A White Knight Talking Backwards
By Michael C. Ruppert

TOROTNO (FTW) - Delmart Edward "Mike" Vreeland, an American citizen whose claims to being a US Naval Lieutenant assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) are being increasingly corroborated in open court, has been in a Canadian jail since December 6, 2000. On August 11 or 12 of 2001, the date is uncertain, after trying to verbally alert his Canadian jailers to the coming World Trade Center attacks, he wrote down key information and sealed it in an envelope which he then had placed in jailers' custody. This event is not disputed by Canadian authorities. The letter specifically listed a number of targets including The Sears Towers, The World Trade Center, The White House, The Pentagon, The World Bank, The Canadian parliament building in Ottawa and the Royal Bank in Toronto.

A chilling sentence follows the list of targets, "Let one happen. Stop the rest!!!"

When the envelope was opened on September 14th it set off alarms in the US and Canada.

The US wants Vreeland back in the States on a Michigan warrant for credit card fraud - using his own credit card. Vreeland, convinced that a return to the US means certain death, wants to stay in Canada in a witness protection program. His lawyers Rocco Galati and Paul Slansky, two former Canadian prosecutors, agree with Vreeland's assessment. They should. Both have been the victims of harassment and threats including dead cats hung on porches and car windows smashed out in car burglaries.

The position of the United States government, as represented by Crown Solicitors in Toronto, is that all of this is nonsense. Vreeland, says the Navy, was discharged as a Seaman after a few months of service for unsatisfactory performance in 1986. He has never had anything to do with intelligence according to 1200 pages of Navy records filed in Toronto Superior Court.

"How is it," says Galati, "that the Navy says that he was only in the service a few months and then send us a 1200 page personnel file? Some of the entries are obvious forgeries or alterations and the sanitizing of his records was done so hurriedly that some dates of medical exams in the 1990s were left intact."

In a January 10, 2002 tactic worthy of Perry Mason, with the greatest possible risk to his client if it failed, attorney Slansky got the judge to agree to let him call the Pentagon from open court. Using a speaker phone, in front of at least six witnesses, Slansky first dialed directory information and got a number for the Pentagon switchboard. Then, calling that number he asked the Department of Defense operator to locate the office of Lt. Delmart Vreeland. Within moments the operator had confirmed Vreeland's posting, his rank as a Lieutenant O-3, his room number and given Slansky his direct-dial number. All of this is a part of the court record.

On January 17, as this writer sat in the courtroom, another mind-numbing event occurred.

As Vreeland sat shackled in a corner, closely flanked by two guards, the Crown Solicitor sought to debunk Vreeland's assertions that he had been assigned to travel to Moscow to review and retrieve highly technical and classified documents pertaining to Russian and Chinese efforts to counter the proposed US "Star Wars" missile defense system. [Ed note: FTW believes this to be a cover story.] "Why," said the Crown Solicitor, "would the US choose, in a case involving some of the most highly technical intelligence, a random seaman with training in the tool and die field." The point that someone discharged in 1986 with no special training and rank would be sent to review technical documents sounded reasonable - assuming that Vreeland's background was as the Solicitor argued.

The reasonableness vanished a few moments later as the Crown Solicitor argued that Vreeland, who has been in jail and without access to a computer for thirteen months, had somehow cracked the Pentagon's personnel records and inserted his name, an office number, and telephone extension into the Pentagon database.

No one except for Vreeland and attorney Galati seemed to notice the contradiction.

The Crown Solicitor ventured further through the looking glass by then arguing that Vreeland, having certain papers in his possession at the time of his arrest, had memorized Russian and Albanian documents and then had translated them from memory. Vreeland doesn't speak Russian or Albanian. The judge, noticing this stretch of credibility, asked the Solicitor to restate the point. The argument then became that Vreeland had an unnamed colleague go to an unspecified web site, print Russian and Albanian documents for him, and then used foreign language dictionaries to translate them.

Vreeland's extradition process could take years and his time in jail has not been easy. There have been threats, illnesses and his every move is watched. Galati and Slansky wonder how long his psyche will hold up. The history of jailhouse deaths of key witnesses leans heavily in favor of Vreeland's belief that he could be killed at any moment. His apparent strategy is to not reveal any accurate Top Secret material to either his lawyers or the press, hoping that his silence will provide him with some support from US clandestine services. This a standard approach taken in dozens of similar cases researched by FTW in the past They include the cases - well known in research circles - of William Tyree and Michael Riconosciuto. Tyree has been jailed on a questionable murder conviction since 1979 and Riconosciuto on a variety or drug-related charges since the early 1990s. Both men have been directly connected to CIA and other intelligence operations by official documents.

"We don't need to know and we don't want to know the secret details, "says Galati. "They're not necessary for us to do the job of keeping our client alive and in Canada. He faces a special danger in the US because he has also been an informant against an organized crime family in Michigan where the criminal charges originate. The most he is facing there is two years but we believe he might not live for two days in that system."

Additional press reports indicate that Vreeland's intelligence work was connected to drug smuggling - a much more likely reason for his trip to Moscow. And the history of the relations between Naval Intelligence and the mafia is documented as far back as the Second World War when ONI officers made deals with convicted mafia don Lucky Luciano and his lieutenant Vito Genovese to protect New York docks and assist with the subsequent Allied invasion and occupation of Italy.

Mike Vreeland is one man who, in a rational world, could totally expose the complicity of the US government in the attacks of September 11th. No one has disputed what he wrote and stuffed into that envelope. In a rational world that would be the most pressing and public inquiry of all. The two questions remaining are whether Vreeland will live and whether or not he will ever tell what he knows. That may be a mutually exclusive proposition.

