Posted on 02/27/2006 5:08:19 PM PST by wagglebee
I'm sorry, did I miss the memo? Are we upset again about foreign management of ports?
Yep, and there was quite a bit of Republican support for it to, amazingly.
Hill will be given a pass on this by the MSM. After all, even though she was co-president when Bill was in the WH, she never did anything really bad. Well, except for Waco, health insurance, stealing, lying, FBI files, Whitewater coverup, that hundred thousand stock lie, more lies....endless list.
Yes, that old line about Capitalists, hangmen, and a rope comes to mind-- or maybe a circular firing squad...
Why can't the Secret Service tell about all the times they ran women up to Bill and Hillary's separate bedrooms in the Whitehouse? This is information that was told to me by a childhood friend of a SS guy who worked in the Clinton Whitehouse, he'd worked there since the Reagan Administration and finally asked for a transfer after he said he could no longer pimp for those two creatures, it made him sick. If this guy doesn't come forward and tell the Country about her then he will allow this monster to become President. CYAs shouldn't apply here, this is the future of America and she needs to be exposed!
She says it long after the check's cleared.
Words have teeth..and sometimes they come back and bite you on the ass..
Morning Digger,
Looks like "Proof of the Pudding" top me. I do not think any sane man could possess any love, for that POS.
As I See It,
NSNR-THM
Yeah, I can´t remember the name right now. For those that served here in Panama there have been a lot of changes. Most of the homes in Allbrook AFB have been sold and much remodeling of the homes has been done. There have been a lot of new luxury homes being build on Fort Clayton as well as remodeling of old quarters. Haven´t been to many of the other bases. Fort Amador has really changed with new tourist hotels and casinos going up.
What I want to know is when is she going to be indicted?
"But she gladly took the Chinese campaign money,"
And hubby took $600,000 from UAE!!!
the 3bx2 duplex toward the back gate/former location of riding club on albrook that was one half yellow, one half blue cracked me up every time i saw it - talk about neighbors getting along! i think they finally repainted it, though.
That whole area by the stables is kuxuary homes now. Real nice to look at exterior and very nice inside. Too pricey though. They are building some real nice luxuary homes on clayton but too expensive for me. About 250K for the house and another $250 for the land. I could buy some land real cheap in the interior and build the same house for half the price. I think most people buy these houses just because they are in the old canal zone and on the old American bases.
and maybe they have no idea what a mess security is now that there are no SPs/MPs patrolling. I have a friend on albrook whose house or car parked outside was hit 3 times.
"I think most people buy these houses just because they are in the old canal zone and on the old American bases."
Hmm forgot to mention the wonderful traffic in and out of there too. It is a zoo, esp. the back gates of clayton and albrook.
BILL VS. HILL ON DUBAI
By GEOFF EARLE, NEW YORK POST
March 1, 2006 -- WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton rallied to defend the United Arab Emirates yesterday — splitting with his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who's fighting to block a firm owned by the Arab nation from taking over port operations in New York and five other U.S. cities.
"I have a very high opinion of UAE and Dubai in particular," Bill Clinton gushed. "They're trying to build a new Middle East — they really are."
Clinton, who has made several trips to the United Arab Emirates since leaving office, called the nation "a good ally to America."...
It Didn't Start With Loral
The Clinton National Security Fire Sale
By CARL LIMBACHER
OYSTER BAY -- The revelation that the Clinton administration may have traded U.S. national security for campaign cash from China exploded like a Long March rocket just two weeks ago. Johnny Chung's confession to investigators that some of the money he donated to help re-elect Bill Clinton came directly from the People's Liberation Army finally set off mainstream media smoke alarms. On the Sunday chat shows, the topic is picking up steam - and has even managed to supplant Monica-gate as the biggest bulb on the Clinton scandalabra.
But the story of Bill Clinton's national security sell out doesn't begin with Jeff Gerth's May 16 New York Times bombshell about Liu Chaoying and her PLA bagman, Mr. Chung. Nor did it start when Gerth began exploring the Loral Corp.'s technology transfers to China on the Times front page six weeks earlier. In fact, the Clinton administration has long demonstrated what could only be described as a pattern and practice of behavior towards China: a series of decisions where the best interests of America have consistently taken a back seat to the designs of Clinton's Chinese patrons. It's not a pretty picture.
