The Right's America-Hating Preacher

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By Robert Parry

One of the advantages that the American Right has achieved from investing tens of billions of dollars in media - from talk radio and cable TV, to print and the Internet - is the ability to define what is and what isn’t a "scandal," a powerful factor in determining who wins national elections.

By comparison, American progressives have short-changed their own investments in media. The disparity leads to the spectacle of Democratic presidential candidates submitting to questioning on Fox News while no one would expect a Republican leader to undergo interrogation from, say, the DailyKos.

On another level, this media imbalance has propelled the rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the category of big news, effectively altering the course of Campaign 2008 by associating Barack Obama with his ex-pastor’s harsh - and at times over-the-top - criticism of the U.S. government.

However, it’s not news that a viciously anti-American religious figure has invested billions of dollars in financing the U.S. conservative movement and put fat wads of cash into the pockets of many prominent Republicans, including members of President George W. Bush’s own family.

While Sen. Obama has to explain what he knew and when he knew it about Wright’s angry sermons, the Bush Family floats above its financial and political associations with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a South Korean theocrat who had denounced the United States as "Satan’s harvest" and likened American women to "prostitutes."

In his angry sermons, Moon has gone further than saying "God-damn America" - as Wright did - to vowing to sweep aside American democracy and individualism as he builds a one-world state.

Once his plan to "swallow entire America" is complete, Moon told his followers in one sermon, there will be "some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."

But Moon’s hatred of America is not deemed news, in part, because Moon has financed the Washington Times since 1982 to the tune of more than $3 billion, according to former newspaper insider George Archibald.

Moon also has lavished many millions of dollars more to pay for conservative conferences and to bail out key right-wing figures when they have found themselves in financial distress, including Republican direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie and the late Jerry Falwell.

Plus, Moon has paid large speaking fees to former President George H.W. Bush - estimated in the millions of dollars - and has feted President George W. Bush’s brother Neil at recent events for the Moon-sponsored Universal Peace Federation.

In 2004, thankful Republicans even gave Moon use of a room in the Senate Dirksen Office Building so he could be crowned the "King of Peace" in a ceremony that Moon’s followers hailed as proof the U.S. government was bowing down to this new Messiah. [See John Gorenfeld’s Bad Moon Rising.]

Yet, even though Moon has gained influence by funneling huge sums of mysterious money into the U.S. political process - and to the Bush Family - he has avoided the intense scrutiny that has fallen on Rev. Wright, who until recently was a little-known black preacher from Chicago’s South Side.

While the YouTube snippets of several Wright outbursts have become daily fare on U.S. news programs, Moon’s influence on the American Right and his largesse toward the Bush Family have remained virtual non-stories. That’s been the case even though Moon may represent a key nexus between international crime and the U.S. political elite.

When Moon is discussed, he’s usually presented as simply the wacky Unification Church cult leader who somehow parlayed carnation sales by his followers into a vast global fortune.

What is almost never referenced are his long-standing ties to organized crime and international drug smuggling, including the Japanese yakuza gangs and South American cocaine traffickers. Even first-hand accounts of Moon’s money-laundering from insiders like his former daughter-in-law Nansook Hong draw no U.S. media attention.

Who Is Moon?

Moon was born on Jan. 6, 1920, in a rural, northwestern corner of Korea, a rugged Asian peninsula then occupied by Japan, a brutal occupation that would continue through the first 25 years of Moon’s life. Allied forces liberated the peninsula from the Japanese in 1945 and then divided Korea into two sections, the south controlled by the United States and the north occupied by Soviet troops.

In this post-war period, Moon, who had been raised within a Christian sect, moved to southern Korea and joined a mystical religious group called Israel Suo-won. The group preached the imminent arrival of a Korean Messiah and practiced a strange sexual ritual called "pikarume," in which ministers purified women through sexual intercourse, the so-called "blessing of the womb."

As he developed his own theology, Moon returned to the North, to communist-ruled North Korea, where he soon ran into legal troubles. North Korean authorities arrested him twice, apparently on morals charges connected to his sexual rites with young women. Moon’s supporters, however, have tried to portray Moon as the victim of communist repression, claiming that he was arrested not for sex charges but for espionage.

Whatever the real story about his detention in North Korea, Moon’s luck soon changed. On Oct. 14, 1950, with war raging on the Korean peninsula, United Nations troops overran the prison where Moon was held, freeing Moon and the other inmates. According to Unification Church histories, Moon then trekked south, carrying on his back an injured prisoner named Pak Chung Hwa.

For years, church officials even published a photograph purportedly showing Pak piggy-backing on Moon across a river. But much of that story appears to be propaganda. Several church sources have since admitted that the photo was a hoax, that Moon is not the man in the picture and the location is not where Moon was.

Moon’s southward journey ended in the South Korean port of Pusan, where he resumed his missionary work. He later moved to Seoul, South Korea’s capital, where he founded his own church in May 1954. He called it T’ong-il Kyo, or Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. It became known as the Unification Church.

At the center of Moon’s theology was a new twist to the Old Testament story about the Fall of Man. Instead of biting into a forbidden apple, Eve copulated with Satan and then passed on the sin by having sex with Adam.

Thousands of years later, God sent Jesus to restore man to his original purity, Moon taught. But Jesus failed because he was betrayed by the Jews and died before he could father any sinless children.

Sex, therefore, remained at the center of Moon’s theology, the need for a Messiah to purify the human race through the reversal of the contamination caused by Satan’s seduction of Eve.

Moon taught that the failure of Jesus to begin this purification process by fathering children forced God to send a second Messiah, who turned out to be Moon himself. Moon saw his task as starting this sexual purification process and thus establishing God’s Kingdom on Earth.

The ultimate goal would be a worldwide theocracy ruled by Moon and his followers cleansed of Satan’s influence. Political power and religious authority went together, Moon lectured. "We cannot separate the political field from the religious," Moon said.

But in South Korea, Moon found that government continued to be an obstacle to his religious plans. When he began to concentrate his religious recruitment on young idealistic college students, especially from an all-girls Christian school, Moon landed in legal hot water again.

The South Korean government arrested Moon in 1955 for allegedly conducting more sexual "purification" rites, according to several U.S. intelligence reports which are now public. Moon was freed three months later because none of the young women would testify for fear of public humiliation, according to an undated FBI summary, released under a Freedom of Information Act request.

"During the next two years in the national news media of South Korea, Rev. Moon was the butt of scandalist humor," the FBI report said.

Six Marys

Church officials repeatedly have denied the reports of Moon’s sexual rituals. But the charges received new attention in 1993 with the Japanese publication of The Tragedy of the Six Marys - a book by the early Moon disciple, Pak Chung Hwa, whom Moon supposedly carried to South Korea.

According to Pak’s book, Moon taught that Jesus was intended to save mankind by having sex with six already-married women who would then have sex with other men who would pass on the purification to other women until, eventually, all mankind would have pure blood.

Pak contended that Moon took on this personal duty as the second Messiah and began having sex with the "six Marys." But Pak alleged that Moon began to abuse the practice by turning the "six Marys" into a kind of rotating sex club.
Pak wrote that Moon’s first wife divorced him after catching him in a sex ritual.

In all, Pak estimated that there were at least 60 "Marys," many of whom ended up destitute after Moon discarded them.

According to the testimony of one "Mary," named Yu Shin Hee, she met Moon in the early 1950s and became a follower along with her husband. Devoted to the church, her husband abandoned her and her five children, whom she then put into an orphanage. She, in turn, agreed to become one of Moon’s "six Marys."

But Yu Shin Hee claimed that Moon tired of her after just one "blood exchange," a phrase referring to sexual intercourse. Still, she was required to have sex with other men. Seven years later, a broken woman with no money, she tried to return to her children, but they also rejected her.

When Moon impregnated another one of the women, Moon sent her to Japan where she gave birth to a baby boy, according to Pak’s account. Moon later admitted fathering the child, who died in a train crash at the age of 13. But Pak wrote that Moon refused to admit responsibility for other illegitimate children born to the women.

"By forwarding this teaching, he violated mothers, their daughters, their sisters," Pak wrote. (After The Tragedy of the Six Marys was published, the Unification Church denounced the allegations as spurious. Under intense pressure, the aging Pak Chung Hwa agreed to recant. However, his book’s accounts tracked closely with U.S. intelligence reports of the same period and interviews with former church leaders.)

Moon’s history of sexual liaisons out of wedlock also was corroborated by daughter-in-law Nansook Hong, who broke with Moon’s so-called True Family in 1995 over abuse she suffered at the hands of Moon’s eldest son, Hyo Jin Moon, during their 14-year marriage.

Nansook Hong reported in her 1998 book, In the Shadow of the Moons, that family members, including Moon himself, acknowledged that he had "providential" sex with women in his role as the Messiah. Nansook Hong said she learned about Moon’s sexual affairs when her husband, Hyo Jin, began justifying his affairs as mandated by God, as his father claimed his affairs were.

"I went directly to Mrs. Moon with Hyo Jin’s claims," Nansook Hong wrote. "She was both furious and tearful. She had hoped that such pain would end with her, that it would not be passed on to the next generation, she told me.

"No one knows the pain of a straying husband like True Mother, she assured me. I was stunned. We had all heard rumors for years about Sun Myung Moon’s affairs and the children he sired out of wedlock, but here was True Mother, confirming the truth of these stories.

"I told her that Hyo Jin said his sleeping around was ’providential’ and inspired by God, just as Father’s affairs were. ’No, Father is the Messiah, not Hyo Jin. What Father did was in God’s plan.’" Later, in a discussion about the extramarital sex, Moon himself told Nansook Hong that "what happened in his past was ’providential,’" she wrote.

As for the sexual purification rituals, Nansook Hong said the rumors had followed the church for decades, despite the official denials.

"In the early days of the Unification Church, members met in a small house with two rooms," Nansook Hong wrote. "It was known as the House of the Three Doors. It was rumored that at the first door one was made to take off one’s jacket, at the second door one’s outer clothing, and at the third one’s undergarments in preparation for sex."

As for Chung Hwa Pak’s Tragedy of the Six Marys, Nansook Hong said Moon succeeded in persuading his old associate to rejoin the church and then got him to disavow the memoir. "I’ve always wondered what the price was of that retraction," Nansook Hong wrote.

Madeleine Pretorious, a Unification Church member from South Africa, also had worked closely with Moon’s temperamental son, Hyo Jin, and had learned from him that the long-denied accounts of Moon’s sexual rites with female initiates were true.

"When Hyo Jin found out about his father’s ’purification’ rituals, that took a lot out of wind out of his sails," Pretorious told me in an interview after she left the church in the mid-1990s.

In late 1994, during conversations in Hyo Jin’s suite at the New Yorker Hotel, "he confided a lot of things to me," Pretorious said. Hyo Jin also had discovered that the Reverend Moon fathered a child out of wedlock in the early 1970s. Moon arranged for the child to be raised by his longtime lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, Pretorious said.

The boy - now a young man - had confronted Hyo Jin, seeking recognition as Hyo Jin’s half-brother. Pretorious said she later corroborated the story with other church members.

Intelligence Ties

The alleged sexual rituals, which involved passing around women, would become a point of embarrassment later, but the practices apparently helped the Unification Church in recruiting men in the early days.

By the late 1950s, Moon had managed to build a small cadre of loyal followers and was reaching out beyond Korea. By the early 1960s, the church also was pulling in better educated young men, including some with connections to South Korea’s intelligence services.

Kim Jong-Pil and three other young English-speaking army officers became closely associated with Moon’s church during this transitional phase as the institution evolved from an obscure Korean sect into a powerful international organization.

Beyond his association with Moon’s sect, Kim Jong-Pil was a rising star in South Korea’s intelligence community. In 1961, he founded the KCIA, which centralized Seoul’s internal and external intelligence activities. Another one of the promising young KCIA officers was Colonel Bo Hi Pak, who also became a dedicated Moon disciple.

With these KCIA officers, however, it was never clear whether the benefits of the religion were paramount or if they simply recognized the potential that an international church held as a cover for intelligence operations.

In many countries, especially the United States, churches are granted broad protections against government interference. With missionaries traveling around the world and with church members attending international religious conferences, a church also provided an effective cover for spying, money-laundering or passing on messages to agents.

In 1962, KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil traveled to San Francisco where he met with Unification Church members. According to an account later published by a congressional investigation, Kim Jong-Pil promised discreet support for Moon’s church.

At the same time of his contacts with associates from the Unification Church, Kim Jong-Pil was in charge of another sensitive negotiation: talks to improve bilateral relations with Japan, Korea’s historic enemy.

Those talks put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important figures in the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa, who once hailed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as "the perfect fascist."

Kodama and Sasakawa were jailed as fascist war criminals at the end of World War II, but a few years later, both Kodama and Sasakawa were freed by U.S. military intelligence officials.

The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA worked with the Italian Mafia in breaking communist-backed unions and protected German Nazi war criminals if they agreed to help in the emerging Cold War. Kodama and Sasakawa assisted U.S. intelligence by dispatching right-wing goon squads to break up demonstrations, according to the book, Yakuza, by David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro.

Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Kim Jong-Pil’s contacts with these right-wing leaders proved invaluable to the Unification Church, which had made only a few converts in Japan by the early 1960s. Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to the Unification Church, according to Kaplan and Dubro.

"Sasakawa became an advisor to Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with Moon in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia, Kaplan and Dubro wrote.

The church’s growth spurt did not escape the notice of U.S. intelligence officers in the field. One CIA report, dated Feb. 26, 1963, stated that "Kim Jong-Pil organized the Unification Church while he was director of the ROK [Republic of Korea] Central Intelligence Agency, and has been using the church, which had a membership of 27,000, as a political tool."

Though Moon’s church had existed since the mid-1950s, the report appeared correct in noting Kim Jong-Pil’s key role in transforming the church from a minor Korean sect into a potent international organization.

New Worlds

With alliances in place in Tokyo and Seoul, the Unification Church next took aim at Washington.