FTW has retained the services of freelance journalist Greta Knutsen in Toronto to report on developments in this critical case for our subscribers. Important updates will be posted and sent out via subscriber bulletin to our readers as they become available.

The Warning Written by Mike Vreeland Before 9-11:

The New York Times's Martin Arnold calls the success of Bernard Goldberg's Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News "perhaps the most astonishing publishing event in the last 12 months." I concur. A number-one best-seller is indeed an impressive accomplishment for a clumsily written screed whose author never even bothers to prove his thesis, much less attempts to convince anyone who does not already know the conservative secret handshake.

Never mind that in their more genuine moments, conservatives from William Kristol to Pat Buchanan admit that the claim of liberal media bias is bogus, cooked up for political advantage. Conservative book buyers, fortunately for Goldberg, are rather late in getting the news. "Just turn on your TV set and it's there," the author, a twenty-eight-year veteran at CBS News, declares. In doing so, he echoes the line of many a know-nothing conservative before him. "There are certain facts of life so long obvious they would seem beyond dispute. One of these--that there is a liberal tilt in the media...," sayeth the editors of the Wall Street Journal. "The fact is everybody knows that Dan Rather is an egomaniacal liberal. Everybody knows that the major news networks lean to the left," chimes in Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online. Never mind, dear reader, that young Jonah was recently signed up by CNN, where he joins liberal Robert Novak and liberal Tucker Carlson as a regular commentator on what Tom DeLay calls the "Communist News Network." He can expect to compete with liberal lunatic Alan Keyes on MSNBC, who replaces liberal criminal Oliver North and liberal miniskirt model Laura Ingraham, and joins liberal carnival barker Chris Matthews, in being given his own show on that liberal network. Thank goodness for the fairandbalanced folks at Fox.

Taking time out from the 200-300 talk-radio programs that regularly feature authors of the conservative publishing house Regnery, which published his book, Goldberg appeared on Jeff Greenfield's Communist CNN program, where he told his host, "I could give you right now, Jeff, about 100 examples of liberal bias in the media that are current." Yet over the course of 230 pages, he manages to string together little more than one idiotic accusation after another. Goldberg reports, "Everyone to the right of Lenin is a 'right-winger' as far as media elites are concerned." He explains that the news bias comes from the same "dark region that produces envy and the unquenchable liberal need to wage class warfare." He insists, "If CBS News were a prison instead of a journalistic enterprise, three-quarters of the producers and 100 per cent of the vice-presidents would be Dan's bitches." Just about the only piece of actual news Goldberg produces is unproven and, I'm guessing, imaginary. According to the author, CBS News president Andrew Heyward once told him: "Look, Bernie, of course there's a liberal bias in the news. All the networks tilt left.... If you repeat any of this, I'll deny it."

Taking the conservative ideology of wealthy white male victimization to new heights, Goldberg pretends he has broken his pledge of omertŕ and suffered the horrifying consequences. He wrote an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking his colleagues. "So what happened?" he writes. "Well, as Tony Soprano might put it to his old pal Big Pussy Bompensiero in the Bada Bing! Lounge: Bernie G. opened his mouth to the wrong people--and he got whacked."

It's heartbreaking until you discover that while Goldberg admits that Heyward had every right to fire him for violating the terms of his contract, instead the boss whom "Bernie G." is either betraying or libeling in these pages found him a nice cushy job at 60 Minutes II and allowed him to serve out his time to qualify for a higher pension. Call me a liberal, but I believe the term "whack" carries a slightly different connotation among Mafia dons.

As for Dan's "bitches," this is likely a fantasy as well. The anchorman, according to Goldberg, "practically kissed Fidel Castro in front of the whole evening news staff when the dictator showed up at CBS News studios." Did I mention that Goldberg (though he'll probably deny it) "practically" beat my dog, raped my cat and exposed himself to a potted plant in front of the entire Nation staff? He "practically" did all this, by the way, before "practically" admitting that his book was cooked up in a few spare minutes to milk money from ignorant people willing to pay to see their prejudices confirmed. Go ahead, Bernie, "whack" me; baby needs a new pair of shoes.

* * *

Speaking of liberals, George Will offered up yet another example recently of why the word "journalist" is considered so vicious an epithet among social scientists. Will has long been obsessed with education spending, which he finds wasteful and counterproductive. This leads him to twist arguments and statistics so shamelessly that one of his columns actually served as the subject of an article in the Journal of Statistics Education demonstrating how not to analyze SAT data.

Former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani may have revealed a lot more about what happened on 9/11 than he intended this past Saturday while addressing a Conference of Mayors breakfast honoring the WTC victims.

"In the 1930's, Hitler told us what he was going to do, and we ignored it, for years and years and years. In the 1990's, the terrorists told us what they were going to do. And we ignored it. We glorified Yasir Arafat when he was training terrorists in Palestine. We allowed Saddam Hussein to build weapons of mass destruction as we removed inspectors." -NY Times 1/27/2002 U.S. Ignored Threat of Terror, Giuliani Says

When a man who has been publicly compared to Hitler throughout his career invokes the Fuhrer by name we should all pay attention. Giuliani was 100% right that we knew what Hitler, Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were going to do, but he left out how we knew. How we knew is the key to understanding Giuliani, the Bush administration and what really happened on 9/11.

Hitler, Saddam and bin Laden have much in common besides being mass murderers. All worked for, were financed by and were armed at the direction of America's top corporate interests, most conspicuously among them corporations and individuals associated with the Rockefeller and Bush families and with the men who created CIA policy. Giuliani is intimately linked to these families and corporations.

The Bush family were Hitler's American bankers, spending more than a decade building up the Nazi war machine until their banking and shipping assets were seized by the U.S. Congress in 1942 under the Trading With the Enemy Act.