Supercomputers
Last year's revelation that the Clinton administration had looked the other way while supercomputer technology was transferred to potential foes foreshadowed the current controversy. In February 1997, Long Island's Newsday first reported that California's Silicon Graphics was under investigation for selling to Russia a high-powered unit that ended up in the Chelyabinsk-70 nuclear weapons laboratory. Reportedly, SGI delivered the computer without even getting the required license. No wonder. The Silicon-Chelyabinsk supercomputer was twice as powerful as anything that was legal for an American firm to ship overseas.
According to the report, the Russians had been very anxious to acquire the high tech equipment. And they made no bones about how they intended to use it. In a Sept. '96 letter to then Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, Russia's Nuclear Energy Minister Viktor Mikhaylov explained that he wanted the high performance computer to "guarantee the reliability of ... Russia's nuclear stockpile."
Just days after the Newsday story, The Wall Street Journal reported that Silicon Graphics had sold two similar computers to China's Academy of Sciences, which conducts research into nuclear weapons and missiles. SGI claimed that the sale was in full compliance with U.S. export regulations. But the Journal revealed that at least one of the SGI units was transferred to the Chinese without benefit of the required license. Moreover, that unit was capable of six billion theoretical operations per second, making it twice as powerful as the model SGI sold to the Russians.
How was SGI allowed to get away with all this during the final years of the first Clinton term? Just lucky, perhaps. Although the fact that SGI's chairman, Edward McCracken, was a big time Democrat donor in' 92 and '96 surely didn't hurt. And McCracken didn't waste any time taking advantage of the access his money bought. According to the previously cited Newsday report:
It was three weeks after a private luncheon with McCracken at the White House in September, 1993, that Clinton announced sweeping liberalization of computer export standards, allowing computers of up to 194 MTOPS to be sold without a license. Until then only machines with up to 12.5 MTOPS - the power of a 486 chip desktop PC - could be sold without a license.
By May of 1997, the full scope of China's American supercomputer bonanza had become public. Under the Clinton "liberalization", The Peoples' Republic of China had acquired no less than 46 of the prized high performance machines. House Judiciary Chairman Henry Hyde was quoted that same month by the Washington Times observing that the computer technology transfers "may have given the PRC more supercomputer capacity than the entire (U.S.) Department of Defense."
COSCO's Beachhead
While he was not too busy helping the Chinese build up their arsenal abroad, Mr. Clinton took time to do what he could for Chinese state business interests at home. The transfer of the Long Beach, California naval station to the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) is by now notorious. But what wasn't widely reported last year was the degree to which the Clinton White House leaned on local Long Beach office holders to pave the way for COSCO's beachhead on American soil. Here's how The New York Times described the intense White House lobbying for that deal:
During a tough battle last year ('96) over how a closed Navy base in Long Beach, Calif., would be used, a Clinton administration official made what several people involved describe as highly unusual telephone calls to push for construction there of a container terminal that would be leased to a shipping company owned by the Chinese Government .... There was no evidence that there was anything improper about the calls, but several officials who received them said it was highly unusual for the White House to intervene on behalf of one side in a local battle like this one, especially when the intervention benefited the cause of a private company .... Several of those officials said the White House pressure had been unprecedented. "We'd never had a phone call like that in this office before," said Lee Keatinge of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. "There's no base re-use fight that's come close to Long Beach" for that kind of high level involvement.
Another Long Beach official, Ruthann Lehrer, told the Times:
"It was made clear that this container terminal plan was the preference of the White House, not any of the other ideas some people were talking about. This was clearly not something that the White House wanted studied further."
Although the Times quoted Long Beach officials who were primarily concerned with the historic preservation of their port, others were more troubled by the tenant. Just months before Bill Clinton enlisted in the battle of Long Beach on the Chinese side, BATF and Customs agents intercepted contraband shipped on a COSCO container ship docked up the coastline in Oakland. The state owned Chinese ship was being used by the state run arms company to smuggle machine guns to American street gangs.