In 1964, Bo Hi Pak, who was emerging as one of Moon’s most able lieutenants, moved to America and started the Korean Cultural and Freedom Foundation, a front that performed the dual purpose of helping Moon meet important Americans, while assisting the KCIA in its international operations.

Bo Hi Pak named KCIA founder Kim Jong-Pil to be the foundation’s "honorary chairman." The foundation also sponsored the KCIA’s anti-communist propaganda outlets, such as Radio of Free Asia, according to the congressional report on the "Koreagate" scandal.

Moon’s church also was active in the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, a fiercely right-wing group founded by the governments of South Korea and Taiwan. In 1966, the group expanded into the World Anti-Communist League, an international alliance that brought together traditional conservatives with former Nazis, overt racialists and Latin American "death squad" operatives.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. John K. Singlaub, a former WACL president, told me that "the Japanese [WACL] chapter was taken over almost entirely by Moonies."

By the 1970s, the U.S. public was aware of Moon and his church, but much of the attention was negative. Parents complained that the church brainwashed their children and pressured them to cut off contacts with their families, while proclaiming Moon their "True Father."

The totalitarian nature of Moon’s church stood out in his staging of mass marriages, or "blessings," in which he would pair up husbands and wives who had never met. Moon also regulated the sexual behavior of even his married followers, a practice that replaced the more personal method of "blessing the womb" that allegedly had prevailed in the church’s early days.

In 1973, amid American military reversals in Indochina, alarm began to spread within Seoul’s right-wing dictatorship about the strength of the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea in case of aggression from the communist North. Those fears led the KCIA, long known for its gross human rights violations, to begin plotting how to bolster its political friends in the United States and undermine its enemies.

Lee Jai Hyon, the chief cultural and information attache at the South Korean embassy in Washington, later testified before the U.S. Congress that he sat in on a series of meetings chaired by the KCIA’s station chief, involving senior embassy officials.

Lee Jai Hyon described six sessions over a five-week period in spring 1973 at which a conspiracy was outlined to "manipulate," "coerce," "threaten," "co-opt," "seduce," and "buy off" political and other leaders of the United States. Lee Jai Hyon said one of the South Koreans participating in the operation was Moon’s top aide Bo Hi Pak.

At the time, Moon was raising concerns among U.S. immigration authorities for bringing hundreds of foreign followers to the United States on tourist visas and then assigning them to mobile fund-raising teams.

But Moon, who owned property outside New York City while maintaining a residence in South Korea, somehow managed to secure a "green card" from the Nixon administration on April 30, 1973. The permit making Moon a "lawful permanent resident" also granted him more legal rights than would be available to a foreign visitor.

"The advantages of using the First Amendment were seen early," wrote Robert Boettcher, the former staff director of the House Subcommittee on International Relations, in his 1980 book, Gifts of Deceit. "Before Moon moved to the United States in 1971, he and his small band of followers realized the operation would have the most flexibility if it was called a church. Businesses, political activities, and tax-exempt status could be protected."

As Moon stepped up his activities, however, the FBI soon began to suspect that Moon’s activities had a political motive. The FBI summary of its evidence about Moon’s church was marked by a number indicating that the Unification Church was under a counter-intelligence investigation in the 1970s.

Although blacked-out portions obscured who was stating some of the conclusions - an individual source or the FBI - the report described the church as "an absolutely totalitarian organization" which was part of an international "conspiracy" that functioned by its own rules.

"One of the central doctrines of the Moon relig[i]ous aspects is what they call heavenly deception," the FBI report said. "It basically says that to take from Satan what rightfully belongs to God, you may do most anything. You may lie, cheat, steal or kill."

Making Friends

Despite the FBI’s concerns, Moon began making friends in Washington the old-fashioned way: by spreading around lots of money. Moon also had his followers cozy up to government officials.

According to the FBI summary, Moon designated "300 pretty girls" to lobby members of Congress. "They were trying to influence United States senators and congressmen on behalf of South Korea," the FBI document read.

"Moon had laid the foundation for political work in this country prior to 1973 [though] his followers became more openly involved in political activities in that and subsequent years," a congressional investigative report on the "Koreagate" influence-buying scandal stated in 1978.

The report added that Moon’s organization used his followers’ travels to smuggle large sums of money into the United States in apparent violation of federal currency laws.

Moon organized rallies in support of the Vietnam War and in defense of President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal. Moon sponsored a National Prayer and Fast Committee, using the slogan: "forgive, love, unite." The public rallies earned Moon a face-to-face "thank you" from the embattled President on Feb. 1, 1974.

In late 1975, the CIA intercepted a secret South Korean document entitled "1976 Plan for Operations in the United States." In the name of "strengthening the execution of the U.S. security commitment to the ROK [South Korea]," it called for influencing U.S. public opinion by penetrating American media, government and academia.

Thousands of dollars were earmarked for "special manipulation" of congressmen; their staffs were to be infiltrated with paid "collaborators"; an "intelligence network" was to be put into the White House; money was targeted for "manipulation" of officials at the Pentagon, State Department and CIA; some U.S. journalists were to be spied on, while others would be paid; a "black newspaper" would be started in New York; contacts with American scholars would be coordinated "with Psychological Warfare Bureau"; and "an organizational network of anti-communist fronts" would be created.

Several months later, in summer 1976, Moon returned to the United States and delivered a flattering pro-U.S. speech at a red-white-and-blue flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument.

"The United States of America, transcending race and nationality, is already a model of the unified world," Moon declared on Sept. 18, 1976. Calling America "the chosen nation of God," Moon said, "I not only respect America, but truly love this nation."

While professing his love for America in public, Moon shared with his followers a very different sentiment in private. He despised American concepts of individuality and democracy, believing that he was destined to rule through a one-world theocracy that would eradicate all personal freedoms.

"Here’s a man [Moon] who says he wants to take over the world, where all religions will be abolished except Unificationism, all languages will be abolished except Korean, all governments will be abolished except his one-world theocracy," Steve Hassan, a former church leader, told me. "Yet he’s wined and dined very powerful people and convinced them that he’s benign."
In 1976, Moon’s search for growing influence in the United States seemed to be following the KCIA script.

Moon started a small-circulation newspaper in New York City that featured a column by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Moon promoted the anti-communist cause through front groups which held lavish conferences and paid speaking fees to academics, journalists and political leaders.

In 1976, Moon, Bo Hi Pak and other church members deepened their investments in the U.S. capital, buying stock in the Washington-based Diplomat National Bank. Simultaneously, South Korean agent Tongsun Park was investing heavily in the same bank.

But the South Korean scheme backfired in the late 1970s with the explosion of the "Koreagate" scandal. Rep.Donald Fraser, a Democrat from Minnesota, led a congressional probe which tracked Tongsun Park’s influence-buying campaign and exposed the KCIA links to the Unification Church.

The "Koreagate" investigation revealed a sophisticated intelligence project run out of Seoul that used the urbane Park as well as the mystical Moon to cultivate U.S. politicians as influential friends of South Korea - and conversely to undermine politicians who were viewed as enemies.

Though it’s clear the church did collaborate with the KCIA during the 1960s and 1970s, it’s less clear whether Moon was using the KCIA or it was using him. Most likely, the relationship was symbiotic, each using the other to advance their overlapping but different interests.

The alliance with the KCIA gave Moon political protection and business opportunities, while the KCIA got a cover for promoting South Korean interests inside the United States, the country responsible for South Korea’s defense.
The "Koreagate" investigation traced the church’s chief sources of money to bank accounts in Japan, but could follow the cash no further. In the years since, the sources of Moon’s money have remained cloaked in secrecy.

In the mid-1990s when I inquired about the vast fortune that the Unification Church has poured into its American operations, the church’s chief spokesman refused to divulge dollar amounts for any of Moon’s activities.

"Each year the church retains an independent accounting firm to do a national audit and produce an annual financial statement," wrote the church’s legal representative Peter D. Ross. "While this statement is used in routine financial transactions by the church, [it] is not my policy to make it otherwise available."

In 1978, Fraser got a taste of the negative side of Moon’s propaganda clout as the South Korean religious leader’s new U.S. conservative allies mounted a strong defense against the "Koreagate" allegations.

In pro-Moon publications, Fraser and his staff were pilloried as leftists. Anti-Moon witnesses were assailed as unstable liars. Minor bookkeeping problems inside the investigation, such as Fraser’s salary advances to some staff members, were seized upon to justify demands for an ethics probe of the congressman.

One of those letters, dated June 30, 1978, was written by John T. "Terry" Dolan of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). Dolan’s group was pioneering the strategy of "independent" TV attack ads against liberal Democrats. In turn, Moon’s CAUSA International helped Dolan by contributing $500,000 to a Dolan group, known as the Conservative Alliance or CALL. [Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1984]

With support from Dolan and other conservatives, Moon weathered the "Koreagate" political storm. Facing right-wing challenges to his patriotism, Fraser lost a Senate bid in 1978 and left Congress.

Though Moon had helped defeat his chief congressional critic, the evidence unearthed by Fraser became the foundation of a tax-fraud conviction of Moon in 1982 and his sentencing to two years in federal prison.

A Media Empire

Despite his felony conviction, Moon pressed ahead with his boldest bid for political influence. In 1982, Moon launched the Washington Times.

The Times was just what the Reagan administration wanted, a reliable voice for its version of events that would push the message into the public debate.

Though Moon would have to subsidize his publications with hundreds of millions of dollars from his seemingly bottomless pool of cash, the newspaper - over the next two decades - would change the parameters of how the U.S. press corps works and would affect the course of U.S. presidential campaigns.

Where all that money came from, however, would remain one of Washington’s least examined secrets.

Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League possible.

The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Ryoichi Sasakawa and Yoshio Kodama, and Moon, "an evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of ’Heavenly Deception,’" the Andersons wrote.

WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that "would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders a respectable new facade," the Andersons wrote.

Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or acquire weapons.

Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.

In the quarter century after World War II, remnants of fascist movements managed to do just that. Shattered by the major Allies - the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - the surviving fascists got a new lease on political life with the start of the Cold War, helping both Western democracies and right-wing dictatorships battle international communism.

Some Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals after World War II, but others managed to make their escapes along "rat lines" to Spain or South America or they finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers, especially the United States.

Argentina became a natural haven given the pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing Nazis also found like-minded right-wing politicians and military officers across Latin America who already used repression to keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.

In the post-World War II years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or Paraguay.
Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.

Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the United States. Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.

Another French Connection mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities. While trafficking in heroin, David also "took on assignments for Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance," Henrik Kruger wrote in The Great Heroin Coup.

During President Nixon’s "war on drugs," U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United States.

By the time the French Connection was severed, however, powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place.

Trafficante-connected groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained from the CIA’s training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine operations. Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.

Enter Rev. Moon

During this time of transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical message to South America. His first visit to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires. But he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.

Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.

"Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America," the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.

"As an international money laundry, ... the Church tapped into the capital flight havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras, Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent."

In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America when a right-wing alliance of Bolivia military officers and drug dealers organized what became known as the Cocaine Coup. WACL associates, such as Alfred Candia, coordinated the arrival of some of the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent putsch.

In Bolivia, right-wing Argentine intelligence officers mixed with a contingent of young European neo-fascists collaborating with Nazi war criminal Barbie in carrying out the bloody coup that overthrew the elected left-of-center government.

The victory put into power a right-wing military dictatorship indebted to the drug lords. Bolivia became South America’s first narco-state.

One of the first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon organization published a photo of Pak meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia Meza.

After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, "I have erected a throne for Father Moon in the world’s highest city."

According to later Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL representatives also played key roles, and CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.

Soon, Colonel Luis Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers, including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work protecting Bolivia’s major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the border.

"The paramilitary units - conceived by Barbie as a new type of SS - sold themselves to the cocaine barons," German journalist Kai Hermann wrote. "The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America." [An English translation of Hermann’s article was published in Covert Action Information Bulletin, Winter 1986]

A month after the Cocaine Coup, General Garcia Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League. Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a leading Moon disciple.

As the drug lords consolidated their power in Bolivia, the Moon organization expanded its presence, too. Hermann reported that in early 1981, war criminal Barbie and Moon leader Thomas Ward were seen together in apparent prayer.
On May 31, 1981, Moon representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a prayer for President Reagan’s recovery from an assassination attempt.

In his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, "God had chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism." According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization sought to recruit an "armed church" of Bolivians, with about 7,000 Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.

But by late 1981, the cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the breaking point.

"The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as clandestinely as they had arrived," Hermann reported.

The Cocaine Coup leaders soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder. Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He died in 1992.

But Moon’s organization suffered few negative repercussions from the Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flush with seemingly unlimited funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican administration in Washington. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush Inauguration, Moon made his organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush and other leading Republicans.

Domestic Spying

An early concern of the Reagan administration was the possibility that a popular movement - similar to the anti-Vietnam War protests - would undermine the hard-line policies that the new U.S. government considered indispensable for stopping the spread of Soviet influence in Central America.

Staunch anticommunists in the administration also suspected that some groups opposed to U.S. intervention in the region could be discredited for holding suspect political loyalties. Though Moon’s organization itself had been exposed by the "Koreagate" investigation as a foreign intelligence operation, the administration still turned to it to help probe the loyalty of Americans.

Starting in 1981, the FBI cooperated with one of Moon’s front groups during a five-year nationwide investigation of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a domestic organization critical of Reagan’s policies in Central America.

According to FBI documents obtained by Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan, the FBI collected reports from Moon’s Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), which was spying on CISPES supporters. The reports came from CARP members at 10 university campuses around the United States and included commentaries on the purported political beliefs of Reagan’s critics. [Boston Globe, April 20, 1988]

One CARP report called a CISPES supporter "well-educated in Marxism" while other CARP reports attached "clippings culled from communist-inspired front groups." The Globe investigation reported that Frank Varelli, who worked for the FBI from 1981 to 1984 coordinating the CISPES probe, said an FBI agent paid members of the Moon organization at Southern Methodist University while the Moon activists were raiding and disrupting CISPES rallies.

