U.N. BIDS TO SILENCE OIL-$$ WHISTLEBLOWER

By NILES LATHEM


May 7, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The United Nations has sent a stern letter to an important witness in the Iraq oil-for-food investigation, demanding that he not cooperate with congressional probes of the scandal, The Post has learned.
The letter - in the name of oil-for-food program chief Benon Sevan - was sent to a U.N. consultant after it was learned he had been talking to congressional investigators about allegations of wholesale corruption, officials said last night.
"This particular individual is someone we have been in contact with for more than a month," said an investigator. "This letter has chilled his willingness to cooperate with the congressional investigation. This individual also appears to be genuinely frightened by the implications inherent in the letter."
Congressional officials would not identify the consultant because he is a potential whistleblower.
The U.N. letter, obtained by The Post, reminded the consultant that under his contract with the oil-for-food program, he "may not communicate at any time to any other person, government or authority external to the United Nations any information known to them by reason of their association with the United Nations, which has not been made public."
"In view of the contractual provisions referred to above and the fact that these matters relate to internal U.N. procedures for administering the Programme, we would ask that you consult with the U.N. before releasing any documentation or information," the letter said.
It is the third letter to surface this week from Sevan's office to companies that did business with the oil-for-food program that invoked confidentiality agreements and demanded that they not release documents to outside investigators.
U.N. spokesmen have said this week that the letters are following standard legal procedure and that U.N. lawyers want all documents to be collected by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who was appointed by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to head an investigation into the scandal. But the letters have ignited a firestorm.
"These confidentiality agreements are fueling a perception on the Hill that the U.N. is deliberately seeking to thwart a congressional inquiry into these allegations," said one congressional investigator.
Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), whose subcommittee is one of three congressional committees investigating the scandal, noted this week that his panel recently heard sworn testimony that Sevan accepted sweetheart oil deals from Saddam Hussein's government.
"It would be a big mistake, I think, for him to suggest that people not cooperate in this investigation. It would further imply that he is totally mixed up in this," Shays said.
The United Nations has said Sevan, who is on vacation pending retirement, was not the author of the letters. They were drawn up by U.N. lawyers and sent out on his stationery.

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Iraqi probed in rigging of cell-phone pacts


By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


An international financier with ties to Saddam Hussein's regime and the United Nations' oil-for-food program helped Middle Eastern and European cell-phone companies edge out American firms for lucrative Iraqi contracts, The Washington Times has learned.
Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraq-born British national who was involved in international arms trading, is being investigated for purportedly rigging bids with the Iraqi Communications Ministry and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in contracts being awarded to three companies tied to Europe, according to defense officials familiar with an internal investigation.


