from HUSTLER Magazine – March 2010

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is the onetime Wall Street insider responsible for handing over $700 billion in bailout money to his pals in the banking industry, with no requirement to pay it back or prove how it is being spent. Under Geithner’s “financial stability” plan, rich investors are getting government subsidies to scoop up so-called toxic assets at a discount. They pocket the potential profits, and we the taxpayers shoulder the risk. A win-win for them; a lose-lose for us. Talk about a fox in the henhouse. Geithner is the same guy who spends the bulk of his time on the phone with his buddies at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street wheeler-dealers instead of fixing America’s economy. For these reasons and others, each month we will put another piece of shit on Geithner’s head until he resigns or is shitcanned.

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You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

SIBEL EDMONDS HAS NAMED NAMES. WHY ISN’T THE MEDIA REPORTING THE STORY?

by Brad Friedman
for HUSTLER MAGAZINE – March 2010

SIBEL EDMONDS, a former FBI translator, claims that the following government officials have committed what amount to acts of treason. They are lawmakers Dennis Hastert, Bob Livingston, Dan Burton, Roy Blunt, Stephen Solarz and Tom Lantos, as well as at least three members of George W. Bush’s inner circle: Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Marc Grossman. But is Sibel Edmonds credible?

“Absolutely, she’s credible,” Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told CBS’s 60 Minutes when he was asked about her in 2002. “The reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Edmonds’s remarkable allegations of bribery, blackmail, infiltration of the U.S. government and the theft of nuclear secrets by foreign allies and enemies alike rocked the Bush Administration. In fact, Bush and company actually prevented Edmonds from telling the American people what she knew—up until now.

John M. Cole, an 18-year veteran of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments, revealed the panic of upper-echelon officials when Edmonds originally started talking back in 2002. “Well, the Bureau is gonna have to try to work something out with Sibel,” Cole said an FBI executive assistant told him at the time, “because they don’t want this to go out and become public.”

But they couldn’t “work something out with Sibel” because, it seems, she wasn’t looking to make a deal. Edmonds says she was looking to expose what she believed to be the ugly truth about the infiltration of the U.S. government by foreign spies. They were enabled, Edmonds claimed, by high-ranking U.S. officials and insider moles planted at nuclear weapons facilities around the nation.

“Everybody at headquarters level at the Bureau knew what she was saying was extremely accurate,” Cole said recently. “They were trying to figure out ways of keeping this whole thing quiet because they didn’t want Sibel to come out.”

Her under-oath testimony for the Ohio Election Commission, given in a recent videotaped deposition, is both shocking and horrifying. (Edmonds was the star witness for Congressional candidate David Krikorian in connection with a formal complaint initiated by Representative Jean Schmidt [R-Ohio]. Challenging her in 2008, a Krikorian flyer had accused Schmidt of accepting “blood money” from Turkish interests to help block a House bill recognizing Turkey’s genocide of Armenians in 1915.) The deposition was allowed to proceed by the Obama Administration, which chose not to invoke the draconian and little-known “State Secrets Privilege” to gag her, as the previous administration had done, twice.

Edmonds testified that Congressman Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), a former Speaker of the House, was involved in “several categories” of corruption on behalf of Turkish agents, according to information she claims to have heard while translating and analyzing FBI counterintelligence wiretaps recorded from 1996 through 2002. She mentioned his “acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash” coupled with the ability “to do certain favors…make certain things happen for… [the] Turkish government’s interest.”

Edmonds also alleged, on the public record, Hastert’s use of a “townhouse that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities” and said that “foreign entities knew about this. In fact, they sometimes participated in some of those…activities in that particular townhouse.”

The allegations against Hastert include accepting some half-million dollars in bribes. While several FBI sources have corroborated Edmonds’s account, the best Hastert’s attorneys could do was offer a nondenial denial to the charges. But the proof, as they say, may be in the post-Congressional pudding. As Edmonds had predicted years earlier, Hastert—who left Congress in 2007—now makes $35,000 a month lobbying his old colleagues as a registered foreign agent for the Turkish government.

Former Congressman Bob Livingston (RLouisiana), who was set to become Speaker prior to Hastert until evidence of a sexual affair was revealed by Larry Flynt, was described in Edmonds’s deposition as having participated in “not very legal activities on behalf of foreign interests” before leaving office in 1999. Afterward, she said, Livingston acted “as a conduit to…further foreign interests, both overtly and covertly,” and also became both a lobbyist and “an operative” representing Turkish interests.

According to Edmonds, Representative Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)—likely to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010—was “the recipient of both legally and illegally raised…campaign donations from…Turkish entities.” Edmonds also claimed that hard-right Representative Dan Burton (R-Indiana), who was instrumental in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, carried out “extremely illegal activities” and covert operations that were “against the United States citizens” and “against the United States’ interests.”

Edmonds named allegedly traitorous Democrats too. She said that former New York Congressman Stephen Solarz, now also a lobbyist, “acted as conduit to deliver or launder contributions and other bribe[s, including blackmail] to certain members of Congress.” And, according to Edmonds, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-California) was said to have been involved in “not only…bribe[ry], but also…disclosing [the] highest level protected U.S. intelligence and weapons technology information both to Israel and to Turkey [and] other very serious criminal conduct.”

The most overtly salacious of the allegations involved Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois), who is “married with…grown children, but she is bisexual,” according to Edmonds. The FBI whistleblower described how Schakowsky was “hooked” by Turkish agents into having a lesbian “sexual relationship with one of their spies,” and “the entire episodes of their sexual conduct was being filmed because the entire house…was bugged…to be used for certain things that they wanted to request.”