Rockefeller's Standard Oil was half owner of IG Farben the chemical and munitions company which formed the industrial basis of the Third Reich and which built and operated 40 slave labor death camps including Auschwitz. IG Farben likewise owned half of Standard Oil.

Most of the world's current leading drug companies such as Bayer were once part of IG Farben. Today, Rockefeller's Exxon/Mobil (formerly Standard Oil) is the world's largest corporation, with his JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup - the two main banks financing Enron - close behind.

Rockefeller's Chase Bank - the main funding source for the Manhattan Institute - has admitted to helping Hitler raid the gold reserves of invaded European nations and voluntarily liquidating thousands of Jewish bank accounts and turning the money over to the Nazis. Rockefeller's intelligence representatives in what later became the CIA imported thousands of former Nazis to the U.S. after WWII, among them major war criminals who participated in the war's worst atrocities. Some of the men who helped import Nazis to the U.S. and conspired to hide this fact from the American people later became CIA directors, Secretaries of State, heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission, presidential advisors and U.S. Presidents.

Eugenics programs in the U.S. were publicly acknowledged by Hitler as the model for what eventually became the Nazi program of mandatory euthanasia, the forcible sterilization of more than 350,000 German citizens and ultimately, the Holocaust. It was the Rockefeller family and their long-time business associates - the Bush and Harriman families who were Wall Street partners in financing Hitler - whose institutions and foundations inspired both the U.S. and the Nazi eugenics laws.

These laws mandating forcible sterilization were in effect in more than 20 states in the U.S. until the Holocaust temporarily gave eugenics a bad name. Eugenics-based ideas have since come back stronger than ever under the guises of population control, the Human Genome Project, eliminating welfare and privatizing prisons, hospitals and schools - which are the preoccupations of the CIA sponsored Manhattan Institute where both Giuliani and GW Bush claim they get all of their ideas.

Contrary to their recent public statements about the sanctity of life, for the past 70 years the Bush family has been among the world's leading proponents of population control policies and abortion. GW's grandfather - the Nazi banker Prescott Bush - was a leading official of Planned Parenthood in the 1950's and lost his seat in Congress because of it. US Ambassador to the U.N. in the early 70's George Bush specialized in promoting a worldwide depopulation program sponsored by David Rockefeller.

Saddam Hussein got his chemical and biological weapons and most of his conventional weapons from the U.S. - specifically from the Bush administration and it's friends in the armaments industry. It was the first Bush administration which indicated to Saddam - after arming him - that we'd look the other way if he invaded Kuwait, thereby starting the Gulf War. It was the Reagan-Bush administration that armed, trained and financed bin Laden, deliberately building up Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan into a force to be reckoned with.

It was the Reagan/Bush CIA director William Casey who orchestrated giving bin Laden and his friends billions in weapons and special military training. That's the same William Casey who founded the Manhattan Institute (MI).

MI has since given us the GW Bush and Giuliani administrations and used them both as testing grounds for a fascistic concept of America featuring eugenics-based social programs, tax cuts for the richest corporations, widespread media censorship, a never-ending war on "terrorism" and the phoniest brand of patriotism ever seen in U.S. history.

It was Giuliani's most important patron, David Rockefeller, who created the World Trade Center with his brother, NY State Governor and Ford Administration vice President, Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller families' oil policies and long entanglement with the Saudi royal family were bin Laden's stated reasons for hating the U.S.

The facts proving these statements are a matter of U.S. history and can be confirmed by anyone with a computer or a library card and an interest in doing so. Thousands of websites are dedicated to this history. There are also thousands of readily accessible mainstream media sources, records of Congressional hearings and books published by respected authors detailing this history. Many of these authors were once U.S. government officials. In the articles on my website http://baltech.org/lederman/ I list hundreds of places where you can find this information.

Admittedly, you won't find any direct reference to these things on the Rockefeller families many websites or in an authorized history of Giuliani or the Bush family. They've spent decades obliterating and whitewashing their record.

As one glaring example of the reach of their censorship consider this simple fact. Since 9/11 not one mainstream U.S. newspaper has reported that the Rockefellers built the WTC yet every history of the WTC and every article from the 1970's on it's construction prominently features this fact, usually in the first paragraph.

Despite his occasional tendency to embarrassing public confession, Rudy Giuliani will never publicly admit his connections to Nazis and the far right or why he is so obsessed with Hitler. He is however, proud to remind us of his close relationship to the Rockefeller families' CIA-initiated Manhattan Institute and to the Bushes.

While leading daily celebrity tours of ground zero, doing hundreds of interviews about his greatness and accepting credit for "saving New York" from the terrorists, Giuliani has never responded to a single question about why he illegally stored 6,000 gallons of fuel in WTC #7 to supply his "bombproof" bunker. That fateful decision caused WTC #7 to collapse thereby conveniently destroying millions of CIA, FBI and Department of Justice files.

Was it a coincidence that the two worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil each destroyed millions of files of criminal evidence that were embarrassing for U.S. government officials and corporations? Is it a coincidence that the so-called "terrorists" in each bombing - Oklahoma City and the WTC - were trained by the U.S. military and/or the CIA?

These millions of files were evidence in criminal cases involving major U.S. banks, US-trained terrorists, the Mafia, U.S. officials and foreign governments who are now our "allies" in the so-called war on terrorism. Giuliani has also refused to answer any questions on why he ordered all of the steel beams from ground zero melted down and destroyed before they could be examined by investigators. Giuliani cleaned up millions of tons of WTC evidence even faster than he cleaned up the "squeegee menace", street artists or topless dancing.

One has to wonder why Giuliani would warn us about imminent terrorist attacks for years, even surrounding his offices at City Hall with concrete barriers and then locate his emergency response bunker in the building complex most expected by U.S. intelligence agencies to be attacked by terrorists. Evidence about what Giuliani himself knew about 9/11 before it happened may be one of the many reasons he recently stole millions of public records on his last active day as Mayor of NYC in order to prevent them from being accessed by the public.

