Clinton chief of staff Thomas F. 'Mack' McLarty; former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt and former Federal Communications Commission chairman William E. Kennard. Former [Bush-Cheney] Secretary of State James Baker works for the firm, as did his former boss, President George H.W. Bush, who was an adviser for the firm's Asian investment funds until he left Carlyle in 2003.”</blockquote>Dan Briody, author of The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2003/7/3/democracy_now_exclusive_why_the_carlyle" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">told</a> Democracy Now in 2003, “They epitomize the revolving door of Washington D.C. They are just a barrel full of conflicts of interest when you have the president’s father working for a defense-oriented firm while his son is waging war all over the world. And no one is saying anything about it.”

There's also Cheney and Halliburton, which received $39.5 billion in federal contracts related to the Iraq war between the invasion and 2013, according to sources <a href="http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/308-12/16561-focus-cheneys-halliburton-made-395-billion-on-iraq-war" style="color: rgb(241, 96, 44); text-decoration: none;">cited</a> by International Business Times. As it noted in March 2013, “The company was given $39.5 billion in Iraq-related contracts over the past decade, with many of the deals given without any bidding from competing firms, such as a $568-million contract renewal in 2010 to provide housing, meals, water and bathroom services to soldiers, a deal that led to a Justice Department lawsuit over alleged kickbacks, as reported by Bloomberg.”

Yet somehow this record of real insider dealing and profiteering reaching into the billions has been forgotten by the Hillary haters at the Wall Street Journaleditorial page, Judicial Watch and other bastions of right-wing indignation. Selective memory loss is to be expected from the usual suspects as the presidential campaign mud season gets underway. But it is still important to inject some perspective into the silly outrage being projected by these right-wingers.

A Clinton campaign spokesman, responding to the latest emails obtained by Judicial Watch, told the Post, “No matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”Yet there is a larger point to make. It was the Bush-Cheney administration’s circle of family, government colleagues and business associates who parlayed billions in wartime profits from White House ties. How convenient that the right-wingers going after Hillary Clinton seem to have forgotten that.<div wibbitz="embed-main-player" style="line-height: 25px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><div class="bio-new body_story" style="width: 630px; font-style: italic; line-height: 22px; height: auto; border-top: 3px solid rgb(223, 223, 218); clear: both; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="author-bio">Steven Rosenfeld </div></div>==

house of saud

Over the years, there have been warm, substantial ties between members of the bin Laden family and leaders of the foreign-policy establishment in America and Britain. Until late last month, the family had a stake amounting to two million dollars in the Washington-based Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with a large interest in defense contracting. The Carlyle Group is known for its politically connected executives such as former President George H. W. Bush, former Secretary of State James Baker, and former British Prime Minister John Major. In the nineteen-nineties, both Bush and Baker visited the bin Laden family when they were prospecting for business in Saudi Arabia. The chairman of the firrn is former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who has been a trusted friend of the current Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, since their days on the Princeton wrestling team. Sources inside the firm suggest that there was a spirited discussion among the partners about whether to sever connections with the bin Ladens, with some believing that to penalize the family for guilt by association was, as one put it, "monstrous." But the prospect of President Bush's father being in business with the half brother of Osama bin Laden was politically untenable, and, when "the irony became too much," as one insider in the firm put it, the bin Ladens recouped their initial investment, plus five hundred thousand dollars.

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<table bgcolor="#000000" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2" border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td bgcolor="#7b849c" class="small name" width="100%" colspan="2" align="left">CIA station chief Lawrence Devlin was under direct instructions from Secretary of State Dulles to seek the immediate removal of Lumumba dictator of the Congo. Carlucci was is depicted as being part of a meeting of US, Belgian, and Congo officials plotting the murder of Lumumba according to the historical record.  </td></tr></tbody></table>

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