July 7/8, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. Those who claim the Bush administration is a Nazi regime are not far from the truth. This story is a special investigation of Bush family slush funds, smuggling, and secret money conduits from and to various right-wing causes, including some that are extremely violent. The New York Times is running a story today about the U.S. military recruiting Aryan Nation, neo-Nazi, and other white supremacists into its ranks. The Times' report states that Neo-Nazi graffiti has sprung up in Baghdad, in quoting from a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The involvement of white supremacy and neo-Nazi groups with the Pentagon began in earnest during the administrations of Reagan and Bush I. According to informed sources who have tracked the neo-Nazis since the Reagan era, the surge in extreme right-wing elements in the Federal government was spurred on by the network of Nicaraguan Contra support activities created to facilitate going around the prohibitions enacted by the Congress. A key member of that strategy was Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington, who was with the CIA, the Iran-Contra Committee in Congress, and then signed on as senior Vice President for the American Trucking Associations (ATA). WMR reported yesterday on the involvement of a foundation set up by McLean Trucking Co., a member of the ATA, with covert Contra support.
The ATA is a hotbed of GOP activity as well past connections with support for covert CIA activities. Its chief lobbyist is Jim ("Whit") Whittinghill, a former aide to Sen. Bob Dole. Whittinghill's wife, Nancy Dorn, served as an assistant to Texas Representative Tom Loeffler and later served as Special Assistant for Legislative Affairs to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Dorn also served as 1989-93), Nancy Dorn worked for Defense Secretary Dick Cheney as Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs. While working for Cheney, Dorn became a close associate of Addington. Dorn was also Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs. In 2001, Dorn returned to government after acting as a lobbyist for Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and China. She became special assistant for legislative affairs to Vice President Cheney. In 2002, Dorn became the Deputy Director for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where she served until 2003 before becoming Vice President for Government Relations of General Electric, the parent company of NBC and NBC News. (This puts into context the partisan pro-Bush editorial slants of the network's news division, particularly Nora O'Donnell, Campbell Brown, Brian Williams, Tim Russert, and Chris Matthews).
In the late 1980s and early 90s, Dorn was associated with the network of right-wing neo-confederates who were gaining tremendous influence in the Republican Party. While the Army's chief of civil works, Dorn had control over Arlington National Cemetery and issued guidance on how the Confederate Memorial Committee of the District of Columbia could hold its annual ceremony at the cemetery's Confederate War Memorial and pay for it with funds provided by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). According to John Edward Hurley, a one-time associate of White House correspondent Sarah McClendon and the head of the non-partisan Confederate Memorial Association (CMA), South Carolina GOP operative and Confederate Memorial Committee chairman Richard T. Hines, now a major lobbyist (RTH Consulting) in Washington, DC (whose clients include Gambia, Saudi Arabia, Cambodia, and Nigeria), arranged with the UDC to have funds transferred for the Confederate monument and ceremony from sources in the South associated with far right-wing elements. Hines, who was close to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, saw to it money was transferred from Metrolina Bank in Charlotte, North Carolina (connected to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms), to First American Bank in Virginia (then owned by the CIA-connected Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)), to the Mid-Atlantic Credit Union in Gaithersburg, Maryland. One of the officials involved in this money movement was the chief accountant for Edison Electric Institute, which was working closely with Enron and, along with Enron, was one of the largest contributors to the Bush and GOP campaign coffers.
The impetus for the Confederate revival at Arlington Cemetery was promoted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) Jefferson Davis Camp Number 305. Its members included a number of individuals associated with white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which was the source of the New York Times article on Aryan Nation and neo-Nazi penetration of the U.S. military, the SCV has come under the control of racists and Ku Klux Klansmen. Denne Sweeney, on the urging of SCV Camp 305 member Kirk Lyons, an attorney for the Klan, took over as SCV commander in 2004. According to the CMA's Hurley, Lyons, who ran the Houston-based Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC) (a right-wing rival of the SPLC), was significantly funded by Hines. Lyons later moved the SLRC to Black Mountain in western North Carolina. According to Hurley and the SPLC, the SCV and SLRC are part of a vast network of far right organizations, including the Council of Conservative Citizens (a successor to the Klan-linked White Citizens Councils), the secessionist Southern Partisan magazine (for which Hines arranged an interview with then Missouri Senator John Ashcroft), the secessionist League of the South, the Aryan Nations, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, and the National Socialist White Americans' Party).