It's tempting to reject all of this material without even looking into it. Like the countless indications in recent years that Enron was a fake, these disturbing truths are hard to face and doing so has serious ramifications for politics, finance, national security and the very idea of what the U.S. government is supposed to stand for.

Both of Arkansas's Republican righteousness brothers have been all over the local broadcast media recently, and both had trouble keeping their stories straight. Indeed, so gracelessly did the Hutchinson boys dance around the truth that a skeptic might wonder how much trouble they think their party could be in come November. That, or they think Arkansas voters are morons.

For his part, Sen. Tim Hutchinson, the scourge of White House sin whose chaste relationship with the staffer who subsequently became the second Mrs. Hutchinson did not-repeat did not, he says-become romantic until AFTER he'd voted to impeach Bill Clinton and then divorced his first wife, set what must be a state record by running a TV campaign ad ten months before his contest with Attorney General Mark Pryor.

In the commercial, all heartwarming front porches and grampaw and grammaw and cute kids and leafy country roads and pickup trucks, Hutchinson reminds us about something called the "Social Security Benefits Guarantee Act." Thanks to Sen. Tim, old folks can rest easy. Their payroll taxes won't be squandered on tax refunds for George W. Bush's campaign contributors. No yachts, no second homes in Aspen. at grampaw and grammaw's expense, no sir. Sen. Tim has done rode to the rescue.

An innocent bystander might wonder if Hutchinson was fixing to run against Pryor in the Democratic primary. Except, get this, there's no such law as the "Social Security Benefits Guarantee Act." It exists purely as a figment of his imagination. Hut-chinson introduced it as SB 806 on May 1, 2001. With no co-sponsors in either party, it's defunct-an election-year shuttlecock batted into the air to fall harmlessly to the ground. Even if enacted, John Brummett pointed out in the Arkansas Times, the government would send you a meaningless IOU. Period.

Then there's Asa, the drug warrior. So far his biggest accomplishment has been a fiat banning hempseed oil from potato chips because it's derived from the same species of plant as marijuana. As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. (Nor that Asa's boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, has ordered $8000 drapes to hide a naked female breast on an art deco statue at the Justice Department. Wouldn't a WonderBra be cheaper?

Columnist Andrew Tobias reports that Ashcroft dispatches aides to remove calico cats from places he speaks. He supposedly considers the animals emissaries from Satan. Nobody could make that up.) Anyhow, for potheads who scarf potato chips in 600 lb round bales to get a buzz, the hemp ban has a loophole. Hutchinson's order doesn't extend to clothing. In a pinch, you could eat your hat.

Anyhow, Asa was interviewed on KUAR-FM, Little Rock's NPR station, on Jan. 25. Host Lisa Ferrell asked him about "rumors" that the Bush Administration paid Afghanistan's Taliban rulers millions to suppress the cultivation of heroin poppies before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Did we make payments to the Taliban?" she asked.

"No," Hutchinson said. He added that the Mullahs only pretended to ban poppy growing to con the west into giving them economic aid while covertly driving up the worldwide price of heroin. (A textbook example of the drug war's sheer futility, actually.)

"It was really an insincere gesture on their part," he said. "But it was, I think, motivated by the hope that they would get more international assistance."

He emphasized the word "hope," as if to imply that the scheme hadn't worked. "Did we provide additional international assistance?" Ferrell persisted.

Asa got cute. "I couldn't answer that specifically," he said. "The United Nations may have provided some help to them and the State Department may have. But it did not flow through the Drug Enforcement Administration, so I'm not aware of exactly what transpired."

As a public service, I suggest Hutchinson consult one Steven Casteel, the assistant administrator for intelligence at the DEA. Casteel was quoted in an article headlined "Taliban's Ban on Poppy a Success, US Aides Say" in The New York Times, May 18, 2001. Also mentioned was Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's announcement of a $43 million grant to Afghanistan specifically tied to heroin eradication."We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans," Powell said "including those farmers who have felt the impact of the ban on poppy cultivation, a decision by the Taliban that we welcome."

On May 24, the Times ran a front page piece by a reporter who visited Afghasistan's barren poppy fields and noted that a regime known for whipping women for exposing their ankles, jailing men for trimming their beards, and holding public executions in soccer stadiums had no trouble enforcing the ban. The article noted that bricks of heroin were readily for sale in Kandahar and rapidly escalating in value.

Remember the inspiring Presidential rhetoric that unified the nation against terrorist assaults? Remember when politicians of both parties gathered on the steps of the Capitol to sing "God Bless America"? Remember how "United We Stand" suddenly showed up on billboards, bumper stickers and storefronts as the slogan of a nation at war?

Well, that was last year, and Karl Rove says you should forget about all that. According to him, bipartisan unity will soon be set aside in the interest of higher goals–such as winning this year’s midterm elections and insuring his party’s domination of Congress.

As the chief political strategist for George W. Bush, Mr. Rove was the featured luncheon speaker at the Republican National Committee’s annual winter conference on Jan. 18. That was when he revealed his plans to regain control of the Senate and retain control of the House by turning the war into a partisan weapon.

His wording was blander, of course, but his meaning was perfectly clear. "We can go to the country on this issue, because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America," he said. He might as well have added that the Democratic elected representatives who have–with a single lonely exception in the House–supported the American military campaign in Afghanistan are a bunch of suckers.

The notion that Republicans are "better" on issues of national security is a myth that has long been exploited for partisan purposes, but Mr. Rove’s eagerness to do so while American men and women are on active duty is especially offensive. It is the kind of demagogy that men like him ought to avoid, since–like so many military enthusiasts on the right–he chose not to serve when the opportunity arose during the Vietnam War.