Still, priorities are priorities. And the priority here for Bill Clinton may have had something to do with the fact that the ubiquitous and generous Mr. Chung was linked to COSCO through Hongye Zheng, a senior COSCO advisor who accompanied Chung to the White House for a Clinton radio address.
"Assault Weapons" for U.S.
But of all the decisions, waivers and export liberalizations executed on behalf of the Chinese by the Clinton White House, none rivals what the administration did for Wang Jun, the princeling chairman of China's state owned arms conglomerate, Poly Technologies. For years, China had been doing a land office business exporting to the U.S. semi-automatic rifles and ammo made by Poly and another arms manufacturer, Norinco. Reportedly, the gun trade was worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually to the PRC. But suddenly in 1994, there was a problem: the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. Overnight, China's weapons cash cow evaporated.
Not to worry. According to a Scripps Howard report by Michael Hedges, which ran on the front page of the March 14, 1997 edition of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Clinton administration granted Wang Jun's Poly Technologies importation permits to flood America with over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of rounds of ammunition -- despite the president's own cherished gun ban. That was on Feb. 2, 1996 -- just days before Clinton issued the first satellite waivers for Loral Corp.
It gets worse. On Feb. 6, just four days after the assault weapon waivers were issued, Wang Jun was ushered into the White House for a personal meeting with Bill Clinton. Wang's escort was Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, who had laundered over $600,000 from Chinese sources for the Clinton Defense Fund. Combined with his campaign donations to the DNC, Trie's total contributions to Clinton coffers topped the million dollar mark in 1996. For that kind of money, it's a good bet Charlie Trie could bring anybody he wanted to the White House.
And Charlie Trie wasn't Wang's only solid White House reference. Charlie had worked with longtime F.O.B. Ernest Green to get Wang a U.S. visa, though Wang conveniently forgot to mention that he was a Communist arms dealer on the visa application. Had he disclosed that fact, Wang Jun would never have been let in the country, let alone the White House. The day after Wang's visit with Clinton, Ernie Green's wife donated $50,000 to the DNC.
Except for these import waivers, issued two years after Poly's rifles had been banned at the president's own direction, there would have been no legal U.S. market for Wang Jun's guns.
Michael Hedges interviewed lawyers involved in negotiating the deal, nearly all of whom were stunned when Poly Technologies got the exclusive approval. "All of a sudden there was a breakthrough. I can't account for it", said one attorney. Another admitted that the Clinton administration had been tying other arms importers in knots to keep guns out of the country because the president was opposed. He described the abrupt turnaround in U.S. import policy as "highly suspicious". And this was from a guy who was working to make this deal happen.
Last year, Hedges told me that his evidence included signed copies of the importation permits for Wang Jun's guns. Between the on-the-record interviews and the documentation, his expose was rock solid. Yet, despite the fact that the implications of his report were absolutely staggering, only one New York or Washington paper thought its readers were entitled to this news. Eleven days later, The New York Daily News followed up on the Wang Jun 100,000 gun story.
News Columnist Michael Daly managed to uncover the destination for Wang's 100,000 guns: a Detroit firm which investigators have linked to the Chinese Armed Police. The Chinese Armed Police used similar assault rifles to mow down demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The massive gun shipment would have gone through, flooding America's cities with weapons ruled inappropriate by the Clinton administration, but the deal was suspended in the wake of the aforementioned COSCO connected smuggling operation - which was short-circuited by federal agents just weeks after Wang Jun's importation waivers were granted. On the night of March 18, 1996, undercover Customs and BATF agents accepted delivery of guns smuggled aboard the COSCO ship Empress Phoenix, as part of an ongoing sting operation dubbed "Dragon Fire." The undercover agents had lured the Chinese into making a trial shipment of Chinese machine guns: a dry run set up to establish a working relationship before the Chinese granted access to their full inventory. Besides the smuggled guns, which they recommended for the California street gang market, the Chinese operatives explained that they were ready to sell everything from grenade launchers to shoulder fired Red Parakeet surface to air missiles, which they boasted could "take out a 747". (Coincidentally, a Boeing 747 was taken out over the skies of Long Island just months later.) That March night, federal agents secretly unpacked COSCO crates containing 2,000 Poly Technologies AK-47's delivered from the hold of the Empress Phoenix. It was the largest seizure of fully operational automatic weapons in the history of U. S. law enforcement.