All the companies have links to Auchi, who was convicted in France last year for taking illegal payments. The contacts could be worth some $500 million annually in future cell-phone service in Iraq, said officials who discussed details ofthe investigation on the condition of anonymity.
"The winners of the Iraqi cellular tender were Saddam's most senior financiers, their Egyptian, Kuwaiti and Iraqi supporters, the bank BNP Paribas, European cellular corporations, particularly Alcatel and the European GMS technology it depends on, and Chinese telecom interests, such as Huawei, which had been active in breaking the Iraqi embargo," said a defense official.
"The losers were American bidders," the official said.
American firms that lost out in the contracting included a consortium of companies such as Qualcomm, which developed a more advanced cell-phone technology known as CDMA, and Lucent Technologies.
Auchi was convicted by a French court in November for his involvement in an illegal payment scheme involving the state-owned oil company Elf-Aquitaine. He received a 15-month suspended prison sentence and a $2.4 million fine.
He also has been linked by U.S. investigators to the United Nations' oil-for-food program, now under investigation by the world body and the U.S. Congress for skimming oil revenue meant to buy humanitarian goods in Iraq.
Auchi, 66, is viewed by U.S. officials as a key figure in the emerging scandal because of his close relationship with officials of the Saddam regime, and because most of the $65 billion involved in the eight-year program was deposited in the Paris bank BNP Paribas. Until 2001, Auchi was a major shareholder in the bank, and investigators believe as much as $10 billion from the program was stolen by Saddam and his associates.
A former Ba'ath Party member, Auchi is believed to have a net worth of about $3 billion.
David Corker, a London lawyer who represented Auchi in the French case, referred calls to Auchi's office. Auchi could not be reached at the headquarters of his company, General Mediterranean Holdings, in Luxembourg.
Officials said Auchi's attorneys in the past have dismissed corruption accusations against him as rumors, at least before the conviction in France.
Auchi also has claimed that the killing of his brother by agents of Saddam's government shows that he is not sympathetic to the ousted dictator.
According to the defense official, "significant and credible evidence" reveals "a conspiracy was organized by Auchi to offer bribes to 'fix' the awarding of cellular-licensing contracts covering three geographic areas of Iraq."
The contracts were won by Asia Cell Telecommunications Co. Ltd., Orascom Telecom Iraq Corp. and Atheer Telecom Iraq.
Officials believe that the contracts-award process was arranged so that companies linked financially to Auchi won the bids and that the common European cell-phone standard, known as GSM, would be the only standard used under the contracts.
As a result, Auchi succeeded in taking over the entire postwar cellular-phone system in Iraq by using contacts and front companies to design the architecture for the phone network in three sectors in Iraq, and to make sure that he owned or controlled the components.
Several American, British and Iraqi nationals are under investigation in addition to Auchi for the reputed cell-phone bid rigging, U.S. officials said.
Two American officials working within the Iraqi Communications Ministry resigned last month and accused a Pentagon official of improperly influencing another contracting process in Iraq. The matter involving all three officials is under investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general.
"The implications of [Auchi] having fixed the tender for the entire Iraqi cellular-telephone system go beyond mere corruption and technological empire building," the defense official said. "It put in control of Iraqi telecommunications a man with an anti-American, anticoalition mind-set and a history of illegal international arms traffic. That control could allow him to compromise the entire Iraqi telecommunications system and undermine the Iraqi security system on an ongoing basis."
One problem for investigators is the June 30 deadline for turning over sovereignty of Iraq to a new government in Baghdad. After July 1, it will be very difficult to figure out how the licensing process for telecommunications contracts was carried out.
The investigation by the Pentagon's Directorate of International Armament and Technology Trade, a special unit set up to track arms and technology transfers, is under way on the telecommunications-contracting improprieties.
According to officials familiar with the investigation, Auchi used "influence peddling and access to the Iraqi regime in conjunction with his European, North African and Middle Eastern financial and business empire to build a worldwide network."
Auchi has large cell-phone business interests in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Jordan in addition to the concessions in Iraq. He is also seeking to set up cell-phone networks in Iran.
Officials also believe Auchi was involved in illegal activities related to Iraqi intelligence officers under Saddam.
The information obtained by the officials shows that Auchi bribed foreign governments and individuals in the months leading up to the Iraq war to oppose the U.S.-led effort to oust Saddam.

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Democracy Now
From the May 17, 2004 issue: The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost.
by Robert Kagan and William Kristol
05/17/2004, Volume 009, Issue 34