As executive director of the College Republicans in the early 70’s, Mr. Rove vociferously supported American intervention in that bloody misadventure without seeing any reason why he should participate personally. In that respect, he resembles several Republican pols whose re-election he now deems more urgent than patriotic cohesion. The rude epithet for such individuals is "chicken hawk," which has been aptly used to describe, among others, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay and Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Texas Senator Phil Gramm and House Majority Leader Dick Armey. That Mr. Rove may succeed in misusing military symbolism for his own narrow purposes only shows how badly informed most Americans are about the respective war records of the two major parties. Among those targeted by the White House political guru for defeat next fall, for instance, is Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat. Unlike Mr. Rove, Senator Harkin happens to be a Vietnam veteran.

No doubt the Rove argument will be that Republicans spend more on the Pentagon and are therefore more trustworthy as the stewards of our security. Stuffing the bank accounts of defense contractors is not necessarily the most reliable measure of martial competence, however, although it does ensure generous, regular contributions to the G.O.P. from those same companies. Despite Republican complaints about defense policy during the Clinton administration, the military that has prevailed so easily in Afghanistan was bequeathed to Mr. Bush by his predecessor in excellent condition.

Republicans demand patriotic unity, but their own conduct in wartime isn’t quite so reliable. Back when President Clinton committed American power to the NATO intervention in Kosovo, the loudest voice lending aid and comfort to Slobodan Milosevic was none other than Mr. DeLay’s.

But if the Republican argument is hollow and hypocritical, it is nonetheless understandable. For Mr. Rove, the imperative of the moment is to distract the electorate and the press; he would much rather hear talk about Afghanistan than Enron.

While there are too many Democrats who took too much money from the bankrupt energy-trading outfit, any close examination of the causes of the Enron debacle will point public attention to the Congressional Republicans. It was the Republican majority, whipped mercilessly by Mr. DeLay, who killed reforms in accounting practices sought by Arthur Levitt Jr., the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. It was those same legislators, attentive to Mr. Armey, who killed stronger oversight of the offshore tax havens abused by Enron.

As for Mr. Rove, he was not merely a longtime Enron stockholder. He had so much clout with the company that he could pick up the phone, call someone at the Houston home office and arrange a nice consulting job for his pal Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition director. (Mr. Rove says he doesn’t remember who took that call, but Mr. Reed got the job.)

NEW YORK-"If there's any kind of support you could give us, we would welcome that," Enron chairman Kenneth Lay begged Commerce Secretary Donald Evans on October 29. Lay was on a first-name basis with this oil-industry-owned White House, and his energy trading company was just weeks away from the most spectacular meltdown in American corporate history.

It's hard to believe that the Bushies didn't give a damn about their pal's troubles. And it seems that few people do-63 percent of respondents to a CBS poll think the administration is hiding something about its role in the Enron scandal. In light of Bush's overall 86 percent approval rating, that's a big vote of no confidence.

"Our administration has done the exact right thing," George W. Bush says. He denies that his administration did anything to help Enron. One of the many investigations now gearing up in Washington may eventually lead to some smoking memo, but Bush is probably being truthful. When corporations give money to political campaigns, they aren't buying future favors-they're paying for favors they've already received. Once D.C. insiders learned that the Enron cash cow was drying up-so much for future contributions!-its Beltway clout evaporated.

So why is the Enron scandal a scandal?

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill called Lay's phone plea for help "business as usual." The same can be said of the whole Enron story.

Aside from the size of the company, once the nation's seventh largest, the Enron story is same old, same old. Corporations routinely use offshore accounts and subsidiaries to disguise losses and avoid paying taxes. The fact that Enron paid no taxes during the last four out of five years makes for a tasty sound bite, but it doesn't itself indicate anything illegal-Enron, we now know, likely didn't earn any profits to tax.

Ditto for the company's relationship with its auditor, Arthur Anderson. Enron paid Anderson big bucks for its audits-and also for various consulting activities; Anderson's supposed independence may have been compromised. But what's unethical isn't necessarily illegal. Reagan-era deregulation permits such unholy unions. (An alleged last-second orgy of document-shredding at the accounting firm, of course, is a different matter.)

Bush tapped into the real cause for public anger on January 22, when he said that he was "outraged·that employees didn't know all the facts about Enron. My own mother-in-law bought stock last summer," he protested, and it's not worth anything now." Kenneth Lay dumped $101.3 million in Enron stock in 1999. On September 26, 2001, two years after his sell-off and a month before he called Evans, he wrote the following e-mail to his employees: "My personal belief is that Enron stock is an incredible bargain at current prices and we will look back a couple of years from now and see the great opportunity that we currently have." Enron, which had peaked at about $90 per share a year before, was then trading at $20.

It's always hard to see inside an executive's stony heart, and it will likely be difficult to prove that Lay sent that e-mail in order to con his employees into buying a stock he knew would continue to lose value. What we're left with is what O'Neill infamously described as "the genius of capitalism." One can't help but pity the Enron employees who lost their life savings when their 401(k)s headed south, but stockholders have never been created equally. The CEOs who make their company's decisions and spend their days poring over its books will always be first to know when to sell, and they'll fare the best in the end. In second place, obsessive market-watchers who spend every waking second hitting the reload button on the financial wires. Dead last: the poor schlubs who work for a living, buy their employer's stock to seem loyal, and hope for the best. These fine upstanding folks are mere roadkill for the high-flying raptors of capitalism.