"Every week, an agent I worked with used to go to SMU to pay the Moonies," Varelli said in an interview. Because of the CARP harassment, CISPES closed its SMU chapter.

While Moon’s organization was helping to spy on American citizens, the case against Moon as a suspected intelligence agent for South Korea was petering out. It’s still not clear why.

"I don’t think there was any doubt that the Moon newspaper took a virulently pro-South Korea position," Oliver "Buck" Revell, then a senior FBI official in the national security area, told me. "But whether there was something illegal about it..." His voice trailed off. As for the internal security investigation of Moon, Revell added only: "It led its full life."

Cash Source

Where Moon gets his cash has been a long-time mystery that few American conservatives have been eager to solve.

"Some Moonie-watchers even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers for drug trafficking," wrote Scott and Jon Lee Anderson. "Others feel that, despite the disclosures of Koreagate, the Church has simply continued to do the Korean government’s international bidding and is receiving official funds to do so."

While Moon’s representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their far-flung activities - including many businesses that insiders say lose money - Moon’s spokesmen have angrily denied recurring allegations about profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs.

In a typical response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin, Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, "I deny categorically these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love." [Clarin, July 7, 1996]

Without doubt, however, Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides collaborating with Sasakawa and other leaders of the Japanese yakuza and the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia, Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contra movement which was permeated with drug smugglers.

Moon’s organization also used its political clout in Washington to intimidate or discredit government officials and journalists who tried to investigate those criminal activities. In the mid-1980s, for instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing the evidence of contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under attacks from Moon’s Washington Times.

An Associated Press story that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in an April 11, 1986, front-page Washington Times article with the headline: "Story on [contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy."

When Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, conducted a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra-drug trafficking, the Washington Times denounced him, too. The newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful political witch hunt. "Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive, in vain," announced the headline of one Times article on Aug. 13, 1986.

But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing, the Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush administration efforts to get at the truth.

"Kerry staffers damaged FBI probe," said one Times article that opened with the assertion: "Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan resistance, federal law enforcement officials said." [Washington Times, Jan. 21, 1987]

Despite the attacks, Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of contra units - both in Costa Rica and Honduras - were implicated in the cocaine trade.

"It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers," Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13, 1989. "In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter."

Kerry’s investigation also found that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments heading north during the contra war.

"Elements of the Honduran military were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on," the report said. "These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue." [Drug, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy - the Kerry Report - December 1988]

The Kerry investigation represented an indirect challenge to Vice President George H.W. Bush, who had been named by President Reagan to head the South Florida Task Force for interdicting the flow of drugs into the United States and was later put in charge of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System.

In short, Bush was the lead official in the U.S. government to cope with the drug trade, which he himself had dubbed a national security threat.

If the American voters came to believe that Bush had compromised his anti-drug responsibilities to protect the image of the Nicaraguan contras and other rightists in Central America, that judgment could have threatened the political future of Bush and his politically ambitious family.

By publicly challenging press and congressional investigations of this touchy subject, the Washington Times helped keep an unfavorable media spotlight from swinging in the direction of the Vice President.

Drug Evidence

The evidence shows that there was much more to the contra-drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush administration or Moon’s organization wanted the American people to know in the 1980s.

The evidence - assembled over the years by investigators at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies - indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup operatives were only the first in a line of clever drug smugglers that tried to squeeze under the protective umbrella of Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war. [For details, see Robert Parry, Lost History, or for a summary of the contra-drug evidence, see Consortiumnews.com’s "Gary Webb’s Death: American Tragedy."]

Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up to the contras and sharing some of the profits, as a way to minimize investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies.

The contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia operations throughout the United States.

The drug traffickers’ strategy also worked. In some cases, U.S. intelligence officials bent over backwards not to take timely notice of contra-connected drug trafficking out of fear that fuller investigations would embarrass the contras and their patrons in the Reagan-Bush administration.

For instance, on Oct. 22, 1982, a cable written by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations stated, "There are indications of links between [a U.S. religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms."

The cable added that the participants were planning a meeting in Costa Rica for such a deal. When the cable arrived, senior CIA officials were concerned. On Oct. 27, CIA headquarters asked for more information from a U.S. law enforcement agency.

The law enforcement agency expanded on its report by telling the CIA that representatives of the contra FDN and another contra force, the UDN, would be meeting with several unidentified U.S. citizens. But then, the CIA reversed itself, deciding that it wanted no more information on the grounds that U.S. citizens were involved.

"In light of the apparent participation of U.S. persons throughout, agree you should not pursue the matter further," CIA headquarters wrote on Nov. 3, 1982. Two weeks later, after discouraging additional investigation, CIA headquarters suggested it might be necessary to knock down the allegations of a guns-for-drugs deal as "misinformation."

The CIA’s Latin American Division, however, responded on Nov. 18, 1982, that several contra officials had gone to San Francisco for the meetings with supporters, presumably as part of the same guns-for-drugs deal. But the CIA inspector general found no additional information about that deal in CIA files.

Also, by keeping the names censored when the documents were released in 1998, the CIA prevented outside investigators from examining whether the "U.S. religious organization" had any affiliation with Moon’s network of quasi-religious groups, which were assisting the contras at that time.

Red Flags

As Moon continued to expand his influence in American politics, some Republicans began to raise red flags.

In 1983, the GOP’s moderate Ripon Society charged that the New Right had entered "an alliance of expediency" with Moon’s church. Ripon’s chairman, Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, released a study which alleged that the College Republican National Committee "solicited and received" money from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media of benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.

Leach said the Unification Church has "infiltrated the New Right and the party it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well." Leach’s news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration.)

Despite periodic fretting over Moon’s influence, American conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance. When White House aide Oliver North was scratching for support for the Nicaraguan contras, for instance, the Washington Times established a contra fund-raising operation.
By the mid-1980s, Moon’s Unification Church had carved out a niche as an acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers, Moon boasted that "without knowing it, even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon]."

Yet, Moon also made clear that his longer-range goal was destroying the U.S. Constitution and America’s democratic form of government.

"History will make the position of Reverend Moon clear, and his enemies, the American population and government will bow down to him," Moon said, speaking of himself in the third person. "That is Father’s tactic, the natural subjugation of the American government and population."

In September 1987, conservative columnist Andrew Ferguson cited some of Moon’s anti-American sentiments as cause for concern, despite his appealing anticommunism.

"There is little else in Unificationism that American conservatives will find compelling," except, of course, the money, Ferguson wrote in the American Spectator. "They’re the best in town as far as putting their money with their mouth is," Ferguson quoted one Washington-based conservative as saying.
Though Moon’s money sources remained shrouded in secrecy, his cash undeniably gave the Right an edge over its political adversaries.

After the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in fall 1986, the Washington Times and other Moon-related organizations rushed to the battlements to defend Reagan’s White House and Oliver North.

Ronald S. Godwin, who was a link between Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and Moon’s Washington Times, raised funds for North through a group called the Interamerican Partnership, which was a forerunner to North’s own Freedom Alliance. [See Common Cause Magazine, Fall 1993]

Another Moon-connected group, the American Freedom Coalition, went to bat for North. According to Andrew Leigh, who worked for a Moon front called Global Image Associates, the American Freedom Coalition broadcast a pro-North video, "Ollie North: Fight for Freedom," more than 600 times on more than 100 TV stations.

Leigh quoted one coalition official as saying that AFC received $5 million to $6 million from business interests associated with Moon. AFC also bragged that it helped put George H.W. Bush into the White House in 1988 by distributing 30 million pieces of political literature. [Washington Post, Oct. 15, 1989]

When Vice President Bush was struggling in his 1988 presidential campaign against Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, Moon’s Washington Times came to the rescue again publishing a slanted story about Dukakis’s mental health.

Times reporter Gene Grabowski had interviewed a Dukakis relative and asked whether Dukakis had ever sought psychiatric help during a low period in his life. "It’s possible, but I doubt it," the relative responded.

Grabowski’s editors, however, snipped out the phrase "but I doubt it" while keeping the phrase "it’s possible" and then spotlighting the story under a headline, "Dukakis Kin Hints at Sessions."

Dukakis’s supposedly questionable mental health became an important theme for the Republicans. President Reagan personally underscored the message by referring to Dukakis as a "cripple," which forced more mainstream publications to reprise the suspicions about the psychiatric treatment.

The story spread doubts among the electorate about Dukakis’s fitness for office. For his part, Grabowski, a former Associated Press reporter, resigned in protest of the distortion, but by then the damage to Dukakis was done.

Weird Behavior

But even as Moon consolidated his influence in Washington during the 12-year Reagan-Bush reign, Moon’s weird behavior was splitting the church leadership and making some American conservatives nervous.

In 1989, published reports disclosed that Moon had declared that one of his sons, Heung Jin Moon who died in a car crash in 1984, had come back to life in the body of a church member from Zimbabwe.

The muscular African - known inside the church as the "black Heung Jin" - then compelled church leaders to stand before him and engage in humiliating self-criticisms, sometimes making them sing songs.

During one of these rituals in December 1988, the Zimbabwean severely beat longtime Moon lieutenant Bo Hi Pak, who was then publisher of the Washington Times. Pak reportedly suffered brain damage and impaired speech from the assault, which church sources told me had been sanctioned by Moon after Pak had fallen out of favor. Afterwards, Pak was transferred back to Asia.

Commenting on the beating of Pak, former Washington Times editor William P. Cheshire wrote, "Where the Moonies are concerned, it seems clear, we are dealing with something besides just an exotic cult. The Pak beating smacks strongly of Jonestown [the site of a mass murder-suicide by a religious cult].

"And with Moon lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars a year on newspapers, magazines and political-action groups in this country and abroad, such occult and aggressive practices give rise to secular apprehensions. If the ’reincarnation’ doesn’t rock those conservative shops that have been taking money from Moon, not even fire-breathing dragons would disturb them." [San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 1989]

But Moon’s organization had proved itself too valuable to be cast aside, regardless of the strange behavior and the questionable sources of money. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Washington Times was the daily billboard where conservatives placed their messages to each other and to the outside world.

In 1991, when conservative commentator Wesley Pruden was named the new editor of the Washington Times, President George H.W. Bush invited Pruden to a private White House lunch. The purpose, Bush explained, was "just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day." [Washington Times, May 17, 1992]

Government documents also showed that the Reagan-Bush team was shielding Moon’s operation from investigations at the same time Moon’s newspaper was doing the same for the administration.

According to Justice Department documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, federal authorities were rebuffing hundreds of requests - many from common citizens - for examination of Moon’s foreign ties and money sources.

Typical of the responses was a May 18, 1989, letter from Assistant Attorney General Carol T. Crawford rejecting the possibility that Moon’s organization be required to divulge its foreign-funded propaganda under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

"With respect to FARA, the Department is faced with First Amendment considerations involving the free exercise of religion," Crawford said. "As you know, the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom is not limited to the traditional, well-established religions."

A 1992 PBS documentary about Moon’s political empire and its free-spending habits started another flurry of citizen demands for an investigation, according to the Justice Department files.

One letter from a private citizen to the Justice Department stated, "I write in consternation and disgust at the apparent support, or at least the sheltering, of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, a foreign agent ... who has subverted the American political system for the past 20 years. ... Did Reagan and/or Bush receive financial support from Moon or his agents during any of their election campaigns in violation of federal law?"

Another letter complained that "apparently Moon gave the Bush and Reagan campaigns millions of dollars in support and helped fund the [Nicaraguan] contras as well as sponsoring rallys [sic] in 50 states to support the Persian Gulf war. No wonder the Justice Department turns a blind eye?"

"I feel it is necessary to find out who is financing the operation and why other countries are trying to direct the policies of the United States," wrote another citizen. "If even one-half of the allegations are true, Moon and his assistants belong in jail rather than being welcomed and supported at the highest level of Washington."

As public demands mounted for Moon and his front groups to register as foreign agents, the Justice Department added a new argument to its reasons to say no. In an Aug. 19, 1992, letter, Assistant Attorney General Robert S. Mueller dismissed a suggestion that the Moon-backed American Freedom Council should register under FARA because Moon, a South Korean citizen, had obtained U.S. resident-alien status - or a "green card."

Mueller, who is now FBI director, wrote that "in the absence of a foreign principal, there is no requirement for registration. ... The Reverend Sun Myung Moon enjoys the status of permanent resident alien in the United States and therefore does not fall within FARA’s definition of foreign principal. It follows that the Act is not applicable to the [American Freedom] Council because of its association with Reverend Moon."

Ironically, Mueller, who went out of his way to find reasons not to investigate Moon, touts in his official FBI biography his background investigating and prosecuting "major financial fraud, terrorist and public corruption cases, as well as narcotics conspiracies and international money launderers."

Hidden Money

Some prominent figures on the American Right went to great lengths to conceal their financial connections to Moon, making sure his assistance passed through several hands before it got to their pockets.

For instance, on Jan. 28, 1995, a beaming Rev. Jerry Falwell told his Old Time Gospel Hour congregation news that seemed heaven sent. The rotund televangelist hailed two Virginia businessmen as financial saviors of debt-ridden Liberty University, the fundamentalist Christian school that Falwell had made the crown jewel of his Religious Right empire.

"They had to borrow money, hock their houses, hock everything," said Falwell. "Thank God for friends like Dan Reber and Jimmy Thomas." Falwell’s congregation rose as one to applaud. The star of the moment was Daniel Reber, who was standing behind Falwell.

Reber and Thomas earned Falwell’s public gratitude by excusing the Lynchburg, Virginia, school of about one-half of its $73 million debt. In the late 1980s, that flood of red ink had forced Falwell to abandon his Moral Majority political organization and the debt nearly drowned Liberty University in bankruptcy.

Reber and Thomas came to Falwell’s rescue in the nick of time. Their non-profit Christian Heritage Foundation of Forest, Virginia, snapped up a big chunk of Liberty’s debt for $2.5 million, a fraction of its face value. Thousands of small religious investors who had bought church construction bonds through a Texas company were the big losers.

But Falwell was joyous. He told local reporters that the moment was "the greatest single day of financial advantage" in the school’s history.