WE DO NOT KNOW how close the American effort in Iraq may be to irrecoverable failure. We are inclined to believe, however, that the current Washington wisdom--that the United States has already failed and there is nothing to do now but find a not-too-damaging way to extricate ourselves--is far too pessimistic, a panicked reaction to the difficulties in Falluja and with Moktada al-Sadr, as well as to the disaster of Abu Ghraib. We are also appalled at the cavalier and irresponsible way people on both left and right now suggest we should pull out and simply let Iraq go to hell. We wonder how those who, rightly, complain about the American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, can blithely consign the entire Iraqi population to the likely prospect of a horrific civil war and the brutal dictatorship that would follow. Spare us that kind of "humanitarianism."
Thank goodness the president says he remains committed to victory. Thank goodness there are stalwarts like Senators Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman, and Evan Bayh in the Democratic party who are fighting against that party's growing clamor for withdrawal. But loss of confidence that the war is winnable goes well beyond left-wing Democrats and isolationist Republicans. The Bush administration seems not to recognize how widespread, and how bipartisan, is the view that Iraq is already lost or on the verge of being lost. The administration therefore may not appreciate how close the whole nation is to tipping decisively against the war. In a sense, it doesn't matter whether this popular and elite perception of the situation in Iraq is too simplistic and too pessimistic. The perception, if it lingers, may destroy support for the war before events on the ground have a chance to prove it wrong.
So Iraq could be lost if the Bush administration holds to the view that it can press ahead with its political and military strategy without any dramatic change of course, without taking bold and visible action to reverse the current downward trajectory. The existing Bush administration plan in Iraq is to wait for U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to name an interim Iraqi caretaker government by the end of May that will take power on July 1, and prepare for elections in January 2005. This plan might have been adequate a couple of months ago. But it is inadequate to meet the new challenge.
Among the biggest mistakes made by the Bush administration over the past year has been the failure to move Iraq more rapidly toward elections. It's true that many, inside and outside the administration, have long been clamoring to hand over more responsibility to Iraqis, responsibility above all for doing more of the fighting and dying. But the one thing even many of these friends of Iraq have been unwilling to hand over to Iraqis is the right to choose their own government. This is a mistake.
We do not believe in the present circumstances that the current administration plan moves quickly enough toward providing Iraqis real sovereignty. It is not real sovereignty when a U.N. official tells Iraqis who their next prime minister will be. We strongly doubt that the announcement of a new interim government--three to four weeks from now, to take office almost two months from now--will have sufficient impact on Iraqi public opinion to overcome the images of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners. Nor do we believe the present course will give the American people and their representatives sufficient reason to hope that a corner may be turned in the near future. The coming weeks are critical.
We don't claim to have a silver bullet. But we believe one answer to the current crisis would be to move up elections by several months, perhaps to September. The administration could announce very soon that nationwide Iraqi elections will be held on September 30. Brahimi could go ahead and announce his caretaker government, but it would be clear to all that the new government's primary purpose was to preside over the transition to elected government--first by preparing for the elections, with the help of the United States and the international community.
Accelerating the elections would have several virtues: First, it would change the subject. Instead of focusing on their anger at Americans, Iraqis would be compelled to begin focusing on the coming elections, where each and every Iraqi adult will have a chance to participate in shaping the future. Second, with elections coming quickly, those who continued to commit violence in Iraq would be understood to be attacking not only the United States, but also the elections process, and therefore democracy. The insurgents would be antidemocratic rather than anti-American. Sunnis could be told that if they want more power, they should begin organizing for the vote. Those Sunnis who committed violence would be harming the Sunni population's chances of fair representation, since violence that disrupts the voting could lead to nullification of the vote in the affected areas. The impending elections would encourage the majority of peaceful Sunnis and Shia to take sides against the guerrillas who seek power through force of arms instead of through the ballot.
Third, with elections pending, American military actions could be seen not just as an effort to suppress rebellious Iraqi movements but as a vital support for the elections process, and for democracy. Americans would be fighting to give Iraqis a chance to vote, soon. Fourth, and not least important, the holding of elections in Iraq within a few months might give Americans here at home greater confidence that things can be turned around in Iraq. Does it make that much difference whether elections are held in January 2005 or September 2004? In normal times, perhaps not. But these are not normal times. In terms of perception and psychology, both in Iraq and in the United States, we believe moving the elections to September can make a very big difference. As for those who rightly point out that the schedule we suggest would make for a hasty and imperfect election process and that much could go wrong, we agree. But even flawed elections in Iraq would contribute to a sense of political progress--of movement toward legitimate self-government--that would give us a chance of improving the situation.
In addition to setting a new date for elections, the administration would have to do a couple of other things. It would have to increase, substantially, the number of troops in Iraq in order to create a more secure environment for elections. Rep. John Murtha has been attacked by Republicans for insisting that we are unlikely to succeed in Iraq without a big increase in the number of troops. These attacks on Murtha are stupid, because he is absolutely right. The Pentagon continues to fiddle while Iraq burns. Everyone in Iraq with whom we talk bemoans the shortage of troops and equipment. It is now impossible to travel safely throughout most of Iraq. This is terrible news, and would be even if we weren't preparing for an election. But if elections are announced, the Pentagon could be forced to overcome its arrogant stubbornness and beef up the force.
Finally, the administration should use the new date for elections as an opportunity to make one more run at Europe and the international community for support. It could challenge the French and Germans to send troops to Iraq not to aid our occupation but to support elections. And aside from troops, Europeans could provide vital money and technical assistance to the elections process, which must be managed with care. We believe it would be hard for Europeans to say no when asked to support a more rapid electoral process in Iraq. The Bush administration, therefore, might be able to demonstrate to the American people that it was acting with greater success to bring the international community in to help. That too would help reverse the gloom and doom here at home.
As we say, this proposal is not a cure-all. It carries its own risks as well as benefits. If someone has a better idea, we're happy to hear it. But if the administration does not take dramatic action now, it may be unable to avoid failure.

--Robert Kagan and William Kristol




? Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
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These Hollywood special effects may cost the world $15 trillion
By Bjorn Lomborg
(Filed: 09/05/2004)