If Americans don't like this arrangement, they ought to press Congress for a return to the golden days of U.S. economic security. From World War II through the `70s, workers weren't expected to invest in the securities markets, nor was money deducted from their paychecks for their "retirement accounts." True, employer-managed pension funds were sometimes raided by unscrupulous employers, but the fact is they succeeded in retiring two generations of Americans into condos in Florida and Arizona. Few of us will do as well, no matter how cannily we split our 401(k)s between aggressive and conservative-growth mutual funds.

Enron employees also earned public sympathy for the way they were unceremoniously fired, but cold-blooded execution is standard operating procedure in the corporate world. All the benign patriarchs are dead; today's bosses are slave-drivers. They use you up and throw you away. I'll never forget the way my best friend was canned when his highly-profitable employer, the E.F. Hutton brokerage firm, was acquired by Shearson Lehman Brothers during the `80s. Hutton had its workers gather in a ballroom in a World Trade Center hotel. Its CEO walked up to a microphone and announced: "If you can hear my voice, you're fired." The newly downsized weren't even allowed to return to their offices to gather their personal possessions. Between 1987 and 1992, 15 million more Americans lost their jobs to further line the pockets of callous, obscenely overpaid CEOs.

It has been 130 days since September 11th. We have heard many debates, accusations, and arguments about the genesis of the attacks. Every major news agency, and every talking head with a whisper of breath in their lungs, has weighed in. We have been told how we should respond. We have been told how we should feel. We have been told how we can help. In all that time, however, something essential has been missing.

We have yet to be told how such a thing was allowed to happen in the first place.

It is a curious phenomenon. Whenever anything occurs in this country, be it a shark attack or the disappearance of a Capitol Hill intern, the media drumbeat has always played the same tune: Why? Why? Why did this happen? This Greek chorus has fallen silent in the weeks since the Towers came down. Rather than question the genesis of our woe, we have been afforded endless observations about how we have and should react. There is no looking back. There are no answers.

Thousands of Americans died on September 11th, and thousands of Afghan civilians have joined them in the dust in the days since. Millions, nay, billions worldwide have been affected. American soldiers stand in peril to defend our freedom, or so we are told. Yet we are afforded no answers, no understanding, no succor. All we have are threads of data flapping in the winds of battle and response. We deserve better.

The time has come to take those threads and weave them together as best we can.

It cannot be denied that the attacks of September 11th represent the most spectacular Intelligence failure in the history of the nation. The planning required to pull off such an audacious attack likely was years in the making, formulated by people all across the planet. Somehow, these people managed to locate and exploit a security loophole left by the mighty FBI, CIA and NSA, and flew four deadly bombs laden with fuel and humanity right through it.

There are two possible explanations for this astounding lapse.

The first is that, despite all the funding they are provided by our tax dollars, despite all the human and technological resources at their disposal, these agencies failed utterly to glean even a whiff of menace. If this proves to be the case, every individual employed by these agencies should be fired with prejudice. The buildings that house them should be razed to the ground, and the rubble burned. The earth upon which they sat should be salted, so nothing will ever grow there again.

If this proves to be the case, these agencies should be torn down brick by brick and built anew for the sake of our safety. They let it happen through negligence, ergo they should cease to exist, and a new cadre should be brought in who can be trusted to defend the interests and security of this country. These axioms are being applied in Afghanistan; they should be applied right here at home.

The other possibility is far more sinister, and smacks of all the bleak realities we have become far too familiar and comfortable with. The other possibility is that the September 11th attacks happened because powerful men were pursuing an agenda of self-interest, in defiance of prudence and security, and their very presence in the equation created the opening for the attack.

It has been widely reported that 13 of the 19 terrorists who commandeered the aircraft on September 11th were from Saudi Arabia, and that some 80% of all Al Qaeda recruits come from that oil-rich nation. It stands to reason, therefore, that American Intelligence agencies would have a vested interest in paying a great deal of attention to Saudi Arabia. Somehow, however, these terrorists managed to elude notice until they appeared in the blue New York sky.

American security concerns overseas fall primarily within the bailiwick of the Central Intelligence Agency. This agency was run in the 1970s by none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, father of the sitting Commander in Chief and a former President himself. Bush Sr. ranks among the most venerated members of the Old Guard from the Nixon and Reagan days, and commands the loyalty of government officials past and present. Because of his long years in politics, Bush Sr. also enjoys a vast array of business connections. This is common knowledge, available in any updated high school history textbook.

Since his departure from the political scene, however, the activities of Bush Sr. have not been paid much attention by the national media. Supporters of the former President would be pleased to know that he has done quite well for himself. He has, in the days since his defeat at the hands of William Jefferson Clinton, secured a position on the advisory board of an organization called the Carlyle Group.

The Carlyle Group is a multi-national, multi-billion dollar private investment firm, managed by former members of the Reagan and Bush administrations, and is involved in everything from soda bottling to pharmaceuticals manufacture. It is here that Bush Sr., whose contacts with Saudi Arabia have been legend since the forming of the Gulf War coalition, comes into play. As early as January of 2000, Bush Sr. was courting the favor of Saudi crown prince Abdullah in the name of Carlyle, which was working with the telecommunications giant SBC to gain control of a large share of the Saudi phone system. He has, over the years, done similar outreach work for Carlyle's oil interests, because the petroleum/energy business is central to the Group's financial strength.

It has long been true that the business of America is business, to the detriment of many other important factors. Given the connections between the former President and head of CIA, a major energy business player, and a nation that contains oil and terrorists in equal measure, questions about conflict of interest must be raised.

The American petroleum industry relies upon the stability of Saudi Arabia to keep their oil flowing in the proper fashion. Because the business of America is business, it is not too far a leap to conclude that the business of the American Intelligence community is also business, deliberately so. Public questions about and investigations into Saudi Arabia's hosting of terrorists like Osama bin Laden, whose family calls that nation home, would certainly make it difficult for the American petroleum industry to work comfortably with the Saudi regime. Add to this the fact that the CIA, whose job it would be to investigate terrorist connections in Saudi Arabia, claims as its former head Bush Sr., who has a vested financial interests in healthy and unobstructed U.S.-Saudi relations.