Left unmentioned in the happy sermon was the identity of the bigger guardian angel who had appeared at the propitious moment to protect Falwell’s financial interests. Falwell’s secret benefactor was Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed South Korean messiah who is controversial with many fundamentalist Christians because of his strange Biblical interpretations and his alleged brainwashing of thousands of young Americans, often shattering their bonds with their biological families.

Covertly, Moon had helped bail out Liberty University through one of his front groups which funneled $3.5 million to the Reber-Thomas Christian Heritage Foundation, the non-profit that had purchased the school’s debt.

I discovered this Moon-Falwell connection while looking for something else: how much Moon’s Women’s Federation for World Peace had paid former President George H.W. Bush for a series of speeches in Asia in 1995. I obtained the federation’s Internal Revenue Service records but discovered that Bush’s undisclosed speaking fee was buried in a line item of $13.6 million for conference expenses.

There was, however, another listing for a $3.5 million "educational" grant to the Christian Heritage Foundation. A call to the Virginia corporate records office confirmed that the foundation was the one run by Reber and Thomas.

In a subsequent interview, the Women Federation’s vice president Susan Fefferman confirmed that the $3.5 million grant had gone to "Mr. Falwell’s people" for the benefit of Liberty University. "It was Dan Reber," she said. But she could not recall much else about the grant, even though it was by far the largest single grant awarded by the federation that year.

For details on the grant, Fefferman referred me to Keith Cooperrider, the federation’s treasurer. Cooperrider was also the chief financial officer of Moon’s Washington Times and a longtime Unification Church functionary.
Cooperrider did not return calls seeking comment. Falwell and Reber also failed to respond to my calls, though Falwell later defended his acceptance of the money by saying it had no influence on his ministry.

"If the American Atheists Society or Saddam Hussein himself ever sent an unrestricted gift to any of my ministries," Falwell said, "be assured I will operate on Billy Sunday’s philosophy: The Devil’s had it long enough, and quickly cash the check." [See "Moon-Related Funds Filter to Evangelicals," Christianity Today, posted on Web, Feb. 9, 1998]

But the public record also reveals that Falwell solicited Moon’s help in bailing out Liberty University. In a lawsuit filed in the Circuit Court of Bedford County - a community in southwestern Virginia - two of Reber’s former business associates alleged that Reber and Falwell flew to South Korea on Jan. 9, 1994, on a seven-day "secret trip" to meet "with representatives of the Unification Church."

The court document states that Reber and Falwell were accompanied to South Korea by Ronald S. Godwin, who had been executive director of Falwell’s Moral Majority before signing on as vice president of Moon’s Washington Times.

According to Bedford County court records, Reber, Falwell and Godwin also had discussions at Liberty University in 1993 with Dong Moon Joo, one of Moon’s right-hand men and president of the Washington Times.

Though Reber was queried about the purposes of the Moon-connected meetings in the court papers, he settled the business dispute before responding to interrogatories or submitting to a deposition. He denied any legal wrongdoing.

Anti-American Tirades

By the mid-1990s, Sun Myung Moon represented a potential embarrassment to the American Right because Moon had grown harshly anti-American after his political ally, George H.W. Bush, was ousted from office.

The conservatives were lucky that few American news outlets were interested in the increasingly bizarre utterances from the South Korean benefactor of U.S. conservative causes.

In earlier years, though privately disdaining America’s concept of individual liberty, Moon publicly stressed his love for the United States. On Sept. 18, 1976, for instance, Moon staged a red-white-and-blue flag-draped rally at the Washington Monument, declaring that "I not only respect America, but truly love this nation."

Even years later, Unification Church recruiters would show that video to young Americans. One recruit, college freshman John Stacey, was impressed with the patriotic images after he was shown the video by the Moon front, Collegiate Association for Research of Principles (CARP).

"American flags were everywhere," recalled Stacey, a thin young man from central New Jersey. "The first video they showed me was Reverend Moon praising America and praising Christianity." In 1992, Stacey considered himself a patriotic American and a faithful Christian.

Stacey soon joined the Unification Church and rose to become a Pacific Northwest leader in CARP. "They liked to hang me up because I’m young and I’m American," Stacey told me. "It’s a good image for the church. They try to create the all-American look."

But Stacey gradually discovered a different reality. At a 1995 leadership conference at a church compound in Anchorage, Alaska, Stacey met face-to-face with Moon who was sitting on a throne-like chair while a group of American followers, many middle-aged converts from the 1970s, sat at his feet like children.

"Reverend Moon looked at me straight in the eye and said, ’America is Satanic. America is so Satanic that even hamburgers should be considered evil, because they come from America,’" Stacey said. "Hamburgers! My father was a butcher, so that bothered me. ... I started feeling that I was betraying my country."

Moon’s criticism of Jesus also unsettled Stacey. "In the church, it’s very anti-Jesus," Stacey said. "Jesus failed miserably. He died a lonely death. Reverend Moon is the hero that comes and saves pathetic Jesus. Reverend Moon is better than God. ... That’s why I left the Moonies. Because it started to feel like idolatry. He’s promoting idolatry."

After years in the sunlight of acceptance from the Reagan-Bush administrations, Moon’s entered years of eclipse as his influence faded during the Clinton administration. His animosity toward the United States grew.
"America has become the kingdom of individualism, and its people are individualists," Moon preached in Tarrytown, N.Y., on March 5, 1995. "You must realize that America has become the kingdom of Satan."

In a speech to his followers on Aug. 4, 1996, Moon vowed that the church’s eventual dominance over the United States would be followed by the liquidation of American individualism and the establishment of Moon’s theocratic rule.

"Americans who continue to maintain their privacy and extreme individualism are foolish people," Moon declared. "The world will reject Americans who continue to be so foolish. Once you have this great power of love, which is big enough to swallow entire America, there may be some individuals who complain inside your stomach. However, they will be digested."

During the same sermon, Moon decried assertive American women.
"American women have the tendency to consider that women are in the subject position," he said. "However, woman’s shape is like that of a receptacle. The concave shape is a receiving shape. Whereas, the convex shape symbolizes giving. ... Since man contains the seed of life, he should plant it in the deepest place. Does woman contain the seed of life? Absolutely not. Then if you desire to receive the seed of life, you have to become an absolute object. In order to qualify as an absolute object, you need to demonstrate absolute faith, love and obedience to your subject. Absolute obedience means that you have to negate yourself 100 percent."

Though Moon had downplayed his provocative sexual beliefs since coming to America, sometimes the old themes popped up. After Moon spoke in Minneapolis on Oct. 26, 1996, a reporter for the Unification News, an internal newsletter, commented that "what the audience heard was not the usual things that one would expect to hear from a minister. Reverend Moon’s talk included a very frank discussion of the purpose, role and true value of the sexual organs." [See Unification News, December 1996]

On May 1, 1997, Moon told a group of followers that "the country that represents Satan’s harvest is America." Moon also declared that "Satan created this kind of Hell on Earth," the United States. He again denounced American women as having "inherited the line of prostitutes. ... American women are even worse because they practice free sex just because they enjoy it."

Lashing out at the United States again, Moon decried American tolerance of homosexuals, whom he likened to "dirty dung-eating dogs." For Americans who "truly love such dogs," Moon said, "they also become like dung-eating dogs and produce that quality of life." [Washington Post, Nov. 23-24, 1997]

Bush to the Rescue

In fall 1996, another of Sun Myung Moon’s forays into the high-priced world of media and politics was in trouble. South American journalists were writing scathingly about his plan to open a regional newspaper that Moon hoped would give him the same influence in Latin America that the Washington Times had in the United States.

As publication day ticked closer for Moon’s Tiempos del Mundo, leading South American newspapers recounted unsavory chapters of Moon’s history, including his links with South Korea’s fearsome intelligence service and with violent anticommunist organizations that bordered on neo-fascist.

Moon’s disciples fumed about the critical stories and accused the Argentine news media of trying to sabotage Moon’s plans for an inaugural gala in Buenos Aires on Nov. 23, 1996. "The local press was trying to undermine the event," complained the church’s internal newsletter, Unification News.

Given the controversy, Argentina’s president, Carlos Menem, rejected Moon’s invitation. But Moon had a trump card to play in his bid for South American respectability: the endorsement of an ex-President of the United States, George H.W. Bush.

Agreeing to speak at the newspaper’s launch, Bush flew aboard a private plane, arriving in Buenos Aires on Nov. 22. Bush stayed at Menem’s official residence, the Olivos, though Bush’s presence didn’t change Menem’s mind about attending the gala.

Still, as the biggest VIP at the inaugural gala, Bush saved the day, Moon’s followers gushed. "Mr. Bush’s presence as keynote speaker gave the event invaluable prestige," wrote the Unification News. "Father [Moon] and Mother [Mrs. Moon] sat with several of the True Children [Moon’s offspring] just a few feet from the podium" where Bush spoke before about 900 of Moon’s guests at the Sheraton Hotel.

"I want to salute Reverend Moon, who is the founder of the Washington Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo," Bush declared. "A lot of my friends in South America don’t know about the Washington Times, but it is an independent voice. The editors of the Washington Times tell me that never once has the man with the vision interfered with the running of the paper, a paper that in my view brings sanity to Washington, D.C. I am convinced that Tiempos del Mundo is going to do the same thing" in Latin America.

Bush’s speech was so effusive that it surprised even Moon’s followers. "Once again, heaven turned a disappointment into a victory," the Unification News exulted. "Everyone was delighted to hear his compliments. We knew he would give an appropriate and ’nice’ speech, but praise in Father’s presence was more than we expected. ... It was vindication. We could just hear a sigh of relief from Heaven."

While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s newspaper as a voice of "sanity" may be a matter of opinion, Bush’s vouching for the Washington Times’ editorial independence simply wasn’t true.

Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates. The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that "I have blood on my hands" for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.

But Bush’s boosterism was just what Moon needed in South America. "The day after," the Unification News observed, "the press did a 180-degree about-turn once they realized that the event had the support of a U.S. President." With Bush’s help, Moon had gained another beachhead for his worldwide business-religious-political-media empire.

After the event, Menem told reporters from La Nacion that Bush had claimed privately to be only a mercenary who did not really know Moon. "Bush told me he came and charged money to do it," Menem said. [La Nacion, Nov. 26, 1996].

But Bush was not telling Menem the whole story. By fall 1996, Bush and Moon had been working in political tandem for at least a decade and a half. The ex-President also had been earning huge speaking fees as a front man for Moon for more than a year.

In September 1995, Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave six speeches in Asia for the Women’s Federation for World Peace, a group led by Moon’s wife, Hak Ja Han Moon. In one speech on Sept. 14 to 50,000 Moon supporters in Tokyo, Bush insisted that "what really counts is faith, family and friends."

Mrs. Moon followed the ex-President to the podium and announced that "it has to be Reverend Moon to save the United States, which is in decline because of the destruction of the family and moral decay."[Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1995]

In summer 1996, Bush was lending his prestige to Moon again. Bush addressed the Moon-connected Family Federation for World Peace in Washington, an event that gained notoriety when comedian Bill Cosby tried to back out of his contract after learning of Moon’s connection. Bush had no such qualms. [Washington Post, July 30, 1996]

Throughout these public appearances for Moon, Bush’s office refused to divulge how much Moon-affiliated organizations have paid the ex-President. But estimates of Bush’s fee for the Buenos Aires appearance alone ran between $100,000 and $500,000. Sources close to the Unification Church have put the total Bush-Moon package in the millions, with one source telling me that Bush stood to make as much as $10 million total from Moon’s organization.

The senior George Bush may have had a political motive as well. By 1996, sources close to Bush were saying the ex-President was working hard to enlist well-to-do conservatives and their money behind the presidential candidacy of his son, George W. Bush. Moon was one of the deepest pockets in right-wing circles.

Fishing for Influence

In a sermon on Jan. 2, 1996, Moon was unusually blunt about how he expected the church’s wealth to buy influence among the powerful in South America, just as it did in Washington.

"Father has been practicing the philosophy of fishing here," Moon said, through an interpreter who spoke of Moon in the third person. "He [Moon] gave the bait to Uruguay and then the bigger fish of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay kept their mouths open, waiting for a bigger bait silently. The bigger the fish, the bigger the mouth. Therefore, Father is able to hook them more easily."

As part of his business strategy, Moon explained that he would dot the continent with small airstrips and construct bases for submarines which could evade Coast Guard patrols. His airfield project would allow tourists to visit "hidden, untouched, small places" throughout South America, he said.

"Therefore, they need small airplanes and small landing strips in the remote countryside," Moon said. "In the near future, we will have many small airports throughout the world." Moon wanted the submarines because "there are so many restrictions due to national boundaries worldwide. If you have a submarine, you don’t have to be bound in that way."

(As strange as Moon’s submarine project might sound, a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Japan, dated Feb. 18, 1994, cited press reports that a Moon-connected Japanese company, Toen Shoji, had bought 40 Russian submarines. The subs were supposedly bound for North Korea where they were to be dismantled and melted down as scrap.)

Moon also recognized the importance of media in protecting his curious operations, which sounded a lot like an invitation to drug traffickers.

He boasted to his followers that with his vast array of political and media assets, he will dominate the new Information Age. "That is why Father has been combining and organizing scholars from all over the world, and also newspaper organizations - in order to make propaganda," Moon said.

With his background and prominence, Moon and his organization would seem a natural attraction for U.S. government scrutiny. But Moon may have purchased insurance against any intrusive investigation by buying so many powerful American politicians that Washington’s power centers can no more afford the scrutiny than he can.

In the 1990s, Moon remembered to keep up some of his important friendships in the United States. In 1997, his Washington Times Foundation made a $1 million-plus donation to George H.W. Bush’s presidential library in Texas. [Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1997]

Moon got a pass even when there was first-hand evidence of his money-laundering.

In Nansook Moon’s 1998 memoirs, In the Shadow of the Moons, Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law - writing under her maiden name Nansook Hong - alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to deceive U.S. Customs agents.