In the final minutes of the Hollywood doomsday spectacular The Day After Tomorrow, which opens in Britain at the end of the month, the US president makes a ludicrously over-the-top State of the Nation speech. It is a great deal less realistic than the performance by the undoubted star of this $125 million blockbuster of a film: a 100 ft high tidal wave that engulfs New York.
Indeed, the film loses any credibility long before that. This is not because of any one of the far-fetched incidents that occur in the course of its 125 minutes. It isn't the flash freezing of a presidential motorcade, or even the escape of man-eating wolves from New York Zoo. No, this extremely enjoyable film has been let down by the simple fact that it has got its science all wrong. None of it could happen.
The story goes like this. As a consequence of global warming, the polar caps melt, sending vast quantities of fresh water into the world's salty oceans. The torrent stops the Gulf Stream, a major current in the North Atlantic, precipitating a global storm that instantly creates a new Ice Age. This is an excuse for breathtaking special effects: Manhattan is buried in 30-storey snowdrifts, Los Angeles is hit by 250 mph tornadoes, and a fearless paleoclimatologist, played by Denis Quaid, straps on his snow shoes to trek from Washington, DC to New York to rescue his son.
The bad guy is the vice president, who bears a striking resemblance to the real one. This Dick Cheney doppelganger arrogantly dismisses the Kyoto Protocol - it is too expensive - and rejects concern about climate change as fearmongering. The scriptwriters save him from death only to subject him to a mea culpa public address at the movie's climax, saying roughly, "We thought that we could affect the Earth's delicate systems without suffering the consequences. We were wrong. I was wrong." This State of the Nation address is broadcast live on the Weather Channel.
If The Day After Tomorrow had no claims to be anything more than another cheesy Hollywood movie with some fabulous special effects, we could happily turn a blind eye to its bogus science and concentrate on the sight of the Statue of Liberty up to her armpits in the water. But the film claims to be offering something more than this.
"There's more truth than hype," the film-makers promise in their publicity. The German director, Roland Emmerich, claims he tried to present us with a valuable fund of scientific information. The film's website provides links to news stories published in February about "a secret report prepared by the Pentagon" which warned that climate change would "lead to global catastrophe costing millions of lives". What this publicity does not reveal is that the Pentagon report was merely a hypothetical worst-case scenario - and one that has already been thoroughly debunked. In fact, the respected magazine Science has reviewed this Pentagon report and the alleged scientific support for The Day After Tomorrow and concludes that "it is highly unlikely that global warming will lead to a widespread collapse" of the Gulf Stream, and "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new Ice Age".
In Nature, another highly-respected scientific journal, a researcher finds that halting the Gulf Stream would be impossible, arguing that "the only way to produce an ocean circulation without the Gulf Stream would be to turn off the wind system or stop the Earth's rotation, or both."
Now, although it is not going to kill us the day after tomorrow, global warming certainly is a reality. It is caused at least partly by mankind's use of fossil fuels. The effects will be predominantly adverse - although high-latitude nations might prosper in a warmer world, tropical countries will have to deal with more heat-days, altered precipitation and higher sea-levels. So what is wrong with using a piece of popular entertainment to campaign for action to save people from that? As the Nasa research oceanographer William Patzert says: "The science is bad, but perhaps it's an opportunity to crank up the dialogue on our role in climate change."
The problem is that if we overestimate the risk that climate change poses, then we will pay less attention to the other challenges that face us. That appears to be exactly the aim of the movie's creators. Emmerich believes that global warming is "the only problem big enough to force all the countries of the world to stop fighting and work together to save the planet"; he says that his great dream is that "this film will force politicians to act".
If politicians were to see The Day After Tomorrow and act on its agenda, what would happen? Implementing the Kyoto agreement on climate change would cost at least $150 billion each year, yet would do no more than postpone global warming for six years by 2100. That is to say, it would cause temperatures to increase slightly more slowly - the temperature we would have reached in 2100 without Kyoto, we would now reach in 2106. Those families in Bangladesh who will get flooded will have an extra six years to move. Even if the film's creators are right - and the scientists are wrong - and the Gulf Stream current does collapse within a decade, then Kyoto would have made no difference.
There is another reason why it is wrong - I would even say amoral - to overplay the case for combatting climate change. We cannot do everything. Our resources are limited, and our attention is quickly diverted from one fashionable cause to another. We must ask ourselves if spending $150 billion every year for the rest of the century to postpone warming for six years is really the best use of that money.
For the cost of implementing Kyoto in just one year, we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation to everyone on the planet. Of course it is unlikely that Emmerich will cast Brad Pitt as a sewage engineer in Kenya for his next glamorous movie. Nor are there many good plotlines to be made from tales of a government which invests in malarial vaccines, or of a global conference called to remove trade barriers. But these are real options that policy-makers face every time they spend a dollar with the intention of easing human suffering.
The world needs a rational basis for making such priorities. That is the aim of a new project, Copenhagen Consensus, which will bring together nine economists - including four Nobel Prize winners - to prioritise solutions to 10 great challenges facing humanity. They will look at problems ranging from financial instability to communicable diseases, examining several different solutions to each challenge. The experts will produce a ranked list - at the top will be the solution that will achieve the most for humanity.
In an ideal world, we would be able to achieve everything - we should halt global warming and eradicate corruption, end malnutrition and win the war against communicable diseases. Because we cannot do everything, we need sound reasoning and high quality information to defeat the hysteria of Hollywood. I believe there is more hope in truth than in hype.