With that claim to fame, one might expect the agents responsible for Operation Dragon Fire to be boasting of their unqualified success. However, as the BATF's Dick Stoltz and the Customs Bureau's Matthew King explained all of the above to Vanity Fair Magazine last December, they emphasized that Dragon Fire's goal was much larger. The real targets of their undercover investigation were Poly and Norinco lieutenants who controlled the deal from China and whom Stoltz and King had managed to lure to America for a brief visit. And they suspected Wang Jun's direct involvement. As King told Vanity Fair:
"Can you imagine the reactions or how Congress would have voted (on MFN for China) if we had been allowed to keep going? If we had arrested the Norinco officials who had come here to sell Red Parakeet missiles? If Dragon Fire had been able to nail the princelings? This country's China policy would be a hell of a lot different today."
So why, instead of stopping with the March 18th gun seizure, didn't they keep going? Stoltz and King had wanted to - but inexplicably, somehow word had leaked about Dragon Fire. First their office got a call from a Los Angeles Times reporter, who shocked them with his detailed knowledge of their supposedly still secret sting. This reporter's silence was purchased with the promise of an even bigger exclusive after the investigation had culminated in indictments of Chinese kingpins. Shortly thereafter, The New York Times called and had to be promised a similar deal to keep the investigation secret. But it was too late. After the second inquiry Stoltz and King realized that their own undercover agents were now in jeopardy. They had to act fast before the entire operation came unraveled. That's why Dragon Fire's ultimate prize turned out to be Chinese AK-47's rather than the Chinese operatives close to arms merchant, Wang Jun.
The mystery of the Dragon Fire leak has never been solved. But there are disturbing clues. Reporters for both the L.A. and New York Times worked in Washington, where the only people familiar with Dragon Fire were top government officials. According to Vanity Fair, the journalists involved would reveal only that their tips came from "diplomatic sources". And evidently these reporters weren't the only ones who got the word. Several of Wang Jun's top lieutenants hotfooted it back to China just one jump ahead of federal indictment. One was Robert Ma, chief of Poly Technologies' U.S. subsidiary, who fled just two days before his arrest warrant was executed.
Was a federal probe into a massive Chinese arms smuggling operation foiled by insiders who knew the investigation put Clinton's China connection at risk? Is it significant that leaks about an investigation run out of San Francisco came from a Washington source? If so, this would constitute a more blatant (though potentially less dangerous) national betrayal than even Clinton's Loral satellite waivers. If the Loral waivers damaged national security, as a still secret internal Pentagon study reportedly claims, then what national interest, pray tell, was served by sabotaging an investigation into Chinese gun smuggling? And just which Americans would have benefited when the White House tossed it's own gun control policy over the side to welcome in 100,000 outlawed Chinese guns?
Though the press has virtually ignored this aspect of the Clinton "China First" policy, House Government Reform and Oversight Chairman Dan Burton has not. Reached Friday on Sean Hannity's New York talk radio show, Burton told me:
"We continue to investigate the Wang Jun connection. Our concentration has been on the illegal campaign contributions and Wang Jun is one of the people that we've been looking into. Obviously if there was a quid pro quo where the president signed off on those guns coming into the country in exchange for campaign contributions, that's something that he should be held accountable for and we are looking into that."
Quid quo pro or not, this president needs to explain why his administration waived its own gun law for a Chinese princeling arms merchant whose lieutenants were intent on smuggling even more to firepower to American street gangs.
Published in the Jun, 1, 1998 issue of The Washington Weekly. Copyright 1998 The Washington Weekly (http://www.federal. com). Reposting permitted with this message intact. http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/loral.html
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