"The Unification Church was a cash operation," Nansook Hong wrote. "I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at his breakfast table.

"The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into the United States; they would tell customs agents that they were in America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet."

Mrs. Moon pressed her daughter-in-law into one cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong wrote.

Mrs. Moon had received "stacks of money" and divvied it up among her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote. "I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills," she recalled. "I hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to higher laws."

U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above $10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure.

In the Shadow of the Moons raised anew the question of whether Moon’s money laundering - from mysterious sources in both Asia and South America - has made him a conduit for illicit foreign money influencing the U.S. government and American politics.

Moon’s spokesmen have denied that he launders drug money or moves money from other criminal enterprises. They attribute his wealth to donations and business profits, but have refused to open Moon’s records for public inspection.

Still, Nansook Hong’s first-hand allegations and other allegations of money-laundering in Uruguay might reasonably have prompted more questions in the United States about how Moon could continue lavishing billions of dollars on U.S. conservative publications and causes.

But those follow-up questions were never asked. Moon apparently had hooked too many large-mouthed fish in the United States.

Moon’s successful fishing in political/media waters also seems to have protected him and his anti-Americanism from the kind of ugly public attention that has inundated Jeremiah Wright.

House Committee Threatens Rove With Subpoena

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By Ben Evans

Washington - The House Judiciary Committee threatened Thursday to subpoena former White House adviser Karl Rove if he does not agree by May 12 to testify about former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman's corruption case.

In a letter to Rove's attorney, committee Democrats called it "completely unacceptable" that the Republican political strategist has rejected the panel's request for sworn testimony even as he discusses the matter publicly through the media.

"We can see no justification for his refusal to speak on the record to the committee," the letter states. "We urge you and your client to reconsider ... or we will have no choice but to consider the use of compulsory process."

Committee Democrats are investigating whether Rove and Republican appointees at the Justice Department influenced Siegelman's prosecution to kill his chances for re-election. It is part of a broader inquiry into whether U.S. attorneys were fired for not aggressively pursuing cases against Democrats.

Siegelman, a Democrat who served one term as governor after being elected in 1998, was convicted in 2006 on bribery and other charges and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He was recently released on bond pending appeal.

Last year, Alabama attorney and one-time Republican campaign volunteer Jill Simpson, told the committee under oath that she heard conversations among GOP operatives in 2002 suggesting that Rove was pushing the Justice Department to pursue a conviction against Siegelman. She also has said Rove asked her in 2001 to find evidence that Siegelman was cheating on his wife.

Rove, who frequently worked in Alabama politics before orchestrating President Bush's White House campaigns, has denied having anything to do with the case. In a recent magazine article, he called Simpson a "complete lunatic" and said he had never heard of her.

The career prosecutors who handled Siegelman's case also have denied any political influence.

Thursday's threat marks the latest development in a lengthy standoff between President Bush and Congress over testimony from current and former White House staffers.

The committee has issued or threatened subpoenas to more than half a dozen administration officials and is suing White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers for refusing to comply with subpoenas on the U.S. attorney firings.

The White House has generally maintained that their testimony is off-limits from congressional oversight under executive privilege.

Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, maintains that Rove must defer to that position. But as the White House has offered on other matters, Luskin wrote the committee this week that Rove would discuss the Siegelman case on the condition that his comments not be under oath and not be transcribed.

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and several other lawmakers rejected the offer, saying such an interview "will not permit us to obtain a straightforward and clear record."

Agricultural corporation boast huge profits in midst of food crisis

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By Naomi Spencer

As inflation and shortages expose billions to hunger worldwide, agricultural giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Company revealed a 42 percent leap in quarterly profits. The announcement follows similarly skyrocketing earnings reports from half a dozen other agribusinesses and suppliers, as well as from major oil companies BP, Shell, and Exxon.

For the third fiscal quarter ending March 31, ADM reported $517 million in profit. In an April 29 conference call, executives attributed record earnings throughout all of the company’s operations to an enormous increase in speculative activity in commodities markets.

“Volatility in commodity markets presented unprecedented opportunities,” ADM chief executive Patricia Woertz told investor analysts in on the call. “Once again, our team leveraged our financial flexibility and global asset base to capture those opportunities to deliver shareholder value.”

Commodities markets have been flooded with investors from out of the credit and housing markets looking for more sound sources of profit. As a result, the grain, metals and oil markets have been subject to rampant turnover of stocks and huge fluctuations in the valuation of the most basic goods.

The price of oil, which has risen 75 percent in the past year, drove up freight and farming and fertilizer production costs substantially, greatly affecting grain production costs.

More directly, speculation and investment in the food system have soared. According to data from agricultural research firm AgResource, investment in corn, soybeans, wheat and livestock trades has ballooned from $10 billion in 2006 to over $47 billion.

In the past year, per bushel wheat prices have risen by 64 percent, corn is up 68 percent; soybeans 76 percent. Rice prices have risen by 134 percent.

In addition to speculation, however, as ADM CEO Woertz’s comments reveal, the enormous price rises for staple grains have also been attended by the deliberate influence of the corporations at every stage along the production and supply lines, as well as on the trade floors.

Significantly, amidst the most severe global grain shortfall and inflationary surge in decades, the company recorded a sevenfold increase in profit—from $46 million quarterly to $366 million over the year—in its grain storage, transportation and trade operations. These operations comprise the company’s agricultural services division, which, as the Associated Press noted Wednesday, “includes a large grain-trading operation that tries to profit from shifts in commodity prices and that buffers Archer-Daniels against price spikes.”

As with the continual record-breaking profits of the big oil companies, the fortunes of the large agribusinesses find their direct express in the exploitation of the world’s population. Food price spikes have triggered rioting, social breakdown, misery, and desperation in countries throughout Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.

In developed countries, including the US, food and fuel inflation are increasingly burdensome for working class families already struggling in a worsening job market and housing crisis. For the poorest populations around the world, the cost of food has become untenable.

In an expression of nervousness over the situation, many national governments, international organizations and the press have called for emergency controls on exports, lowering of import barriers, and aid for food programs. Governments have also sought to stockpile grains, scooping up US crops for relatively less cost as the dollar declines, as a form of domestic insurance against unrest. However, the massive purchases have had the consequence of exacerbating volatility on the US grain exchanges and further inflating grain futures.

Agriculture is increasingly a vertically integrated industry, with a few mega-companies dominating the fundamental aspects of the food system—allocation, trading, processing and distribution—with the goal of maximizing the amount of profit that can be turned between payment to farmers and sale to higher-level purchasers. As the largest grain processor in the US, ADM oversees a huge proportion of the country’s corn, soybeans and other crops. It also processes raw grains into ethanol and meal for animal and human food industries, and distributes grains on the domestic and international markets.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal noted enormous profit increases for all of the largest agricultural suppliers and processors. The second-largest grain processor, Cargill, recorded quarterly earnings of $1.03 billion February 29, up 86 percent from a year ago. Third-largest processor Bunge reported $289 million, shooting up 1,964 percent over last year. Farm equipment manufacturer Deere & Co. reported a 55 increase in quarterly earnings over the year, to $369 million.

Monsanto, a company with a virtual monopoly on crop seed and herbicide production, reported $1.13 billion in profits for the latest quarter, more than doubling profits of the preceding quarter. Other corporations with significant agricultural operations, including Syngenta AG, DuPont and Dow Chemical, have also posted huge profits.

Mosaic, a leading producer of fertilizer components potash and diammonium phosphate, took in over $520 million in the last fiscal quarter, up 1,134 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. As Fortune magazine pointed out May 1, as high as Mosaic was able to sell fertilizer over the quarter, it was actually selling for less than half of the contemporaneous market prices due to the “time lag in its sales contracts.”

The magazine cited comments from Merrill Lynch analyst Don Carson, who suggested that while record-breaking quarterly profit-taking was “significant, it will appear minor when compared to the margin expansion in coming quarters.”

Five years after “mission accomplished,” sharp rise in Iraqi and US casualties

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By Bill Van Auken

May 1 marked the fifth anniversary of the infamous “mission accomplished” speech delivered by President George W. Bush aboard a US aircraft carrier. Five years after what Bush proclaimed to be the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, US casualties have reached a seven-month high, while the Iraqi death toll continues to mount.

In April, 52 US troops were killed in Iraq, the highest number since last September. The bulk of the casualties came in Baghdad, mostly in the crowded Shia slum neighborhoods of Sadr City. The sharp rise in US dead and wounded, and the far greater death and destruction being inflicted on Iraqi civilians, is the result of a month-old offensive launched by US and Iraqi puppet forces against the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to nationalist Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

Citing “security officials,” Agence France-Presse said that 1,073 Iraqis were killed last month. This is undoubtedly a gross underestimation of the real death toll. One hospital alone in Sadr City reported taking in 400 bodies.

The two major hospitals in the area, which is home to more than 2 million people, said that they had received nearly 2,500 wounded. The medical facilities are overwhelmed with the number of casualties. They report that they lack sufficient numbers of severe trauma specialists to treat the wounded and are running low on basic supplies, including clean water.

“The situation is very critical and unstable,” Abbas Owaid, director-general of Fatima al-Zahra hospital told the United Nations news agency IRIN. “There is still a pressing need for bandages, pain killers, syringes and other first aid materials. Blood is available as there are people who donate, but we still need more as there are injuries.”

Owaid said that ambulances were coming under attack and that patients and staff alike were prevented from reaching his hospital because US-backed Iraqi forces had taken up positions nearby.

A senior military official at the Pentagon used a press briefing Wednesday to assert that the sharp climb in casualties did not indicate an unraveling of the US “surge,” the escalation of the American intervention that sent another 30,000 troops into the occupied country last year.

“While it is sad to see an increase in casualties, again, I don’t think it is necessarily indicative of a major change in the operating environment, at least from the US perspective,” said Lt. Gen. Carter Ham, director for operations of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff. He added, “When the level of fighting increases, then, sadly, the level of casualties does tend to rise.” He stressed that the US military had never made a decline in casualties “The measure of how things are progressing in Iraq.”

On the contrary, both the Pentagon and the White House were until recently lauding the relative decline in the carnage against the Iraqi people and the reduced number of US soldiers killed in action as proof of the “surge’s” success. Now, the US military is providing daily body counts in which it invariably describes all those killed as “criminals” and “terrorists.” Hospitals receiving the victims, however, report that the bulk of them are civilians, including large numbers of women and children.

The military has been ordered to achieve a political objective deemed crucial for rescuing Washington’s faltering attempt to impose colonial domination over the oil-rich country. It is to take on and defeat the Mahdi Army and thereby weaken the Sadrists, who have voiced opposition to both the US occupation and the bid to open up Iraq’s oil reserves to exploitation by US-based energy conglomerates. The aim is to complete this task before October provincial elections, which Sadr’s followers would otherwise be expected to win in the key southern provinces that contain the bulk of Iraq’s oil assets.

To carry out this task, Washington is prepared to spill as much Iraqi blood as it takes, and to accept a sizeable increase in American casualties as well. One result has been a steady increase in the number of flag-draped coffins returning to towns and cities across America. The news of these individual tragedies is confined to the local media, with the real cost of this criminal war largely concealed from the American people.

Among those who last month lost their lives in the five-year-old war to conquer Iraq were the following:

* Army Specialist David P. McCormick, 26, who died as a result of wounds suffered in a rocket attack April 28. The soldier’s longtime friend and minister, Mike Zimmerman, described him as “a pretty quiet person,” who was “looking forward to getting out” and wanted to go to college for business administration.

* Air Force Technical Sergeant Anthony Capra, 31, who died April 9 from wounds inflicted by a roadside bomb. Capra, who is survived by a wife and five children, was serving his fourth tour of duty in Iraq.

* Sergeant Jesse Ault, a national guardsman from Virginia, who died April 9 from wounds resulting from an improvised explosive device (IED). He had left the guard, but when his wife, also a guard member, was recalled for a second tour in Iraq, he re-enlisted in order to take her place and allow her to stay with their children. “I’ve got to do what’s best for my family,” he told his father.

* Army Sergeant Shaun Paul Tousha, 30, who was killed by an IED on April 9. He was the 100th military fatality from the Houston, Texas area. His sister Becky, reflecting on the mounting death toll, told the Houston Chronicle, “I think they ought to bring our boys home and call it quits.”

* Jacob Fairbanks, 22, of St. Paul, Minnesota, who died in Iraq on April 9. He had been sent back for a 15-month tour shortly after he and his wife, Dwan, had a new baby. Dwan told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he had been plagued by a feeling of dread. “What if I don’t come back this time?” he told her. The Pentagon listed the cause of death as a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

* Staff Sergeant Jeremiah McNeal, 23, of the Virginia National Guard, who died April 6 from wounds caused by an IED. “He joined the National Guard soon after [high school] graduation to support his mother and three younger siblings,” the Virginian Pilot reported. “He was not just another number,” his wife Nikita told the media.

* Private Fist Class Shane Penley, 19, who was killed April 6 by a sniper’s bullet just short of a year after graduating from Bloom Trail High School in Illinois. According to the local newspaper, the Southtown Star, he “joined the Army because he was frustrated trying to find a good job” after waiting on tables in a local restaurant. His three sisters, the paper reported, had tried to talk him out of enlisting.

* Major Stuart Wolfer, 36, who was killed in an April 6 rocket attack on the fortified Green Zone, where the US Embassy and Iraqi government buildings are located. He is survived by a wife and three children. When Representative Robert Wexler (Democrat of Florida) invited his constituents to submit questions for last month’s congressional testimony by the US Iraq war commander, General David Petraeus, Len Wolfer, the soldier’s father, requested that he ask Petraeus, ““ For what? For what had he lost his son?”

The names of the victims of American Hellfire missiles, bombs and machine gun fire in the crowded streets of Sadr City are for the most part unknown outside of Iraq, and are far more numerous. Thanks to a wrenching Associated Press photograph, the identity of one has been publicized. He is Ali Hussein, aged two.

A photographer captured the image of his lifeless, chalk-covered body being lifted from the rubble of his home, which had been destroyed in a US rocket attack. Mouth agape and limbs hanging limp, the little boy wore a T-shirt, blood-stained shorts and a child’s sandals.