Bjorn Lomborg is the director of Copenhagen Consensus and Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute. He is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist
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Gas Cartel Gouging the Golden State
Roger Hedgecock, KOGO-AM 600, San Diego
www.RogerHedgecock.com

Gas prices are too high! These prices are caused by a near-monopoly ownership of the whole industry in California. From the oil well to the refinery to your local gas station, five oil companies control 90 percent of California's gas supply. And surprise, surprise! In 2003 gas prices were up 35 percent, and those five oil companies' profits went up 926 percent.
I'm all for profits, but profits like these tell me this monopoly feels no competitive pressure. In a real capitalistic economy, competition between companies produces better-quality products at lower prices. A monopoly produces obscene profits by conspiring to produce a scarce product at a higher and higher price.
The state has antitrust laws designed to give the attorney general the tools to fight this kind of monopoly. Where is our California Attorney General Bill Lockyer? He says he's studying the problem.
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Hillary's Hidden History of Persecuting the Press
Posted May 7, 2004

Though Hillary Clinton may be a media darling now, as a popular New York senator and author of a best-selling tome about her White House years, a new book by Richard Poe claims that, as first lady, she ran a secret police force that went after journalists who dug too deeply into Clinton scandals.
The New York Times best-selling author reveals in Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists how reporters who the first lady considered a threat were harshly dealt with in myriad ways, including being the subjects of wiretaps, being blacklisted and being framed for crimes.

For more on this story, see the interview ...


