I just read this article on Truthout and found it to be pretty shocking and definitely thought it was worth sharing with the community here. Just when I think I cannot be shocked by what's gone on with our dirty dealings with the Saudis and the Brits and just what we're doing in Iraq, and what's been covered up and lied about, I manage to be proven wrong. Here's part of the beginning of the article:
Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war........On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family."
The entire article on Truthout can be read here:
War Profits Trump the Rule of Law
I also found a few other articles on Google news on the story, but none which go into the detail that the Truthout story does:
BAE emerges from the political storm with MoD Tornado contract
F&C expresses concern over dropping of BAE case
UK's 'banana politics' on BAE
Here's the entire beginning of the article on Truthout:
Slush funds, oil sheiks, prostitutes, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals, war plans, climbdowns, big lies and Dick Cheney - it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq. Yet chances are you've never heard about it - even though it happened just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is just as thick as the fog of war.
But here's how the deal went down. On December 14, the UK attorney general, Lord Goldsmith (Pete Goldsmith as was, before his longtime crony Tony Blair raised him to the peerage), peremptorily shut down a two-year investigation by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) into a massive corruption case involving Britain's biggest military contractor and members of the Saudi royal family. SFO bulldogs had just forced their way into the holy of holies of the great global back room - Swiss bank accounts - when Pete pulled the plug. Continuing with the investigation, said His Lordship, "would not be in the national interest."
It certainly wasn't in the interest of BAE Systems, the British arms merchant that has become one of the top 10 US military firms as well, through its voracious acquisitions during the profitable War on Terror - including some juicy hook-ups with the Carlyle Group, the former corporate crib of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush and still current home of the family fixer, James Baker. BAE director Phillip Carroll is also quite at home in the White House inner circle: a former chairman of Shell Oil, he was tapped by George II to be the first "Senior Adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Oil" in those heady "Mission Accomplished" days of 2003. BAE has allegedly managed to "disappear" approximately $2 billion in shavings from one of the largest and longest-running arms deals in history - the UK-Saudi warplane program known as "al-Yamanah" (Arabic for "The Dove"). Al-Yamanah has been flying for 18 years now, with periodic augmentations, pumping almost $80 billion into BAE's coffers, with negotiations for $12 billion in additional planes now nearing completion. SFO investigators had followed the missing money from the deal into a network of Swiss bank accounts and the usual Enronian web of offshore front companies.
Nor was continuing the investigation in the interest of the Saudi royals, whose princely principals in the arms deal were embarrassed by allegations that a BAE-administered slush fund had supplied the fiercely ascetic fundamentalists with wine, women and song - not to mention lush apartments, ritzy holidays, cold hard cash, Jags, Ferraris and at least one gold-plated Rolls-Royce, as The Times reported. One scam - uncovered by the Guardian in a batch of accidentally released government documents - involved inflating the price of the warplanes by 32 percent. The rakeoff was then presumably siphoned into BAE's secret accounts, with some of it kicking back to the Saudi royals and their retainers.
The Saudis were said to be incensed by the continuing revelations spinning out of the investigation, which had begun in 2004 after the Guardian first got wind of the alleged slush fund. Last month, with talks on the new $12 billion extension in the final stages, the Saudis lowered the boom, threatening to ashcan al-Yamanah and buy their warplanes from - gasp! - the French instead. For a week or two, the Blair government played chicken with the Saudis, hoping the threat was just a hardball bluff for better terms (or maybe bigger slush).
Then came a curious intervention. Last month, Dick Cheney traveled to Riyadh for talks with Saudi King Abdullah. There he beseeched the king to step in and help pull America's fat out of the wildfire of Iraq by using Saudi influence on Iraq's volatile Sunni minority, the Scotland Sunday Herald reported. It's also thought that Cheney asked the Saudis to stump up more cash to replace some of the billions of dollars in missing "reconstruction money" that White House cronies and local operators have somehow "misplaced" into their own pockets during the war.
The articles go into a whole lot more with all of the dirty dealings that have been going on, threats that were made to our government and to the Brits by the Saudis, coverups of corruption and money for contractors that has disappeared, and the squashing of an investigation that would have had a lot of high level heads rolling. They talk about the timing of the story on Princess Diana's death coinciding with the press releases in Britian about this to keep it under raps and not reported about in their media since they knew the press would latch onto that instead (sound familiar with our sock puppets we've got for an excuse of the MSM here?).
You've got to wonder who's being bribed, threatened, and put under what kind of pressure to keep this under wraps and not investigated, and what it might mean for just how ugly things get here once the Democrats take over the Congress, and try to have some hearings on similar matters. It's going to be ugly folks. Lots of money, lots of power, lots of threats, and lots of intimidation to those that try to do the right thing. Read it and weep. I hope that there is a better job of overcoming these obstacles once the hearings start with the new Congress here in the US, and if these articles are any indication, Mr. Cheney is going to have some really serious legal problems awaiting him come January. Everyone should be writing to their Representatives, and asking them if they know about these news articles, and what they intend to do about these matters once the Democrats take power and hold hearings.