As these crimes continued to unfold, the White House took the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech to invent a new defense of the American president’s grotesquely unfounded assessment of the situation in Iraq.

In what was obviously a scripted remark aimed at preempting inevitable media references to the anniversary, White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told a news conference: “President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said ‘mission accomplished’ for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission. And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner.”

This is, of course, all nonsense. The banner, together with Bush’s tailhook landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and his strutting before the cameras in a pilot’s flight suit, were all carefully choreographed to sell the success of the Iraq war and American militarism to the public. The banner itself was produced by a private contractor with White House assistance.

The remarks made by Bush on that occasion were fully in keeping with the two-word slogan. “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed,” he told his captive audience of sailors. “And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that country.”

Moreover, barely one month later, he used the same words emblazoned on the banner in a speech to US troops in Qatar. “America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people,” he said, “and that mission has been accomplished.”

At that point, the Bush administration and most of the American ruling elite believed they would be able to quickly solidify their grip over Iraq, install a puppet regime and use the country’s oil wealth to pay for the war and strengthen US capitalism.

At the time, the World Socialist Web Site foresaw that there would be no such easy road for US imperialism’s colonial-style venture in Iraq.

“In reality, of course, the killing is far from over,” the WSWS stated on May 2, 2003. “Pentagon officials acknowledge that there is no prospect of reducing the current number of US troops in Iraq—close to 140,000—for years to come. There is, in short, no ‘exit strategy,’ but rather a plan for permanent colonial occupation.

“Some of the greatest US war crimes lie ahead as Washington attempts to suppress popular opposition to its imposition of a puppet regime to rule the Iraqi people in the interests of the US oil companies, banks and corporations.”

This warning has been tragically confirmed. Close to 97 percent of US casualties have been suffered since Bush delivered his speech, while the bloodbath suffered by the Iraqi people over the same period has dwarfed the considerable carnage inflicted during the “shock and awe” stage of the US invasion. According to the best demographic estimates, at least a million Iraqi lives have been lost as a result of the US intervention.

Proposed rules seek to bar some rate hikes by credit card firms

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By Kathy M. Kristof

Complaints of unfair rate hikes spur new consumer protections.

Credit card companies would be barred from some retroactive interest rate hikes and other "unfair and deceptive" practices that cost consumers billions of dollars each year under a proposal by federal regulators Thursday.

The proposal by the Office of Thrift Supervision was hailed as a "good start" by the Consumer Federation of America. But the federation and other consumer advocates said stronger steps were still needed, including measures to ban overdraft fees that are assessed because a bank has put a payment check on hold.

Federal regulators said they drafted the measures in response to a wide range of public complaints on credit card fees and practices. Susan Wones of Denver, for instance, testified at a recent congressional hearing that the interest rate on her credit card had soared because the issuer decided her credit card balances were too high. She said she had never been late with a payment or gone over her credit limit, but she was forced to pay an interest rate of 24.99%.

In addition to barring some interest rate hikes, the proposed rules would require banks and other credit card issuers to mail or deliver statements at least 21 days before their due dates to allow consumers adequate time to mail a payment without facing a late fee.

To ensure uniform practices across the industry, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Credit Union Administration are expected to release identical proposals today, said William Ruberry of the Office of Thrift Supervision.

The proposals will be subject to a 75-day public comment period, with adoption anticipated by the end of the year.

"It's about time federal regulators offered consumers some relief from unfair bank practices," said Gail Hillebrand, financial services campaign manager at Consumers Union in San Francisco.

Banking industry groups declined to comment, saying they did not have time to review the proposal.

If enacted, the proposed rules also would:

* Prohibit institutions from increasing the interest rate on an outstanding balance, except in some well-communicated instances, such as when the credit card was issued with a temporary promotional rate. The proposal also would allow banks to hike the rate on an existing balance if the consumer was more than 30 days late in making a payment.

* Curb fees required to obtain some cards so that these fees won't eat up the majority of the available credit limit. In addition, if the fee exceeded 25% of the available balance, it would have to be spread out, rather than charged as a lump sum.

* Bar a controversial practice in which credit card companies apply all payments to the balance with the lowest interest rate, in instances where different rates apply to portions of the consumer's debt.

(This often happens when consumers get a low promotional rate for, say, a balance transfer. However, they are charged a higher rate for purchases and potentially a third rate for cash advances.) The proposed rule demands that any amount over the minimum payment be either allocated among all outstanding balances or allocated to the highest-cost debt.

* Ban credit card and checking account issuers from assessing over-limit or overdraft fees solely because of a "hold" placed on available credit. (These holds are sometimes placed by gas stations for amounts that exceed the customer's purchase price and are not lifted until the retailer's debt clears.)

It was not clear Thursday how common these practices were or how much they cost consumers. But Hillebrand of Consumers Union estimated that it was easily in the billions of dollars.

Credit card issuers collect $15 billion annually in penalty fees, and overdraft fees run to $17 billion a year, she said.

Hillebrand and other groups noted that the rules did not address fees charged to pay a credit card bill over the phone or banks' ability to charge over-limit fees when they've approved the charge. Nor does it stop overdraft fees that are caused by a check hold, in which the bank has the money but has not yet credited the consumer's account.

Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) is sponsoring proposed legislation dubbed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, which is opposed by bankers but widely supported by consumer advocates.

"This is a good first step -- an important first step," said Travis Plunkett, legislative director at the Consumer Federation of America. "But Congress still needs to act. More needs to be done."

Sending Felons Off to War

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By Ivan Eland

The growing unpopularity of Bush’s open-ended wars, especially the one in Iraq, has forced the U.S. military to recruit more and more felons with potentially disastrous consequences, as the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland notes in this guest essay:

Enmeshed in two military occupations that have turned into well-publicized quagmires, the Army and Marines are understandably having trouble enlisting new recruits. Their answer: vastly increase the number of convicted felons and other societal miscreants accepted into their ranks.

According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.

For example, some entrants had convictions for crimes of dishonesty—including burglary, robbery, and grand larceny—crimes of violence—such as aggravated assault, arson, and “terroristic” threats, including bomb threats—and sex crimes, such as rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, and indecent acts with a child.

In addition, the two services dramatically increased their “conduct waivers” for people convicted of misdemeanors. Astonishingly, in fiscal year 2007, nearly one in five Army recruits were brought in under waivers for felonies and misdemeanors.

The never-ending wars have also forced the Army to take larger numbers of recruits who are older and less physically fit, have lower education and aptitude, and have formerly disqualifying medical maladies. Also, recently President Bush reduced the length of combat tours in Iraq from fifteen months to twelve.

Although this latter measure may help somewhat with military recruiting and retention and gives soldiers a much-needed break from the stress of combat, it is detrimental to winning a war against guerrillas.

In such counterinsurgency warfare, it is crucially important to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous people. To do this, personal relations must be maintained with the local leaders and warlords.

Rotating people out of Iraq so quickly may boost morale and recruiting, but it destroys such relationships. The same happened with short tours in Vietnam.

One problem is that when the U.S. is not fighting a war against what the American public perceives as a dire threat (for example, the Nazis and Imperial Japanese during World War II)—that is, the war is one of choice, such as Iraq or Vietnam—the nation is unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to win.
In World War II, serving more than twelve months overseas was not an issue.

Another problem is that recruiting societal miscreants might especially impair counterinsurgency warfare. Especially violent people, or those who don’t properly control their behavior, might be adequate for all-out combat against a conventional enemy, but would not be good at winning hearts and minds.

In fact, when faced with guerrillas who attack and then melt back into the general population, these recruits might be more apt to commit atrocities against the population.

Finally, the military would rather have such miscreants—some of them violent criminals or felons who have committed sex-related crimes (as long as they are heterosexual offenses)—in its ranks than it would gays.

The fact that openly gay people are still being kicked out of the military does not create an enticing climate for gays to join, at a time when the armed forces need every qualified person they can get.

Similarly, excluding women from serving on submarines (because of the allegedly cramped quarters) and certain combat positions (because they are presumably too frail) deters some athletic and qualified women from enlisting in the ground and naval forces.

The obvious solutions to all of these problems are to avoid unnecessary brushfire wars and to change wacky military personnel policies that undermine the all-volunteer military.

Somalia: a victim of Bush’s recklessness

Go to Original
BY Matthew Carr


One of the forgotten battlegrounds of George Bush's 'war on terror' jumped sharply into focus yesterday, with the announcement that a pre-dawn US missile strike had killed the Islamist militia leader Aden Hashi Ayro and at least 10 other people in the town of Dusamareb in Somalia.

The Americans claim Ayro was a key al-Qaeda figure in East Africa. There is no way of objectively assessing these claims, but his assassination is certain to fuel the ongoing conflict in a country that Oxfam recently described as Africa's worst humanitarian crisis.

To much of the Western public, violent mayhem has long been synonymous with the failed state depicted in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down. But the violence that is currently ripping Somalia apart is a direct consequence of the Bush administration's reckless military adventurism and the Manichean fantasy world of the 21st century's terror wars.

The present conflict can be traced to Christmas Day 2006, when the Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi invaded Somalia in order to topple a grassroots Islamic movement, the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC).

During their six-month ascendancy in the south of the country, the Islamic Courts earned themselves some kudos amongst the war-weary Somali population, who were prepared to tolerate their literalist interpretation of Sharia in exchange for the freedom to walk the streets without being robbed, shot or raped by warlord militias.

It was a period in which many analysts, such as John Prendergast, a former Clinton official, saw 'the beginnings of governance' after nearly two decades of relentless civil war.

However, the xenophobic Zenawi regime did not regard the triumphant Islamists in Somalia with any enthusiasm. Nor did the Bush administration, which saw the Islamic Courts as an incipient Taliban and accused its leaders of sheltering "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda leaders and an unknown number of lesser operatives.

The UIC denied these allegations and even made some conciliatory overtures to the West, but these efforts were not reciprocated. Instead the Bush administration gave what one US official called a 'yellow-green light' to an invasion that the Zenawi regime presented as its own 'war on terror'.

From its bases in Kenya and Djibouti, the Pentagon's newly-created Africa Command also provided military support for the invasion, in the form of special forces and helicopters. In January 2007 US helicopter gunships carried out 'rinse and repeat' attacks on fleeing refugees near the Kenyan border, who were believed to include al-Qaeda terrorists.

The main casualties in these attacks appear to have been nomads and their livestock, though few people were counting. But the Islamists appeared to have been routed and Ethiopia promptly set about establishing a puppet government, headed by the warlord Abdullahi Yusuf. Since then, resistance to Ethiopian occupation has grown exponentially and Somalia has sunk ever deeper into a vortex of violence. More than one million people have been displaced, thousands have been killed and the country's fragile food supply once more placed in jeopardy.

Was all this done in order to eliminate "half a dozen or less" al-Qaeda operatives who may never have been in the country in the first place? Did the US hope to gain access to Somalia's rich oil fields? Or was the Bush administration so blinded by its association between 'Islamism' and 'terror' that it chose to shoot first and ask questions later?

We cannot know what the Islamic Courts might have become had the US engaged them diplomatically or offered aid instead of rinse and repeat free fire zones. But the consequences could hardly have been much worse than they are now.

In its bloody attempt to rescue Somalia from 'fundamentalism' the US and its Ethiopian proxy have paved the way for the violent political fragmentation in which al-Qaeda thrives. While Western politicians dream of further humanitarian interventions elsewhere, it is salutary to pause and reflect on the catastrophe inflicted on yet another country that had to be destroyed before it could be saved.

Secret Bush "Finding" Widens War on Iran

Go to Original
By Andrew Cockburn

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, "unprecedented in its scope."

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or "army of god," the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border -- whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. That has not proved a problem. An initial outlay of $300 million to finance implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous condition of the U.S. economy.

Until recently, the administration faced a serious obstacle to action against Iran in the form of Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon, who made no secret of his contempt for official determination to take us to war. In a widely publicized incident last January, Iranian patrol boats approached a U.S. ship in what the Pentagon described as a "taunting" manner. According to Centcom staff officers, the American commander on the spot was about to open fire. At that point, the U.S. was close to war. He desisted only when Fallon personally and explicitly ordered him not to shoot. The White House, according to the staff officers, was "absolutely furious" with Fallon for defusing the incident.

Fallon has since departed. His abrupt resignation in early March followed the publication of his unvarnished views on our policy of confrontation with Iran, something that is unlikely to happen to his replacement, George Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus.

Though Petraeus is not due to take formal command at Centcom until late summer, there are abundant signs that something may happen before then. A Marine amphibious force, originally due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing date abruptly moved up to May 4. A scheduled meeting in Europe between French diplomats acting as intermediaries for the U.S. and Iranian representatives has been abruptly cancelled in the last two weeks. Petraeus is said to be at work on a master briefing for congress to demonstrate conclusively that the Iranians are the source of our current troubles in Iraq, thanks to their support for the Shia militia currently under attack by U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Interestingly, despite the bellicose complaints, Petraeus has made little effort to seal the Iran-Iraq border, and in any case two thirds of U.S. casualties still come from Sunni insurgents. "The Shia account for less than one third," a recently returned member of the command staff in Baghdad familiar with the relevant intelligence told me, "but if you want a war you have to sell it."

Even without the covert initiatives described above, the huge and growing armada currently on station in the Gulf is an impressive symbol of American power.

Armed Might of US Marred By Begging Bowl to Arabs

Sometime in the next two weeks, fleet radar operator may notice a blip on their screens that represents something rather more profound: America’s growing financial weakness. The blip will be former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin’s plane commencing its descent into Abu Dhabi. Rubin’s responsibility these days is to help keep Citigroup afloat despite a balance sheet still waterlogged, despite frantic bail out efforts by the Federal Reserve and others, by staggering losses in mortgage bonds. The Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund injected $7.5 billion last November (albeit at a sub-prime interest rate of eleven percent,) but the bank’s urgent need for fresh capital persists, and Abu Dhabi is where the money is.