Hillary's Secret War

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 7, 2004
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Richard Poe, a New York Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. Formerly the editor of Frontpagemag.com, he is the author of the new book Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists. Visit his blog at RichardPoe.com.
Frontpage Magazine: Mr. Poe, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you with us.
Poe: Thank you.
FP: So let's discuss your new book. First things first though: Hillary is out of the White House. Why should we even care about her anymore?
Poe: Well, as we all know, Hillary means to regain the White House, at any cost. I believe she will make her play this year, in 2004. John Kerry is imploding as we speak. He is unelectable. Kerry has too much baggage, too many skeletons in his closet.
Democrat strategists are already quietly discussing a "Torricelli option" - to pull Kerry from the race, just as they pulled Robert Torricelli from the New Jersey Senate race in 2002, replacing him at the last minute with Frank Lautenberg.
If the Democrats "pull a Torricelli" at their National Convention in July - that is, if they force Kerry to withdraw - Hillary will be the obvious frontrunner. I think there's a strong chance that, when Election Day rolls around, President Bush will face Hillary, not Kerry.
FP: Hillary's Secret War tells us that Hillary personally led a secret police force from her office in the White House. Tell us about your proof and evidence.
Poe: The operations of Hillary's secret police have been copiously documented, to the point where the topic can hardly be called controversial any longer.
During the Clinton years, journalists who probed too deeply into Clinton scandals ran terrible risks. Journalists were beaten, wiretapped, framed on criminal charges, fired and blacklisted. They experienced burglaries, IRS audits, smear campaigns and White-House-orchestrated lawsuits.
Some may have paid the ultimate price. In February, 1998, just as the Clinton impeachment was gathering steam, Sandy Hume, the 28-year-old son of Fox News anchorman Brit Hume, suddenly turned up dead of a gunshot to the head. He was covering the U.S. Congress for the magazine The Hill, and was known for his excellent sources among Republican insiders. Sandy Hume supposedly committed suicide, but friends and associates have questioned the official story.
Some of the White House "secret police" were private detectives, such as Terry Lenzner, Jack Palladino and Anthony Pellicano. Others were Clinton loyalists embedded in federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the NTSB and so on. Many of these people are still in place, and still doing the Clintons' dirty work. I call them the Shadow Team.
FP: How does Hillary fit into all this?
Poe: Hillary is the muscle end of the Clinton mafia. It was she who organized and led the Shadow Team. Her role as White House enforcer was first revealed by the late Barbara Olson.
Mrs. Olson was a former federal prosecutor who served from 1995 to 1996 as Chief Investigative Counsel for the Clinger Committee - Rep. William F. Clinger Jr.'s House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, which probed the Filegate and Travelgate affairs. The evidence Mrs. Olson uncovered convinced her that Hillary Clinton had, among other things, conspired to use the Federal Bureau of Investigation unlawfully to intimidate, punish, harass, frame and otherwise harm innocent people who stood in her way.
In her 1999 book Hell to Pay, Mrs. Olson wrote, "Hillary is not merely an aider and abettor to this secret police operation. She has been its prime instigator and organizer. ... In one White House scandal after another, all roads led to Hillary. To investigate White House improprieties and scandals, the evidence necessarily led to her hidden hands guiding the Clinton operation."
FP: This is actually quite incredible. How did Hillary get away with all of this? Surely Ken Starr would have jumped on any excuse to indict Hillary, no?
Poe: Well, as I explain in my book, there are two Ken Starrs. There's the imaginary Ken Starr conjured up by Big Media - a ruthless, rightwing religious zealot, bent on toppling the Clintons. Then there's the real Ken Starr - a timid bureaucrat, afraid of his own shadow, who shrank from investigating any of the truly serious Clinton scandals. On the contrary, Starr actively helped to suppress and whitewash evidence of Clinton wrongdoing.
Take the Vincent Foster case. In September 1994, Starr appointed Miquel Rodriguez to lead the grand jury investigation into Foster's death. Rodriguez resigned in protest less than four months later, charging that the investigation was rigged. Rodriguez accused Starr's people of pressuring him to announce that Foster committed suicide, despite evidence to the contrary.
After resigning, Rodriguez tried to go public. But Big Media shut him out. According to WorldNetDaily, Rodriguez claims that he told his story to reporters from Time, Newsweek, ABC's Nightline, the Boston Globe, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times. Rodriguez says that he spent six hours with a reporter from the New York Times. In every case, his story was spiked by higher-ups. No one reported it.
Clinton defenders often argue that five different investigations ruled Foster's death a suicide. But Rodriguez retorts, "In fact, all of the investigations were done by the same people, the FBI." Rodriguez says that FBI agents threatened his "physical well-being," if he did not shut up about the Foster case. Today, Rodriguez serves as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Sacramento.
FP: Why would Ken Starr cover for the Clintons?
It has been alleged that the Clintons had some sort of hold over Starr - that, in fact, Starr was "fixed," either by threats, blackmail or perhaps mutual self-interest.
According to White House whistleblower Nolanda Hill, Starr's team was thoroughly infiltrated by Clinton loyalists. Even Starr's FBI investigators reported secretly to Janet Reno. This gave the Clintons enormous leverage to guide and manipulate the investigation their way.
Moreover, Starr had a conflict of interest. In his private legal practice, he represented a subsidiary of CITIC, a company owned by the People's Liberation Army of China, and led by arms dealer Wang Jun, a Chinese military intelligence operative and a key player in the Chinagate scandal. The mere fact that Starr was on Wang Jun's payroll should have disqualified him from serving as Independent Counsel. But, for some reason, Starr did not recuse himself.
FP: You also accuse Hillary's secret police of blackmailing witnesses, journalists, Senators, Congressmen - even federal investigators and House impeachment managers. Can you prove these charges?
Poe: Well, in many cases, these threats were made quite openly. For example, on February 8, 1998, with pressure mounting to impeach Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos appeared on ABC's This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Stephanopoulos had resigned as White House communications chief in 1996 and become an ABC news analyst. But he was still carrying the Clintons' water, as his next words made clear.
Stephanopoulos announced that the Clinton White House was planning what he called an "Ellen Rometsch" strategy. He explained that Rometsch was an East German spy who had managed to become John F. Kennedy's lover. According to Stephanopoulos, the Kennedy White House threatened to open up the FBI files and divulge embarrassing or incriminating information on anyone who attempted to blow the whistle on JFK's affair with Rometsch. If pressed to the wall, the Clinton White House would do likewise, said Stephanopoulos.
Sam Donaldson asked, "Are you suggesting for a moment that what they're beginning to say is that if you investigate this too much, we'll put all your dirty linen right on the table? Every member of the Senate? Every member of the press corps?" To which Stephanopoulos replied, "Absolutely. The president said he would never resign, and I think some around him are willing to take everyone down with him."
