Kudos to the SF Bay Guardian for
this piece which finds that there are circumstantial links between the plane which carted German citizen Khaled El-Masri
off from Macedonia to Afghanistan, and former U.S. Senator
Paul Laxalt..
You may recall Laxalt as Reagan's best buddy from the early 80s. What you may not also recall is that William Casey was a good buddy of Laxalt's, that he had strong alleged links with organized crime which were an issue in the 1984 presidential election (and led to a spiked story by Lowell Bergman for 60 minutes), and had a key role in being the go-to-guy between Ferdinand Marcos and Reagan, leading to alleged payments from Marcos to the 1980 Reagan campaign, and to a principal role in the departure of Marcos from the Phillipines. The latter notion of negotiating a departure of a brutal dictator was elevated by no less than John Bolton to the level of the `Laxalt Doctrine'.
Kudos to the Guardian--an interesting link indeed. More below the fold.
Laxalt has disappeared from public view since the Reagan administration, and stepped down as senator in 1987.
The deal that the Guardian reporters (A.C. Thompson and Trevor Paglen) uncovered is that the retooled Boeing 737 noted by ``plainspotters'' was sold last year to a Reno based company named Keeler and Tate (after journalists were getting close to the original holder, Premier from the northeast). They did journalism the old fashioned way here-they drove the 3.5 hours from SF to Reno on I80 and started sniffing around.
They could find no Keeler or Tate in Reno, but they found that the lawyer who registered the company was there (Steven F. Petersen) was in town. They went to his office, which he shared with Peter Laxalt, Paul Laxalt's brother and business partner. The office is the same location as the official address of Keeler and Tate, and at the time of their visit, of the Reno office for Laxalt's lobbying firm.
What this looks to be is that Laxalt is a classic fixer for messed up operations. It looks like a thread that might be worth pulling some more.
The article also offers a rather nice picture of what the planespotters are like, focusing on an East Bay spotter who helped identify the 737 in question as suspicious (notably, it was cleared to land at any army base anywhere!).
Some further background for value added to this post: on the Casey Laxalt links--from the Walsh report on Iran-Contra an excerpt from a Casey-Reagan letter:
The public pouting of George Shultz and the failure of the State Department to support what we did inflated the uproar on this matter. If we all stand together and speak out I believe we can put this behind us quickly. Under Secretary of State Armacost sat through my briefing like a bump on a log, opening his mouth only to deny any involvement or knowledge. . . . Rich Armitage, who accompanied me for Defense, was helpful in explaining the rules on arms transfer and was forthcoming and supportive whenever he had the opportunity. . . . You need a new pitcher! A leader instead of a bureaucrat. I urge you to bring in someone like Jeane Kirkpatrick or Paul Laxalt, who you may recall, I recommended for State in 1980.104
On Laxalt's ties to organized crime and another
spiked Lowell Bergman story (remember The Insider) on 60 minutes:
There was an air of excitement at 60 Minutes late last summer as journalists at that top-rated CBS news program completed an expose about Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt's alleged ties to organized crime. Earlier stories in the press--most notably in the Miami Herald in 1981 and the Wall Street Journal in 1983--included long lists of Laxalt's friends and campaign contributors who have mob connections. By mid-September, Lowell Bergman, a 60 Minutes producer for senior correspondent Mike Wallace, was putting finishing touches on his own story--the end-product of a three-month-long investigation--that had uncovered startling revelations about Laxalt's notorious friendships. On September 14, 1984, Wallace said on the Phil Donahue Show that the forthcoming Laxalt segment on 60 Minutes could possibly change the course of the November presidential election.
ON Laxalt and the Laxalt doctrine (Laxalt's strategy approved by Casey and Reagan for a negotiated departure of Marcos from the Phillipines--it is interesting to note that both Marcos and Casey were once alleged to have solicited funds from Marcos for the 80 campaign!) as noted in this love poem to Laxalt by none other than John Bolton(!) in 2000:
THERE IS NO DOUBT that many "human rights" activists are motivated as much by their desire to construct a comprehensive international law straitjacket as they are by their concern for the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity. For them, the results in particular cases, such as Pinochet or Wiranto, are of less concern than the broad precedents they can establish to override national legal systems. Their agendas sound dry and legalistic (putting many otherwise astute observers immediately to sleep), or appear frivolous and irrelevant to traditional foreign policy analysts (such as "social summits" and the recent "Beijing-plus-five" conference in New York), far removed from international realpolitik.
Unfortunately, precisely the opposite is true. Many "globalists" (especially the human rights groups) have a deeply political agenda, and one of its central elements is the gauzy notion that force and power in international affairs can be easily replaced by "the rule of law" enforced through multilateral organizations. Although wildly naïve (and therefore dangerous), one unmistakable objective is the limitation of American power through a network of legal prohibitions applied initially to the likes of Pinochet, but applied later to American presidents and secretaries of state and defense.
Americans can resist this tendency now or face the deleterious consequences later. Accordingly, the Laxalt Doctrine provides both a more realistic way of dealing with immediate problems of undesirable regimes and also protection against the implicit agenda of the human rights warriors and their allies. Different American administrations and their decision makers will make different tradeoffs under the Laxalt Doctrine, which is not only to be expected, but also to be welcomed. Indeed, it is the prospect of that very flexibility and the necessity to craft case by case judgments that make it such a potentially important and useful tool of a realistic American foreign policy. It is by no means a free pass for repressive regimes. There are almost certainly cases in which Americans will not find a villa on the Riviera acceptable for undesirable or authoritarian rulers, and where hanging justice is the only appropriate end. Nonetheless, the Laxalt Doctrine is a quintessentially American response to an imperfect world filled with irritatingly imperfect humans, and its revival in a new administration would be a most welcome development.
Group blogging on this interesting Guardian piece might yield some dividends. Have away Kossacks!