The result of this line of inquiry is chilling. Could the CIA have been dissuaded from fully investigating the roots of terrorism in Saudi Arabia because such investigations would have conflicted with the interests of entities like the Carlyle Group? If this was not the case, the explanation must be chalked up to simple incompetence. Considering the complexity of what transpired on September 11th, the simple answer is not reliable. Occam's Razor fails in the face of the facts.

The sins of the father may well have been visited upon the son. George W. Bush's affinity for the energy industry is well-known, and his personal financial involvement in a number of oil businesses before his political career is part of the record. His administration is riddled with dozens of high-ranking appointees who held a large amount of stock in the now-defunct Enron corporation. Many of these people are also former Enron employees. Enron, a giant in the energy industry, contributed millions to Bush's political aspirations. The company was heavily involved with Vice President Cheney, himself an energy industry veteran from the Halliburton Petroleum Corporation, in the creation of national energy policy behind closed, locked doors.

Enron's dazzling financial implosion on December 2nd, 2001, has led to a number of pressing investigations into the circumstances behind the collapse. More than a few questions about the financial and political connections between Enron's chairman, Kenneth Lay, and George W. Bush have been raised. The intense scrutiny has shaken loose two emails sent by Lay to his employees in August of last year. In them, Lay waxes optimistic about the strength and stability of his company, and exhorts his employees to buy into the company's stock program.

Most observers view this as the gasping lies of a drowning criminal, desperate to keep his operation from flying apart under the burden of his and his associates' shoddy business practices. When held up against recently revealed information, however, Mr. Lay's messages must be considered in a different light.

A book recently published in France titled 'Osama bin Laden: The Hidden Truth' by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasique has put some serious questions on the table for consideration. In 1998, American oil company Unocal's attempt to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan, in order to exploit the vast Turkmenistan natural gas fields, was foiled by Osama bin Laden's attack on American embassies in Africa. The Clinton administration forbade any company from dealing with the Taliban, protectors of bin Laden, who were in control of Afghanistan at the time.

Upon his arrival in Washington D.C. in 2000, Bush revived negotiations with the Taliban to see this pipeline through. High-level talks between Washington and Kabul continued through August of 2001 to this very purpose. The Bush administration was trying to get the Taliban on board with the pipeline idea, and believed they could depend upon the regime to be stable enough to see it built. The rationale for these actions is simplicity itself: Bush's campaign was funded by the energy industry, and negotiations like this were their payoff. The business of America is business.

Problems arise when one considers the fact that the chief bin Laden hunter in America, former Deputy Director John O'Neill, quit his post in protest some two weeks before the September 11th attacks. O'Neill had been the lead investigator in several previous bin Laden-controlled attacks, and was considered to be the most knowledgeable man in America about the terrorist mastermind's activities and capabilities. He quit in frustration, stating that his efforts at capturing bin Laden had been thwarted by oil interests in America, and by a desire by powerful people to protect America's relationship with Saudi Arabia. After leaving the FBI, O'Neill took a job at head of security at the World Trade Center, and died in the September 11th attack. The irony of this is agonizing.

O'Neill knew that bin Laden called Afghanistan home. Was he kept from pursuing the terrorist there by an administration that wanted to protect its relationship with the Taliban in order to see the pipeline through? Did his departure create a security gap in America that allowed the attacks to take place? Conversely, did America's dalliance with the Taliban incite bin Laden to attack? It is well documented that his terrorist career began with the arrival of American troops onto Saudi soil, a land he considered sacred. Was he motivated to attack again when his new home seemed ready to allow the Crusaders in?

Finally, does this pipeline deal shine a light onto the emailed optimism of Kenneth Lay? There is no question that Enron was Bush's favorite company. If the pipeline was to happen, it is easy to imagine that Enron would get the contract. Lay would have known this. His last email was sent on August 27th, about the same time as the last U.S./Taliban meeting. If a deal was near at hand, and if he knew that his company was about to get a plum government contract, he had every reason to be optimistic about the future.

Is this why Arthur Andersen was ordered to shred documents? Did those documents detail the preparations for the pipeline, thus demonstrating beyond doubt that Bush was dealing with the Taliban? Were the consequences of releasing these documents more damaging than the consequences of destroying them because of this?

It will be a long hot season before we know the half of it. One thing, however, is certain. Not long from today, we will stand in observance. Before we know it, one year will have passed since the attacks of September 11th, 2001. We will light candles, unfurl wind-tattered flags, sing patriotic songs, and remember the dead. In that year we will have mourned for those lost, and mourned the passing of an age of innocence in America. The oceans that separate us, the armies that guard us, the weapons that make others fear us, protected us not at all on September 11th. The security we felt before that day is gone forever.

Bush and his people rode into town swearing that they would restore "honor" and "dignity" to the White House and civility to the government. Sometimes one of them would also use the word "integrity" and somewhere in there was the new craze that was sweeping the GOP (at least until the "election" was over), "compassionate conservative."

All these buzzwords were focus group tested-these were words that people responded to after years of being bombarded with the concept that consensual oral sex was about as evil a thing as could be imagined. The word to the wise was that if we somehow lost our collective minds, bought what they were selling, and elected their boy to the hardest job in the world, he wouldn't have oral sex in the Oval Office. Drug arrests, DUI's, even going AWOL from keeping America's borders safe from Mexico during the Vietnam War didn't count as measures of "integrity". Neither does having as your only talent the ability to get your dad to bail you out of every dumb thing you ever did. That stuff's okay, you just won't catch this guy getting a tune up in the White House.