This was a clear threat, delivered openly, on national television. Through Stephanopoulos, the Clintons were warning Congress and the media to back off. The threat worked. David P. Schippers, who was Chief Investigative Counsel for the Clinton impeachment, reveals in his book Sell-Out that Republican leaders, from the get-go, had no intention of holding a proper impeachment trial or of convicting Bill Clinton. It was all a charade.
FP: What is the New Underground?
Poe: The New Underground is the name I have given to the network of dissident journalists who began speaking out against Clinton corruption during the 1990s, through New Media outlets such as talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.
FP: How did Hillary persecute the New Underground?
Poe: In July 1995, Hillary's Shadow Team produced a secret report which identified the Internet as a special danger to the Clintons' power. The report proved prophetic when journalists such as Matt Drudge, Christopher Ruddy, Joseph Farah and, of course, David Horowitz, began using the Internet to publish stories that Big Media would never touch.
In February 1998, Hillary announced that the Internet needed an "editing or gatekeeping function." By the time she spoke those words, Hillary was already hard at work putting her gatekeeping machinery into place.
Her most damaging attacks against the Internet came disguised as private lawsuits, brought by third parties. For instance, Hillary operative Sid Blumenthal sued Matt Drudge for $30 million in 1997, charging defamation. The lawsuit was clearly orchestrated by the White House. David Horowitz came to Drudge's rescue, providing him with free legal representation, and got slapped with an IRS audit for his troubles. The case dragged on for years, but, soon after the Clintons left office, Blumenthal dropped his suit.
In September 1998, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times sued Jim Robinson's FreeRepublic.com for copyright violation. Like most message board operators, Robinson allowed users to post full-length newspaper articles on his discussion forum. However, unlike other message board operators, Robinson one day found himself deluged by cease-and-desist orders from Times Mirror, Dow Jones, Reuters and other leading news organizations. According to the Washington Weekly, the attack on FreeRepublic was coordinated by Debevoise & Plimpton - a law firm used by the Clintons and the Democratic National Committee.
FP: Have you experienced any persecution or harassment personally? Any threats or warnings? Do you have concerns for your and your family's safety?
Poe: Well, I doubt that I'm important enough to merit Hillary's personal attention. The Shadow Team has bigger fish to fry. For instance, I imagine they've got their hands pretty full, right now, trying to frame Rush Limbaugh on drug charges.
That said, I did have a devil of a time getting Hillary's Secret War published. Random House originally signed the book. After I turned in the manuscript, they refused to publish it. Things looked bad for awhile. Then Joseph Farah and WND Books came riding to the rescue, God bless them, and agreed to publish Hillary's Secret War.
FP: Tell us about Hillary's secret conspiracy report.
Poe: Its official title was The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce. Hillary's Shadow Team produced this report in July 1995, in an attempt to squelch further discussion of the Vincent Foster case. Hillary's operatives quietly circulated the report to Clinton-friendly journalists, in order to give them ammunition for debunking and discrediting any journalist who dared to continue probing the Foster cover-up.
The report accused Pittsburgh newspaper mogul Richard Mellon Scaife of fabricating rumors about Foster's death and paying rightwing journalists to spread them. Significantly, the report featured a special section identifying the Internet as the most dangerous weapon in Scaife's arsenal, enabling him and his vast rightwing conspiracy to disseminate - and I quote - "an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information..."
FP: We all know that Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story. What other big stories did the New Underground break?
Poe: Virtually every Clinton scandal of any note was either broken on the Internet, or kept alive on the Internet long after Big Media had suppressed it. The list is endless: there's the Clintons' involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal; the Vincent Foster cover-up; the suspicious death of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown; the Clintons' ties to drug lords and global crime syndicates; the TWA 800 coverup; the Oklahoma City bombing coverup; Chinagate; Russiagate; the Clinton body count. You name it.
FP: You claim that the New Underground helped turn the tide for George W. Bush during the 2000 election. Please explain.
Poe: During the election crisis, FreeRepublic mobilized activists who took the fight to the streets. They created the now-famous "Sore Loserman" emblem brandished by protesters across America. When Jesse Jackson came to Florida to incite racial unrest, the Freepers shouted him down at a major rally and sent him packing. Freepers also joined the protest outside the Stephen Clarke government building in Miami, which helped stop the all-Democrat Miami-Dade canvassing board from carrying out an illegal, selective vote count behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, J.J. Johnson's SierraTimes.com acted as a central command post for Operation Truckstop 2000 - a nationwide, general trucking strike that would have gone into effect had Gore succeeded in stealing the election.
The real tie-breaker, however, was an exclusive series of stories published on Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily, exposing Gore's ties to the criminal rackets of the "Hillbilly Mafia." Local observers say that story, which got wide play in Tennessee media, cost Gore his home state, with its crucial eleven electoral votes. Had Gore won Tennessee, he never would have needed those disputed votes in Florida.
FP: In your epilogue, you recount an interesting experience you had on the day of the 9-11 attack. Tell us about that.
Poe: I was then editor of David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine.com -- as you are now. On the day of the attack, my wife Marie got a call from our friend Ann Coulter. She was stranded in a bar in Queens, and her cell phone was dying. Manhattan was locked down. The bridges were closed and Ann couldn't get home. So we got in the car and picked her up.
Ann had a column due that night, so we set her up in our library with her laptop. We were all there together when we got the news of Barbara Olson's death. Tragically, Mrs. Olson had gone down with American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.
Barbara Olson was a personal friend of Ann's. The loss hit her very hard. That night, Ann sat in my library, with F-16 jet fighters screaming overhead every few minutes, and wrote her eulogy to her lost friend. It concluded with what would soon become Ann's most famous and controversial one-liner: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
FP: You compare the New Underground to the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. Do you believe we are headed for revolution?
Poe: God forbid. Revolutions usually end in dictatorship, no matter which side wins. Still, if the enemies of our Republic pick a fight - and I'm talking here about our internal foes - I don't believe that Americans are in any mood these days to back down from it.
FP: Mr. Poe, we are out of time. Thank you for joining us and everyone here at Frontpagemag.com would like to congratulate you on accomplishing this vital piece of work on the Clintons. We hope to see you again soon.
Poe: Thank you Jamie.
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I welcome all of our readers to get in touch with me if they have a good idea/contact for a guest for Frontpage Interview. Email me at jglazov@rogers.com.
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Israel and the Ghost of Gonen