Even if those radar operators pay no attention to Mr. Rubin’s flight, and the ironic contrast it illustrates between American military power and financial weakness, others will, and not just in Tehran. There’s not much a finding can do about that.

"Good News," Iraq & Beyond, Part II

Go to Original
By Noam Chomsky

Elite policy and the "Axis of Evil"

Having brought up Iran [in Part I], we might as well turn briefly to the third member of the famous Axis of Evil, North Korea. The official story right now is that after having been forced to accept an agreement on dismantling its nuclear weapons facilities, North Korea is again trying to evade its commitments in its usual devious way—"good news" for superhawks like John Bolton, who have held all along that the North Koreans understand only the mailed fist and will exploit negotiations only to trick us. A New York Times headline reads: "U.S. Sees Stalling by North Korea on Nuclear Pact" (January 19). The article by Helene Cooper details the charges. In the last paragraph we discover that the U.S. has not fulfilled its pledges. North Korea has received only 15 percent of the fuel that was promised by the U.S. and others and the U.S. has not undertaken steps to improve diplomatic relations, as promised. Several weeks later (February 6), in the McClatchey press Kevin Hall reported that the chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea, Christopher Hill, confirmed in Senate Hearings that "North Korea has slowed the dismantling of its nuclear reactor because it hasn’t received the amount of fuel oil it was promised."

As we learn from the specialist literature, and asides here and there, this is a consistent pattern. North Korea may have the worst government in the world, but they have been pursuing a pragmatic tit-for-tat policy on negotiations with the United States. When the U.S. takes an aggressive and threatening stance, they react accordingly. When the U.S. moves towards some form of accommodation, so do they.

When Bush came into office, both North Korea and the U.S. were bound by the Framework Agreement of 1994. Neither was fully in accord with its commitments, but the agreement was largely being observed. North Korea had stopped testing long-range missiles. It had perhaps one to two bombs worth of plutonium and was verifiably not making more. After seven Bush years of confrontation, North Korea had eight to ten bombs and long-range missiles, and was developing plutonium. The Clinton administration Korea specialist, Bruce Cumings, reports the Administration "had also worked out a plan to buy out, indirectly, the North’s medium and long-range missiles; it was ready to be signed in 2000 but Bush let it fall by the wayside and today the North retains all its formidable missile capability."

The reasons for Bush’s achievements are well understood. The Axis of Evil speech, a serious blow to Iranian democrats and reformers as they have stressed, also put North Korea on notice that the U.S. was returning to its threatening stance. Washington released intelligence reports about North Korean clandestine programs; these were conceded to be dubious or baseless when the latest negotiations began in 2007, probably, commentators speculated, because it was feared that weapons inspectors might enter North Korea and the Iraq story would be repeated. North Korea responded by ratcheting up missile and weapons development.

In September 2005, under international pressure, Washington agreed to turn to negotiations within the six-power framework. They achieved substantial success. North Korea agreed to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing weapons programs" and allow international inspections, in return for international aid and a non-aggression pledge from the U.S., with an agreement that the two sides would "respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize relations." The ink was barely dry on the agreement when the Bush administration renewed the threat of force, also freezing North Korean funds in foreign banks and disbanding the consortium that was to provide North Korea with a light-water reactor consortium. Cumings alleges that "the sanctions were specifically designed to destroy the September pledges [and] to head off an accommodation between Washington and Pyongyang."

After Washington scuttled the promising September 2005 agreements, North Korea returned to weapons and missile development and carried out a test of a nuclear weapon. Again under international pressure, with its foreign policy in tatters, Washington returned to negotiations, leading to an agreement, though it is now dragging its feet on fulfilling its commitments.

Writing in Le Monde diplomatique last October, Cumings concluded that, "Bush had presided over the most asinine Korea policy in history. These last years, relations between Washington and Seoul have deteriorated drastically. By commission and omission, Bush trampled on the norms of the historic U.S. relationship with Seoul while creating a dangerous situation with Pyongyang."

Charges against North Korea escalated in September 2007, when Israel bombed an obscure site in northern Syria, an "act of war," as at least one American correspondent recognized (Seymour Hersh). Charges at once surfaced that Israel attacked a nuclear installation being developed with the help of North Korea, an attack compared with Israel’s bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981—which, according to available evidence, convinced Saddam Hussein to initiate his nuclear weapons program. The September 2007 charges are dubious. Hersh’s tentative conclusion after detailed investigation is that the Israeli actions may have been intended as another threat against Iran—the U.S.-Israel have you in their bombsights. However this may be, there is some important background that should be recalled.

In 1993 Israel and North Korea were on the verge of an agreement: Israel would recognize North Korea, and in return, North Korea would end any weapons-related involvement in the Middle East. The significance for Israeli security is clear. Clinton ordered the deal terminated, and Israel had no choice but to obey. Ever since its fateful decision in 1971 and the years that followed to reject peace and security in favor of expansion, Israel has been compelled to rely on the U.S. for protection, hence to obey Washington’s commands.

Whether or not there is any truth to current charges about North Korea and Syria, it appears that the threat to the security of Israel and the region could have been avoided by peaceful means, had security been a high priority.

Let us return to the first member of Axis of Evil, Iraq. Washington’s expectations were outlined in a Declaration of Principles between the U.S. and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government last November. The Declaration allows U.S. forces to remain indefinitely to "deter foreign aggression" and for internal security. The only aggression in sight is from the United States, but that is not aggression, by definition. And only the most naïve will entertain the thought that the U.S. would sustain the government by force if it moved towards independence, going too far in strengthening relations with Iran, for example. The Declaration also committed Iraq to facilitate and encourage "the flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American investments."

The unusually brazen expression of imperial will was underscored when Bush quietly issued yet another signing statement, declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq." Shortly before, the New York Times had reported that Washington "insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with its...deep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." More third world irrationality.

In brief, Iraq must agree to allow permanent U.S. military installations (called "enduring" in the preferred Orwellism), grant the U.S. the right to conduct combat operations freely, and ensure U.S. control over the oil resources of Iraq while privileging U.S. investors. It is of some interest that these reports did not influence discussion about the reasons for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. These were never obscure, but any effort to spell them out was dismissed with falsification and ridicule. Now the reasons are openly conceded, eliciting no retraction or even reflection.

Iraqis are not alone in believing that national reconciliation is possible. A Canadian-run poll found that Afghans are hopeful about the future and favor the presence of Canadian and other foreign troops—the "good news," that made the headlines. The small print suggests some qualifications. Only 20 percent "think the Taliban will prevail once foreign troops leave." Three-fourths support negotiations between the U.S.-backed Karzai government and the Taliban and more than half favor a coalition government. The great majority therefore strongly disagree with the U.S.-Canadian stance and believe that peace is possible with a turn towards peaceful means.

Though the question was not asked, it is reasonable to surmise that the foreign presence is favored for aid and reconstruction. More evidence in support of this conjecture is provided by reports about the progress of reconstruction in Afghanistan six years after the U.S. invasion. Six percent of the population now have electricity, the AP reports, primarily in Kabul, which is artificially wealthy because of the huge foreign presence. There, "the rich, powerful, and well connected" have electricity, but few others, in contrast to the 1980s under Russian occupation, when "the city had plentiful power"—and women in Kabul were relatively free under the occupation and the Russian-backed Najibullah government that followed, probably more so than now, though they did have to worry about attacks from Reagan’s favorites, like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who got his kicks from throwing acid in the faces of young women he thought were improperly dressed.

These matters were discussed at the time by Rasil Basu, UN Development Program senior advisor to the Afghan government for women’s development (1986-88). She reported "enormous strides" for women under the Russian occupation: "illiteracy declined from 98 percent to 75 percent, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law, and in the Constitution.... Unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs. But the strides [women] took in education and employment were very impressive.... In Kabul I saw great advances in women’s education and employment. Women were in evidence in industry, factories, government offices, professions and the media. With large numbers of men killed or disabled, women shouldered the responsibility of both family and country. I met a woman who specialized in war medicine which dealt with trauma and reconstructive surgery for the war-wounded. This represented empowerment to her. Another woman was a road engineer. Roads represented freedom—an escape from the oppressive patriarchal structures."

By 1988, however, Basu "could see the early warning signs" as Russian troops departed and the fundamentalist Islamist extremists favored by the Reagan administration took over, brushing aside the more moderate mujahideen groups. "Saudi Arabian and American arms and ammunition gave the fundamentalists a vital edge over the moderates," providing them with military hardware used, "according to Amnesty International, to target unarmed civilians, most of them women and children." Then followed much worse horrors as the U.S.-Saudi favorites overthrew the Najibullah government. The suffering of the population was so extreme that the Taliban were welcomed when they drove out Reagan’s freedom fighters. Another chapter in the triumph of Reaganite reactionary ultra-nationalism, worshipped today by those dedicated to defaming the honorable term "conservative."

Basu is a distinguished advocate for women’s rights, including a long career with the UN during which she drafted the World Plan of Action for Women and the draft Programme for the Women’s Decade, 1975-85, adopted at the Mexico City Conference (1975) and Copenhagen Conference (1980). But her words were not welcome in the U.S. Her 1988 report was submitted to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Ms. magazine. But rejected. Also rejected were Basu’s recommendation of practical steps that the West, particularly the U.S., could take to protect women’s rights.

Highly relevant in this connection are the important investigations by Nicolas Lanine, a former soldier in the Russian army in Afghanistan, bringing out the striking comparisons between Russian commentary during the occupation and that of their NATO successors today.

These and further considerations suggest that Afghans really would welcome a foreign presence devoted to aid and reconstruction, as we can read between the lines in the polls.

There are, of course, numerous questions about polls in countries under foreign military occupation, particularly in places like southern Afghanistan. But the results of the Iraq and Afghan studies conform to earlier ones and should not be dismissed.

Recent polls in Pakistan also provide "good news" for Washington. Fully 5 percent favor allowing U.S. or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan "to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters." Nine percent favor allowing U.S. forces "to pursue and capture Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan." Almost half favor allowing Pakistani troops to do so. And only a little over 80 percent regard the U.S. military presence in Asia and Afghanistan as a threat to Pakistan, while an overwhelming majority believe that the U.S. is trying to harm the Islamic world.

The good news is that these results are a considerable improvement over October 2001, when a Newsweek poll found that "Eighty- three percent of Pakistanis surveyed say they side with the Taliban, with a mere 3 percent expressing support for the United States," while over 80 percent described Osama bin Laden as a guerrilla and 6 percent a terrorist.

Events elsewhere in early 2008 might also turn out to be "good news" for Washington. In January, in a remarkable act of courageous civil disobedience, tens of thousands of the tortured people of Gaza broke out of the prison to which they had been confined by the U.S.-Israel alliance (with the usual timid European support) as punishment for the crime of voting the wrong way in a free election in January 2006. It was instructive to see the front pages with stories reporting the brutal U.S. response to a genuinely free election alongside others lauding the Bush administration for its noble dedication to "democracy promotion" or sometimes gently chiding it because it was going too far in its idealism, failing to recognize that the unpeople of the Middle East are too backward to appreciate democracy—another principle that traces back to "Wilsonian idealism."

This glaring illustration of elite hatred and contempt for democracy is routinely reported, apparently with no awareness of what it signifies. To pick an illustration at random, Cam Simpson reports in the Wall Street Journal (February 8) that despite the harsh U.S.-Israeli punishment of Gaza and "flooding the West Bank’s Western- backed Fatah-led government with diplomatic and economic support [to] persuade Palestinians in both territories to embrace Fatah and isolate Hamas," the opposite is happening: Hamas’s popularity is increasing in the West Bank. As Simpson casually explains, "Hamas won Palestinian elections in January 2006, prompting the Israeli government and the Bush administration to lead a world-wide boycott of the Palestinian Authority," along with much more severe measures. The goal, unconcealed, is to punish the miscreants who fail to grasp the essential principle of democracy: "Do what we say, or else."

The U.S.-backed Israeli punishment increased through early 2006 and escalated sharply after the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in June. That act was bitterly denounced in the West. Israel’s vicious response was regarded as understandable if perhaps excessive. These thoughts were untroubled by the dramatic demonstration that they were sheer hypocrisy. The day before the capture of Corporal Shalit on the front lines of the army attacking Gaza, Israeli forces entered Gaza City and kidnapped two civilians, the Muammar brothers, taking them to Israel (in violation of the Geneva Conventions), where they disappeared into Israel’s prison population, including almost 1,000 held without charge, often for long periods. The kidnapping, a far more serious crime than the capture of Shalit, received a few scattered lines of comment, but no noticeable criticism. That is perhaps understandable, because it is not news. U.S.-backed Israeli forces have been engaged in such practices, and far more brutal ones, for decades. In any event, as a client state, Israel inherits the right of criminality from its master.

The U.S.-Israel attempted to organize a military coup to install their favored faction. That was also reported frankly, considered entirely legitimate, if not praiseworthy. The coup was preempted by Hamas, which took over the Gaza Strip. Israeli savagery reached new heights. While in the West Bank, U.S.-backed Israeli operations carried forward the steady process of taking over valuable territory and resources, breaking up the fragments remaining to Palestinians by settlements and huge infrastructure projects, imprisoning the whole by a takeover of the Jordan Valley, and expanding settlement and development in Jerusalem in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years to ensure that there will be no more than a token Palestinian presence in the historic center of Palestinian cultural, commercial, and social life. Non-violent reactions by Palestinians and solidarity groups are viciously crushed with rare exceptions and scarcely any notice. Even when Nobel laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire was shot and gassed by Israeli troops while participating in a vigil protesting the Separation Wall—now better termed an annexation wall—there was apparently not a word in the English-language press, outside of Ireland.

Israel’s settlement and development programs on the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, are flagrantly illegal, in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions and the authoritative jugment by the International Court of Justice on the Separation Wall, with the agreement of U.S. Justice Buergenthal in a separate declaration.

