Excerpts from our interview with Congressman Maurice Hinchey.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Fox and the Saudi Prince
Thursday, April 8th, 2010Last month I appeared on Fox News Network’s morning show, Fox and Friends, to talk about airline security. Normally such appearances end up as clips on the Fox News Web site. Granted, the Steve Doocy interview was hardly groundbreaking, but that is seldom a criterion for feeding the beast that is a major cable network news Web site. Curiously, I was quoted in a written piece on the site that got a fair amount of pick-up, but no video.
The notorious Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, nephew to the Saudi king, met with Rupert Murdoch in Hong Kong on Jan. 14. The prince issued a press release after the meeting stating that the prince’s Kingdom Holding Company had discussions that “touched upon future potential alliances with News Corp.”It was not until a few days later that I learned what may have been behind the absence of a video clip on the Web site. I had said to Doocy that Saudi Arabian money was still financing Al Qaeda. Doocy did not react to my comment. But ten days later I learned that Fox’s parent company, News Corporation, was, at the time of my interview, negotiating with a Saudi prince to vastly increase his stake in the company.
By the time I appeared on Fox News, Prince Alwaleed was about to become News Corp’s fourth largest voting shareholder (behind the Murdoch family, Liberty Media, and Fidelity Management & Research Co, a mutual fund). The prince has repeatedly defended his homeland as a problem-free place. What he has failed to mention is that he has personally donated huge amounts of money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Iranian Missiles and what they mean for the Persian Gulf.
Thursday, April 8th, 2010Israel and Iraq had two things in common. Both had a close relationship with China and both had exclusive access to the U.S. Army Laboratory at Aderdeen, home to our main weapons supercomputers at the time. Because China was working closely with the Iraqis (and Gerald Bull who had close connections to the laboratory), technology from the lab got into the hands of the Chinese.
By 2001 the Chinese had stopped shipping C-802s to Iran, but Iran had, by then, reversed engineered the missile and was successfully building a much more advanced version than China had in its own arsenal. The anti-ship missile can travel about 60 kilometers, has over-the-horizon radar capability and can carry a conventional, nuclear or chemical warhead. The C-802 can accelerate from zero to mach one in seconds. What gives Navy defenders against the missile problems is that a few kilometers before it encounters the target, the C-802 descends from an altitude of between 75 to 100 feet down to wave top, about nine feet above sea level before it punctures the hull of a ship. It is that kind of maneuverability that makes the C-802 so difficult to defend against, according to Navy weapons experts.
I learned that the Iranians felt cheated by the Chinese on the C-802 deal and had hired a notorious Syrian arms dealer to represent them against the Chinese. I obtained the official CIA biography of the arms dealer Monzer al-Kassar, who had been brought into the deal before Soghanalian. French intelligence, distrustful of al-Kassar, instructed Soghanalian to work with the Chinese after their falling out with Iran.
Dirty Waters: Cashing in on Ocean Pollution
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010DIRTY WATER exposes how even the newest cruise ships lack state-of-the-art environmental mitigation systems. The two-part series exposes a cruise industry dependent on lax federal oversight and more interested in putting profits into PR and lobbying and campaign contributions instead of installing new technologies that could mitigate some of its negative environmental impact.
DCBureau reporter David Rosenfeld reveals that the cruise industry touts untouched ocean scenery while beneath the surface cruise ships leave a wake of toxic sewage and other harmful pollutants that threaten marine life and human health. The cost-effective and preferred method of discharging sewage into the ocean requires a high-grade retrofit that costs $10 million. Yet the largest cruise companies choose not to spend the money to equip dozens of ships with the latest technology even as they make huge profits. Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise company, in the down 2009 economy made $1.3 billion in one quarter alone.
The Burn Pit Contracts: KBR and the Army
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010KBR exposed soldiers and their employees to toxic burn pit smoke at Joint Base Balad in Iraq. KBR denies any responsibility even though their contract with the army contradicts their denial. Soldiers and KBR workers have suffered from health problems consistent with exposure to burn pit smoke since returning home.
Unsafe At Any Altitude
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010Stories That Matter #3: Losing The War On Drugs
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010In a new Stories That Matter video, Joe Trento tells how one of the CIA’s most notorious case officers was brought back by the CIA from Iran-Contra disgrace – a convicted felon and one of the few high-level officials to serve time in prison – to coddle the Karzai family in Afghanistan. It provides historical context to the CIA’s recruiting of drug lords, including using the Laos-Vietnam era case officer to work with Karzai family members with drug connections. This story advances the recent New York Times article on Karzai’s well connected brother.
Stories that Matter #2: The Atlantic Water Summit
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010The main Ballroom at the National Press Club was packed with individuals from nonprofits, government and business (lobbyists, media relations and a few executives) who traded business cards, overused acronyms and buzzwords, asked long questions, and got short answers. As a large camera in the back panned the room, The Atlantic Water Summit was officially live…
Stories that Matter #1: No Contractor Left Behind
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010No Contractor Left Behind tells how American soldiers were not told they were exposed to a cancer-causing chemical at the Qarmat Ali electrical plant near Basra in the first months of the Iraq War. KBR, the Pentagon’s biggest private contractor, was supposed to clean up the site. It did not. Instead, the company and the Army exposed hundreds of soldiers to a rust inhibitor that is a well known carcinogen and did not tell them about it until years later. Many of the Army National Guard soldiers from Oregon, Indiana, and West Virginia became very ill. Several have died. You will meet some of the soldiers who were exposed and see the depositions of KBR officials who did nothing to protect the Guardsmen. The story shows how the Senate, more concerned about KBR and the Pentagon than the health of our soldiers, left the investigation into this tragedy to the Democratic Policy Committee. The DPC is powerless to compel testimony from witnesses, or subpoena documents, or control the budgets of the Pentagon or the Veterans Administration to help these men who are facing huge health bills and years of medical treatment.