By P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 7, 2004

In the days leading up to Likud voters' crushing defeat of Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, an Oslo golden oldie reappeared in the Israeli media. Ex-Member of Knesset and cabinet minister Gonen Segev was arrested and remanded on charges of trying to smuggle 25,000 Ecstasy pills into Israel from the Netherlands. It seemed like a fortuitous reminder that so long as Israel is in the grip of the Oslo mentality, the Spirit of Gonen lives on.
Seemingly, the Likud anti-disengagement vote was a stellar example of democracy in action. A month ago Prime Minister Sharon, accused of negating his electoral platform and betraying his constituents from his own party, announced to those constituents that they'd have a chance to decide if his plan would go any further.
But now that they've said no, Sharon is already saying he's going to find a way to get around it. Gonen must be smiling in his jail cell.
Gonen Segev emblazoned his name forever in the annals of infamy back at the time of the Knesset's vote on the Oslo II agreement in October 1995. He was elected to the Knesset in 1992 on the ticket of the Tsomet Party--a hawkish party to the right of Likud that became thoroughly anti-Oslo as the "process" emerged. But Gonen and his sidekick Alex Goldfarb bolted Tsomet, joined Labor, and cast the two votes that enabled Oslo II to squeak past by a margin of 61-59. For the citizens' votes that they'd bargained away, Segev and Goldfarb were each rewarded, it was commonly understood, with a cabinet post and a new car by the Rabin-Peres Labor Party.
In other words, except for that glitch of corruption the Oslo II agreement would have been rejected by the elected representatives of the Israeli people (especially the Jewish representatives, among whom the anti-agreement margin was wide even after Segev and Goldfarb's treachery). But, rather than refusing to make further concessions to the genocidal Palestinian Authority or for that matter dismantling it, the "process" moved on, taking its toll of blood whose latest addition was a mother and four daughters murdered pointblank in their car by two "militants" in Gaza.
Sharon's plan for unilateral retreat from Gaza and northern Samaria (and, clearly, additional parts of Judea and Samaria further down the road) has a seductive appeal to many Israelis and friends of Israel, since Sharon speaks in terms of "strengthening" our position and being able to "fight terror more effectively." Yet Palestinian Media Watch reports that the Palestinian media unanimously views the plan as a victory for the Palestinians and a precedent for destroying Israel entirely. Let me put it this way: if you lived in New York City and anti-American terrorists were operating in Westchester County, would you want the U.S. army to be operating there too, or would you want it to be pulled out? Well, the Sharon Plan states: "upon completion of this process, there shall no longer be any permanent presence of Israeli security forces or Israeli civilians in the areas of Gaza Strip territory which have been evacuated"--meaning the entire Strip except for a tiny "corridor" along the Gaza-Sinai border. Even there, the plan only promises that Israel will "initially" deploy forces.
It was because they recognized the Sharon plan as a further continuation of the Oslo giveaways, whose result has been to surround Israel with terror enclaves and turn it into a slaughterhouse, that an overwhelming majority of Likud members voted against it. Yet Sharon, in the true Oslo spirit, is now saying he'll go ahead with the plan anyway.
Israel is admired as an innovative country, but not all its innovations are something to be proud of. The idea here is: "O.K., you guys can vote on this. If the vote goes in my favor, it counts; if it goes against me, it doesn't count."
In seeking to get around a Likud vote that was supposed to be binding, Sharon is behaving about as honorably as Gonen Segev.
Unlike Gonen, Sharon's motives may not be--if one may put it so--pure corruption. True, some claim his disengagement plan is an attempt to escape his legal difficulties by currying favor with Israel's left-wing media and judicial establishments. Others claim that, with his roots in the Labor movement, he's showing his own true left-wing colors. Or, some say that like Likud prime ministers before him, Sharon now wants to prove his "peace" credentials while ignoring all the evidence that caving in to terror brings on further catastrophes.
But Sharon's determination to scotch the Likud verdict smacks of the Oslo paradigm of running roughshod over Israeli democracy. From Yitzhak Rabin's betrayal of his 1992 campaign promises not to negotiate with the PLO to the crooked Oslo-II vote to the use of Clinton-donated American spin doctors in Ehud Barak's election campaign to Sharon's current maneuvers, Oslo has always been a totalitarian impulse that sacrifices honor and morality to goals that turn out to be disastrous. Maybe that's why Gonen Segev came back to haunt us.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in many Israeli, Jewish, and political publications.


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