Criminal actions by Palestinians, such as Qassam rockets fired from Gaza, are angrily condemned in the West. The far more violent and destructive Israeli actions sometimes elicit polite clucking of tongues if they exceed approved levels of state terror. Invariably Israel’s actions —for which of course the U.S. shares direct respon- sibility—are portrayed as retaliation, perhaps excessive. Another way of looking at the cycle of violence is that Qassam rockets are retaliation for Israel’s unceasing crimes in the West Bank, which is not separable from Gaza except by U.S.-Israeli fiat. But standard racist- ultranationalist assumptions exclude that interpretation.

International humanitarian law is quite explicit on these matters. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1950 states that, "No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.... Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited." Gazans are unambigously "protected persons" under Israeli military occupation. The Hague Convention of 1907 also declares that, "No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, can be inflicted on the population on account of the acts of individuals for which it cannot be regarded as collectively responsible" (Article 50).

Furthermore, High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Convention are bound to "respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances," including of course Israel and the U.S., which is obligated to prevent, or to punish, the serious breaches of the Convention by its own leaders and its client. When the media report, as they regularly do, that "Israel hopes [reducing supplies of fuel and electricity to the Gaza Strip] will create popular pressure to force the Hamas rulers of Gaza and other militant groups to stop the rocket fire" (Stephen Erlanger, NYT, January 31), they are calmly informing us that Israel is in grave breach of international humanitarian law, as is the U.S. for not ensuring respect for law on the part of its client. When the Israeli High Court grants legitimacy to these measures, as it has, it is adding another page to its ugly record of subordination to state power. Israel’s leading legal journalist, Moshe Negbi, knew what he was doing when he entitled his despairing review of the record of the courts We were like Sodom (Kisdom Hayyinu).

International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own populations. That is always a difficult task, particularly so when articulate opinion and the courts declare crime to be legitimate.

In January, the Hamas-led prison break allowed Gazans for the first time in years to go shopping in nearby Egyptian towns, plainly a serious criminal act because it slightly undermined U.S.-Israeli strangulation of these unpeople. But the powerful quickly recognized that these events too could turn into "good news." Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai "said openly what some senior Israeli officials would only say anonymously," Stephen Erlanger reported in the New York Times: the prison-break might allow Israel to rid itself of any responsibility for Gaza after having reduced it to devastation and misery in 40 years of brutal occupation, keeping it only for target practice and, of course, under full military occupation, its borders sealed by Israeli forces on land, sea, and air, apart from an opening to Egypt (in the unlikely event that Egypt would agree).

That appealing prospect would complement Israel’s ongoing criminal actions in the West Bank, carefully designed along the lines already outlined to ensure that there will be no viable future for Palestinians there. At the same time, Israel can turn to solving its internal "demographic problem," the presence of non-Jews in a Jewish state. The ultra-nationalist Knesset member Avigdor Lieberman was harshly condemned as a racist in Israel when he advanced the idea of forcing Arab citizens of Israel into a derisory "Palestinian state," presenting this to the world as a "land swap." His proposal is slowly being incorporated into the mainstream. Israel National News reported in April that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of the governing party Kadima, "considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert," proposed a plan that "appears very similar to one touted by Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman," though Schneller says his plan would be "more gradual" and the Arabs affected "will remain citizens of Israel even though their territory will belong to the [Palestinian Authority and], they will not be allowed to resettle in other areas of Israel." Of course the unpeople are not consulted.

In December Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the last hope of many Israeli doves, adopted the same position. An eventual Palestinian state, she suggested, would "be the national answer to the Palestinians" in the territories and those "who live in different refugee camps or in Israel." With Israeli Arabs dispatched to their "natural" place, Israel would then achieve the long-sought goal of freeing itself from the Arab taint, a stand that is familiar enough in U.S. history, for example in Thomas Jefferson’s hope, never achieved, that the rising empire of liberty would be free of "blot or mixture," red or black.

For Israel, this is no small matter. Despite heroic efforts by its apologists, it is not easy to conceal the fact that a "democratic Jewish state" is no more acceptable to liberal opinion than a "democratic Christian state" or a "democratic white state," as long as the blot or mixture is not removed. Such notions could be tolerated if the religious/ethnic identification were mostly symbolic, like selecting an official day of rest. But in the case of Israel, it goes far beyond that. The most extreme departure from minimal democratic principles is the complex array of laws and bureaucratic arrangements designed to vest control of over 90 percent of the land in the hands of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization committed to using charitable funds in ways that are "directly or indirectly beneficial to persons of Jewish religion, race or origin," so its documents explain: "a public institution recognized by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization as the exclusive instrument for the development of Israel’s lands," restricted to Jewish use, in perpetuity (with marginal exceptions), and barred to non-Jewish labor (though the principle is often ignored for imported cheap labor). This extreme violation of elementary civil rights, funded by all American citizens thanks to the tax-free status of the JNF, finally reached Israel’s High Court in 2000, in a case brought by an Arab couple who had been barred from the town of Katzir. The Court ruled in their favor, in a narrow decision, which seems to have been barely implemented. Seven years later, a young Arab couple was barred from the town of Rakefet, on state land, on grounds of "social incompatibility" (Scott Peterson, Washington Post, December 20, 2007), a very rare report. Again, none of this is unfamiliar in the U.S. After all, it took a century before the 14th Amendment was even formally recog- nized by the courts and it still is far from implemented.

For Palestinians, there are now two options. One is that the U.S. and Israel will abandon their unilateral rejectionism of the past 30 years and accept the international consensus on a two-state settlement, in accord with international law—and, incidentally, in accord with the wishes of a large majority of Americans. That is not impossible, though the two rejectionist states are working hard to render it so. A settlement along these lines came close in negotiations in Taba Egypt in January 2001 and might have been reached, participants reported, had Israeli Prime Minister Barak not called off the negotiations prematurely. The framework for these negotiations was Clinton’s "parameters" of December 2000, issued after he recognized that the Camp David proposals earlier that year were unacceptable. It is commonly claimed that Arafat rejected the parameters. However, as Clinton made clear and explicit, both sides had accepted the parameters, in both cases with reservations, which they sought to reconcile in Taba a few weeks later—and apparently almost succeeded. There have been unofficial negotiations since that have produced similar proposals. Though possibilities diminish as U.S.-Israeli settlement and infrastructure programs proceed, they have not been eliminated. By now the international consensus is near universal, supported by the Arab League, Iran, Hamas, in fact every relevant actor apart from the U.S. and Israel.

A second possibility is the one that the U.S.-Israel are actually implementing, along the lines just described. Palestinians will then be consigned to their Gaza prison and to West Bank cantons, perhaps joined by Israeli Arab citizens as well if the Lieberman-Schneller-Livni plans are implemented. For the occupied territories, that will realize the intentions expressed by Moshe Dayan to his Labor Party cabinet colleagues in the early years of the occupation: Israel should tell the Palestinian refugees in the territories that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads." The general conception was articulated by Labor Party leader Haim Herzog, later president, in 1972: "I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter.... But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner."

A third possibility would be a binational state. That was a feasible option in the early years of the occupation, perhaps a federal arrangement leading to eventual closer integration as circumstances permit. There was even some support for similar ideas within Israeli military intelligence, but the grant of any political rights to Palestinians was shot down by the governing Labor Party. Proposals to that effect were made (by me in particular), but elicited only hysteria. The opportunity was lost by the mid-1970s when Palestinian national rights reached the international agenda and the two-state consensus took shape. The first U.S. veto of a two-state resolution at the Security Council, advanced by the major Arab states, was in 1976. Washingon’s rejectionist stance continues to the present, with the exception of Clinton’s last month in office. Some form of unitary state remains a distant possibility through agreement among the parties, as a later stage in a process that begins with a two-state settlement. There is no other form of advocacy of such an outcome, if we understand advocacy to include a process leading from here to there; mere proposal, in contrast, is free for the asking.

It is of some interest, perhaps, that when advocacy of a unitary binational state had some prospects, it was anathema, while today, when it is completely unfeasible, it is greeted with respect and is advocated in leading journals. The reason, perhaps, is that it serves to undermine the prospect of a two-state settlement.

Advocates of a binational (one-state) settlement argue that on its present course, Israel will become a pariah state like apartheid South Africa, with a large Palestinian population deprived of rights, laying the basis for a civil rights struggle leading to a unitary democratic state. There is no reason to believe that the U.S., Israel, or any other Western state would allow anything like that to happen. Rather, they will proceed exactly as they are now doing in the territories today, taking no responsibility for Palestinians who are left to rot in the various prisons and cantons that may dot the landscape, far from the eyes of Israelis travelling on their segregated superhighways to their well-subsidized West Bank towns and suburbs, controlling the crucial water resources of the region, and benefiting from their ties with U.S. and other international corporations that are evidently pleased to see a loyal military power at the periphery of the crucial Middle East region, with an advanced high tech economy and close links to Washington.

Turning elsewhere, major polls are not such good news for conventional Western doctrine. Few theses are upheld with such passion and unanimity as the doctrine that Hugo Chavez is a tyrant bent on destroying freedom and democracy in Venezuela and beyond. The annual polls on Latin American opinion by the respected Chilean polling agency Latinobarometro therefore are "bad news." The most recent (November 2007) had the same "irritating" results as before. Venezuela ranks second, close behind first-place Uruguay, in satisfaction with democracy, and third in satisfaction with leaders. It ranks first in assessment of the current and future economic situation, equality, and justice, and education standards. True, it ranks only 11th in favoring a market economy, but even with this "flaw," overall it ranks highest in Latin America on matters of democracy, justice, and optimism, far above U.S. favorites Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Chile.

Latin America analyst Mark Turner writes that he "found an almost total English speaking blackout about the results of this important snapshot of [Latin American] views and opinions." That has also been true in the past. Turner also found the usual exception: there were reports of the finding that Chavez is about as unpopular as Bush in Latin America, something that will come as little surprise to those who have seen some of the bitterly hostile coverage to which Chavez is subjected, in the Venezuelan press as well—an oddity in this looming "dictatorship." Editorial offices have been well aware of the polls, but evidently understand what may pass through doctrinal filters.

Also receiving scant notice was a declaration of President Chavez on December 31, 2007 granting amnesty to leaders of the U.S.-backed military coup that kidnapped the president, disbanded parliament and the Supreme Court and all other democratic institutions, but was soon overturned by a popular uprising. That the West would have followed Chavez’s model in a comparable case is, to put it mildly, rather unlikely. Perhaps all of this provides some further insight into the "clash of civilizations"—a question that should be prominent in our minds, I think.

The Plague of Potomac Fever

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By David Sirota

If any publication was going to document the sickness known as Potomac Fever, it was going to be The Washington Post.

Last month, the newspaper penned a front-page dispatch headlined “Housing Accord Puts Builders First; Strapped Homeowners Offered Little Aid.” It described congressional leaders agreeing to “provide billions of dollars in tax rebates to the slumping home-building industry while offering little to homeowners threatened with foreclosure.” The bill proposes $6 billion in corporate tax cuts, while “families who cannot afford to repay their home loans—the group at the heart of the mortgage meltdown”—would get less than 2 percent of that for “counseling services.”

Next to this story was a report labeled “Sweeping Bills Passed to Help Homeowners.” It told of Maryland state lawmakers “toughening oversight of the mortgage-lending industry and establishing pre-emptive measures to help people at risk of foreclosure.”

The newspaper page was a scientific proof, with states as the control. They show what minimally healthy democratic systems do: help ordinary people. That’s different from a Congress ravaged by Potomac Fever—the disease inside the Washington Beltway inhibiting emotions like compassion and integrity. As the housing crisis intensifies, this malady is getting worse.

For example, states like Oregon are cracking down on predatory lenders, while North Carolina and Minnesota are the latest to regulate abusive mortgage fees. Yet, Congress—debilitated by the fever—does nothing to halt banks’ usurious practices that originally created the mortgage meltdown.

State legislators are demanding aid to borrowers. Delegate Dereck Davis, D-Md., told The Washington Post that homeowners “need a federal bailout from Congress.”

But in the land of Potomac Fever, bailouts are for financial firms. Congressman Barney Frank, D-Mass., in fact, told newspapers “it’s irrelevant” how many homeowners—if any—are ever helped. According to The Hill newspaper, he is pushing industry-backed legislation that would federally guarantee banks’ outstanding mortgages for modest write-downs. The proposal deliberately avoids forcing banks to freeze interest rates.

Because the plan is voluntary, lenders “will just dump their worst loans into the system,” says economist Dean Baker. The Congressional Budget Office adds that the proposal focuses not on rescuing homeowners, but on “shift[ing] the risk involved in mortgage losses from the current lenders and investors to taxpayers.”

Such virulent strains of Potomac Fever have many causes. One is the proximity of lawmakers to constituents. Many state representatives serve part time and are not career politicians, meaning they have authentic connections to local communities and therefore often better reflect public priorities. By contrast, professional lawmakers in Washington are insulated from real-world pressures by six-figure salaries, security sentries and servile staffers.

Campaign contributions are also a culprit. Though industries certainly influence state legislators, Big Money has a tougher time controlling 50 separate state capitals than one U.S. Capitol. And, boy, is the money flowing in D.C. Reporting on the housing crisis, Politico.com says “campaign donations from affected industries have spiked [and] lobbyists also are making money off the misery.” Banks pleading poverty somehow have plenty of resources to buy influence.

Finally, there is the filibuster—a tool that does not exist in state legislatures. Coupled with the U.S. Senate’s undemocratic structure giving Delaware as many votes as California, the filibuster allows 41 politicians representing just 11 percent of America’s total population to stop almost anything. Corporate lobbyists and their Senate allies have used the filibuster to obstruct legislation representing the public’s economic interests.

Can Potomac Fever be stopped? Maybe not, considering most inside the Beltway are so afflicted they have lost the capacity to even see it. Then again, the more bold actions states take, the more ill Washington will look. Perhaps the embarrassing contrast can cure the plague.

David Sirota is the best-selling author of “Hostile Takeover” (Crown, 2006). He is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and a board member of the Progressive States Network, both nonpartisan research organizations. His daily blog can be found at www.credoaction.com/sirota.