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www.truthout.org...
Jury Convicts 5 Involved in Enron Deal with Merrill
By Kurt Eichenwald
The New York Times
Thursday 04 November 2004
The first criminal trial stemming from the financial dealings at the Enron Corporation ended yesterday when a federal jury in Houston found that five defendants, including four former executives of Merrill Lynch, had conspired to help Enron report bogus profits.
U.S. Faces Record Borrowing Requirement
By Martin Crutsinger
The Associated Press
Tuesday 02 November 2004
Washington - The federal government, running record budget deficits over the past two years, is projecting that it will have to borrow a record $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, the Treasury Department announced Monday.
www.truthout.org...
U.S. Forces Pound Parts of Fallujah
By Robert H. Reid
The Associated Press
Thursday 04 November 2004
Baghdad - U.S. forces pounded parts of Fallujah from the air and ground Thursday, targeting insurgents in a city where American forces were said to be gearing up for a major offensive. Three British soldiers were killed in an attack by guerrillas as they patrolled in central Iraq.
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U.S. Job Cuts Top 100,000
By Terry Weber
The Globe and Mail
Tuesday 02 November 2004
Planned job cuts topped 100,000 for the second straight month in October, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. said Tuesday in a report that raises more questions about the future of U.S. jobs.
CIA Chief Seeks Change in Inspector's 9/11 Report
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
KRT
CIA chief Porter Goss reportedly wants the report to defer judgments
about who should be held accountable for pre-9/11 intelligence lapses.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 1
The director of central intelligence has asked the
C.I.A.'s inspector general to modify a draft report on the Sept. 11 attacks to avoid drawing conclusions about whether individual C.I.A. officers should be held accountable for any failures, Congressional and intelligence officials said Monday.
www.chron.com...
Houston Chronicle
Washington Bureau
Nov. 20, 2004, 9:51AM
Afghan poppy growing takes huge leap
WASHINGTON - A huge leap in opium poppy growing in Afghanistan, revealed by a U.S. study released Friday, threatens the fragile democracy and increases pressure on anti-narcotics efforts to succeed, top federal officials said.
Afghanistan had more than half a million acres of opium poppies, which are used to make heroin, under cultivation during the 2004 growing season, according to the State Department study based on satellite images.
That is up almost 2.5 times from a year ago, government officials said.
In 2001, the last year the Taliban controlled the country, only an estimated 5,000 acres were in production, according to U.S. estimates.
www.newsmax.com...
Bush Will Not Stop Afghan Opium Trade
Charles R. Smith
Thursday, March 28, 2002
The Bush administration has decided not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop...
The U.S. and all its allies signed onto a worldwide ban on opium sales. In January 2002, the U.N. issued a report on the Afghan opium production, noting that allied forces needed to act quickly to destroy the 2002 opium poppy crops before the end of spring...
"Afghanistan has been the main source of illicit opium: 70 percent of global illicit opium production in 2000 and up to 90 percent of heroin in European drug markets originated from Afghanistan," states the U.N. report....
Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. According to these sources, Pakistani intelligence had threatened to overthrow President Musharraf if the crops were destroyed.
"The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences � the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA. The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years, so I guess they just want to carry on their favorite business," noted an allied intelligence official who works closely with U.S. law enforcement.
"The sole reason why organized crime groups and terrorists have the power that they do is all because of drug trafficking. Like the old saying, 'those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it,'" stated the official.
www.wanttoknow.info...
At the start of the Contra war, the CIA and Justice Department had worked out an unusual agreement that permitted the CIA not to have to report allegations of drug trafficking by its agents to the Justice Department. It was a curious loophole in the law, to say the least.
www.whale.to...
The CIA and the Department of State were protecting more and more politically powerful drug traffickers around the world: the Mujihadeen in Afghanistan, the Bolivian coc aine cartels, the top levels of Mexican government, Nicaraguan Contras, Colombian drug dealers and politicians, and others. Media�s duties, as I experienced firsthand, were twofold: first, to keep quiet about the gush of drugs that was allowed to flow unimpeded into the US; second, to divert the public�s attention by shilling them into believing the drug war was legitimate by falsely presenting the few trickles we were permitted to indict as though they were major �victories,� when in fact we were doing nothing more than getting rid of the inefficient competitors of CIA assets. P. 266 ---Michael Levine
ciadrugs.homestead.com...
The reputation of President Bill Clinton has been marred by allegations (stemming from his tenure as Governor of Arkansas) of corruption and involvement in the Arkansas drug trade related to CIA activities in Mena, Arkansas.
Like J.K. didnt know about his wife's association here?
For eight years Teresa maintained a close relationship with Ken Lay. Since 1995 Mr. Lay served as a trustee of the Heinz Center for Economics, Environment and Science which Teresa founded to memorialize her late husband. Teresa, as well Fred Krupp the executive director of Teresa's main environmental philanthropy Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), also served as trustees.
Oddly, Mr. Lay served as a trustee even after Enron's demise -- a pamphlet obtained from the Heinz Center in the spring of 2003 listed him as a trustee affiliated with Lay Interests LLC. This seems odd in light of Kerry's highly critical comments of Enron.
When asked about Mrs. Heinz Kerry's Enron connection, a Heinz Center spokeswoman explained to the Washington Post, "Whatever troubles he had at Enron, Ken Lay had a good reputation in the environmental community for being a businessman who was environmentally sensitive."
"When someone does wrong in one part of their life, it doesn't mean they can't do good in another part of their life," she added.
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Audit: Halliburton Lost Track of U.S. Property in Iraq
The Associated Press
Saturday 27 November 2004
Washington - A third or more of the government property Halliburton Co. was paid to manage for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq could not be located by auditors, investigative reports to Congress show.
Halliburton's KBR subsidiary "did not effectively manage government property" and auditors could not locate hundreds of CPA items worth millions of dollars in Iraq and Kuwait this summer and fall, Inspector General Stuart Bowen reported to Congress in two reports.
Bowen's findings mark the latest bad news for Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, which is the focus of both a criminal investigation into alleged fuel price gouging and an FBI inquiry into possible favoritism from the Bush administration.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that FBI agents have extensively interviewed an Army contracting officer who last month went public with allegations that the Bush administration was improperly awarding contracts to Halliburton without competitive bidding.
Halliburton and the Pentagon deny wrongdoing, and say they are cooperating in all investigations.
Hastert Launches a Partisan Policy
By Charles Babington
The Washington Post
Saturday 27 November 2004
In scuttling major intelligence legislation that he, the president and most lawmakers supported, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert last week enunciated a policy in which Congress will pass bills only if most House Republicans back them, regardless of how many Democrats favor them.
News Target Network
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Think the first Patriot Act was a civil rights and personal privacy tragedy? Just wait until you see Patriot Act II. Section 102 of the police state bill would make it a crime to engage in any information gathering, meaning that people who gather news headlines on the Internet would suddenly be deemed criminals and terrorists.