With the recent news about neo-Nazi and Klan penetration of the U.S. military, it is noteworthy that Hines' wife, Patricia Mayes Hines, was the U.S. Army's Deputy Assistant Secretary for Manpower and Reserve Affairs during the George H. W. Bush administration. Mrs. Hines served under Cheney along with Dorn, who was permitting neo-Confederate penetration of Arlington Cemetery, and David Addington, who was continuing to help cover up the elder Bush's role in Iran-Contra as Cheney's General Counsel, and Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, who was Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Strategy and Resources and Deputy Undersecretary for Policy, and was also involved in senior Bush's covert operations abroad. Hines, who was an associate of the late Lee Atwater, Karl Rove's dirty tricks doppelganger, practiced his dirty tricks trade for George W. Bush in his home state against John McCain in the vicious 2000 GOP primary.
It is noteworthy that on the day he was arrested, Murrah Federal building bomber Timothy McVeigh was wearing a Southern Partisan magazine T-shirt bearing the Latin phrase, Sic Semper Tyrannis, along with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The phrase was shouted by John Wilkes Booth after he shot to death President Lincoln at Ford's Theater. Another violent connection to the neo-confederates is the FBI's VANPAC (Vance Political Assassination Conspiracy) case that involved white supremacist mail bombings directed against Federal judges. According to the Department of Justice, "four mail bombs [were] sent in December 1989 to different locations in the southeastern United States. One killed federal judge Robert Vance [11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals] in Alabama, a second killed a civil rights attorney [Robert Robinson] in Georgia, and two others [one at the U.S. Courthouse in Atlanta and the other at the NAACP headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida] were discovered before they exploded. A massive investigation ensued involving the FBI and several other law enforcement agencies. The FBI referred to the case as VANPAC because it involved the assassination of Judge Vance [at his home] with a bomb sent in a mail package. In June 1991, a federal jury convicted Walter LeRoy Moody, Jr. [a former Klansman] on charges related to the bombings." Louis Freeh, Jr. was appointed the Special Prosecutor in the VANPAC case. After moving the case from Birmingham, Alabama to St. Paul, Minnesota, and after introducing tainted evidence, Freeh won a successful conviction of Moody, who was sentenced to seven life sentences. An Alabama court sentenced Moody to death. In appreciation for his work, Freeh was nominated as U.S. District Court judge for the southern district of New York. In 1993, President Clinton named Freeh to be FBI Director, where he served during the McVeigh case and the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky investigations of Clinton. Vance was a progressive Democrat in Alabama, having served as Democratic Party chairman for the state for 11 years. At the time of his death, several Alabama political figures cited "drugs" and "Colombian cartels" as the reason for the mail bombings directed at Federal judges. Vance, a Jimmy Carter appointee, had incurred the wrath of the neo-confederates who viewed him as too liberal and called him the "Daniel Ortega of Alabama." Because of the mail bombings directed against the Federal judiciary (Moody threatened to kill 17 judges), there were a number of judicial resignations around the United States, which allowed George H. W. Bush to replace them with his own people.
"Southern Partisan" T-shirt worn by right-wing terrorist bomber Timothy McVeigh. George W. Bush has appointed many neo-confederates to top jobs in his administration.
The threat against judges resumed under Bush's son, George W. Bush. In 2005, after being threatened with death by white supremacist and World Church of the Creator (now "Creativity Movement") head Matthew Hale, U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, discovered the bodies of her 64-year old husband and 89-year old mother at her home. They had been brutally murdered. In a bizarre development, a Chicago man named Bart Ross shot himself in a Milwaukee suburb after being pulled over by police for a traffic violation. Police said they found a suicide note in which Ross claimed responsibility for the murders of Judge Lefkow's husband and mother. However, Ross had no known connections to any white supremacist organizations. Hale had been convicted for threatening Judge Lefkow's life and obstruction of justice. Threatening judges was not confined to people like Hale. Then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay threatened judges when he stated, "the time will come for the men responsible for the death of Terri Schiavo to answer for their behavior." Senator Frank Lautenberg wrote to DeLay, stating he was "stunned to read the threatening comments . . . directed at federal judges and our nation's courts of law in general." >>>cont
WayneMadsenReport
Here's how a Washington Post piece soon after the Supreme Court's smack-down of the Bush administration's Guantanamo policies began: "Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that they must back President Bush on how to try suspects at Guantanamo Bay or risk being branded as weak on terrorism… As the White House and lawmakers weighed next steps, House GOP leaders signaled they are ready to use this week's turn of events as a political weapon." So what's new? The single greatest skill of the Bush administration -- and especially of its presiding political strategist Karl Rove -- has been turning potential disasters (of which there have been so many) into successful attacks on the Democrats, while, against all odds, briefly elevating the President's approval ratings...