They needed the compassionate part because of the reputation for heartless cruelty that Newt Gingrich and others gained when they were in charge. (I would love to see the focus groups whose hot buttons were pushed by the phrases "uniter not a divider" and "reformer with results") . A lot of those folks are still around-the spirit of Gingrich past is still around in Tom DeLay and Trent Lott, to name two.

But enough ancient history for now. I'll come back to it.

Right now we're looking at a recession at exactly the same time that Clinton's welfare reform is due to start kicking people off the welfare rolls who have reached the end of their lifetime limit of 5 years. Between the tax cut to the upper 1% that was Bush's domestic policy centerpiece and the effects of September 11 on the economy, last year's budget surplus is gone. I've read that the war on terror is costing upwards of a billion dollars a day. That doesn't leave money for piddly little things like affordable prescriptions for seniors, better schools, Medicare, health care, or extending unemployment benefits to the unemployed, let alone all the people coming up who are going to slip through the cracks.

What we get from the White House to deal with the problem is their same solution to everything from acne to crop circles: more tax cuts to the people who have the most. Look at all the tax cuts we've had in the last couple of decades. If you make less than $200,000 a year or so, have you ever seen anything from one?

I would hope that the tax cut from last spring could at least be put on hold until things settle down a little, if not just outright repealed. And an economic stimulus package that gives more tax cuts to the wealthy and huge corporations isn't going to help anything right now. A few Democrats have been acting like they finally remember they're in a different party and opposed it, which means it didn't get passed before Congress left for the holidays.

Tom Daschle said ``Sept. 11 and the war aren't the only reasons the surplus is nearly gone...The biggest reason is the tax cut''.

And Dennis Hastert (Squeaker of the House) said ``Perhaps the most important thing Congress did last year to promote economic security was to pass the president's tax relief proposal...Senator Daschle voted against that proposal and now he seems to indicate that he wants to repeal it,'' saying that would be ``exactly the wrong way to achieve long term economic security.''

Yeah, jeez Tom, come on. First you say you don't want it, then you say repeal it. Make up your mind, for Chrissake. (Daschle never actually said he wants to repeal the tax cut. That's Hastert and Trent Lott putting words in his mouth. Ted Kennedy did just call for a repeal).

At the same time that people are having to leave welfare with no jobs waiting, other people are losing their jobs in the recession with no jobs waiting. Anyone's guess how that's all going to play out.

Here's my guess. Using Minnesota as an example, which (like most states) has a budget shortfall, states will be cutting funding to nonprofit and neighborhood groups which provide programs and services for the underprivileged. Women and children tend to be the main clients of these groups, and they are the ones who will be most affected by the welfare reform limits. No one wants to see people living out their lives on welfare, but it's getting clear that 'welfare reform' is going to need to be reformed.

A lot of these groups provide after school programs and computer access to children. The philosophy is that giving children an alternative to the street is a goal that will pay off later for the children and for society. But the schools are also facing funding shortages. The first things that typically get cut when that happens are arts and after school (extracurricular) activities. There is indication that the programs and support provided by the nonprofits and neighborhood groups has had a positive effect on lowering youth crime in the Twin Cities. But that could all go out the window.

And all over the country, states and cities are going to have to cut funding for police and fire departments, as well as other services.

Many of the people who will be affected are immigrants. Charitable programs and job training and referral programs will suffer from lack of funding.

People who are losing their jobs will have fewer resources to help with job location and retraining or education after their unemployment benefits expire.

So, these people have a lot more at stake than their dignity. Living on the street is what's ahead for lots of people who are going to fall between the cracks, and there won't be much dignity there. Even going to an agency for help isn't something that dignifies a person, but that blow to someone's pride hurts a lot less than eating out of garbage cans.

The Congressional Budget Office says that Bush's economic stimulus plan won't do much to stimulate the economy. And the New York Times reported that when the plan was put in front of focus groups they literally refused to believe that it was a serious proposal. The plan has a provision to give tax refunds to corporations going back years. Enron, who didn't pay taxes for 4 of the last 5 years, would get a huge tax refund from it.

The "conventional wisdom" is saying that the first Bush wasn't reelected because he broke his promise not to raise taxes. I think the "conventional wisdom" is wrong. The first Bush went over to Iraq and and came back with astronomical approval ratings. The country was in a recession at the time, people were hurting, but Bush wouldn't even admit there was a recession. When he finally did, he refused to do anything about it. He was out playing golf and boating and living it up when reporters would catch up to him to ask about the recession. He was making comments about how foreign policy was more fun than domestic affairs. And since it wasn't fun, families got to go down the tubes. I believe that had a lot more to do with him not being reelected. No one is ever going to convince me that the top 10% honked off over the tax increase all of a sudden voted for Clinton or Ross Perot.

The "war on terror" was knocked off the front pages by Enron. It looks like the search for bin Laden is pretty much down to putting his picture on milk cartons. The administration needs something to reestablish themselves in people's eyes, since new polls are saying that people believe they are up to their eyeballs in the Enron mess.

It's time to see some "honor and dignity" from the top. Bush's tax cut should be repealed, and his administration's economic stimulus plan should be redone so that money is put into the hands of the people who need it most and would spend it-which would actually stimulate the economy. We're told that corporate tax breaks will create jobs, but I highly doubt that. Jobs are created when there is more demand (I'll call this people spending money) than there is supply. Look at this past holiday season, with the lowest spending in years. Companies didn't unload all the supply they had then. How is giving them more money going to make them want to produce more if people aren't buying? And how are people going to buy more if they either don't have the money or are too scared to spend what they do have? If we give the money to the people who will spend it, we will start to move the economy.

It's time to make the pie higher, George. Time to prove you're not just a waterboy for the megacorporations.