Edmonds noted, however, that she didn’t “know if she [Schakowsky] did anything illegal afterwards” since Edmonds was fired by the FBI before learning what came of that particular setup. The Turks, she said, intended to get at Schakowsky’s husband, lobbyist Robert Creamer, who in April 2006 began serving five months in prison (and 11 months of house arrest) for check-kiting and failing to collect withholding tax.

Schakowsky’s office has vehemently denied the allegations. As head of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation, Schakowsky might be expected to hold hearings on any of the former FBI employee’s revelations but she has not. She has also refused Edmonds’s challenge to take a polygraph test and has not yet sued her for libel, as the whistleblower has challenged her to do.

Edmonds’s most disturbing allegations, however, may be against high-ranking appointed officials in the Bush Administration. Elaborating on testimony she laid out in her sworn deposition, Edmonds told American Conservative magazine’s Phil Giraldi—a 17-year CIA counterterrorism officer—very specific details of alleged traitorous schemes perpetrated by top State and Defense Department officials. As already noted, these included Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and, perhaps most notably, former Deputy Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, the third-highest-ranking official in the Bush State Department.

Edmonds said that Feith and Wolfowitz were involved in plans to break Iraq into U.S. and British protectorates months prior to 9/11. She also claimed that the duo shared information with Grossman on how to blackmail various officials and that Grossman had accepted cash to help procure and sell nuclear weapons technology to Israel and Turkey—and, from there, on to the foreign black market. There the technology would be purchased by the highest bidder, such as Pakistan, Iran, Libya, North Korea or possibly even al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Edmonds claimed that Grossman, the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey before taking his State Department post, had tipped off Turkish diplomats to the true identity of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s front company, Brewster Jennings & Associates, a full three years prior to their being publicly outed by columnist Robert Novak. That in itself, according to George H.W. Bush, would be an act of treason carried out by “the most insidious of traitors.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Giraldi summed up Edmonds’s disclosures to me in blunt terms: “This was a massive coordinated espionage effort directed against United States nuclear secrets engineered by foreign agents who successfully corrupted senior government officials and legislators in our Congress. It’s that simple.”

According to a declassified version of a 2005 Department of Justice Inspector General’s report, Sibel Edmonds’s allegations are “credible,” “serious” and “warrant a thorough and careful review by the FBI.”
Perhaps more damningly, the FBI’s John Cole recently confirmed a key element of Edmonds’s claims when he revealed the existence of “the FBI’s decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman was perhaps the top U.S. ringleader for the entire foreign espionage scheme. The probe, Cole added, “ultimately was buried and covered up.”

Cole, who now works as an intelligence contractor for the Air Force, not only finds Edmonds “very credible,” but also confirms the “ongoing and detailed effort by Turkey to develop influence in the United States” through a number of illegal means.

“Turkish individuals would ask for favors—ya know, ‘You help me out, and I’ll help you out’—and basically what would happen is the elected official would either receive money or some kind of gift,” Cole explained. “Or, if it was a government employee, I’ve seen it where after they retired, they get these very lucrative positions with a Turkish company, or whatever the country may be.”

As noted, Hastert now works for Turkey, and Grossman now works for a Turkish company and as a lobbyist—no doubt raking in a pretty penny from both. Hastert and Grossman repeatedly ignored requests to comment on these charges.

The mainstream U.S. media, however, apparently remain uninterested in investigating any of it. Not even after Cole himself called for a “Special Counsel” to investigate and prosecute. So what the hell is going on here?
Giraldi believes that, as with companies such as AIG and GM becoming “too big to fail,” the size and success of this massive national security espionage scandal has simply become too big to bust.

He told me, “You have to look at Marc Grossman being part of a much bigger operation in terms of the Israelis and the Turks obtaining influence over our legislators and over a number of senior government officials at the Pentagon and State Department. Because this thing was so big, and it affected both Democrats and Republicans, I think the U.S. government is terrified of opening up this Pandora’s box.”

Giraldi added, “The people in Congress and in the Justice Department who should be investigating this…and also in the media—because the media is tied hand and foot to government—this is all part of one big, you know, conspiracy, if you want to look at it this way. And, essentially, this is a story that they don’t want to get out.”

So why, exactly, isn’t the media covering Sibel Edmonds, whom the ACLU once described as “the most gagged person in the history of the U.S.,” now that she is finally able to tell her story? It’s a story, after all, that the legendary 1970s whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has deemed “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers.”

“If we had an effective mainstream media that was going after this story, that would make it come out,” Giraldi noted. “But we don’t have an effective media.” He then pointed out one more reason for the media’s reluctance to dig into this story: “According to Sibel, Grossman actually bragged that he would get from the Turks the information that they wanted to appear in an article. He would write it up, and he would fax it over to the New York Times, and they would print it just as he had written it under somebody else’s byline.”

Guess we won’t expect any coverage of this scandal from the New York Times, “the paper of record,” any time soon. And if a story isn’t covered by the Times, and thereafter picked up by everybody else, did it really happen? Given the complicity of the media with regard to Sibel Edmonds, it would appear the government never even needed to invoke the “State Secrets Privilege” in the first place.

As of this writing, HUSTLER stands to be the largest, most “corporate” U.S. outlet in which these startling, now-public, on-the-record disclosures have been reported. The moral: Pull off a large enough crime, and it becomes too big to do anything about.

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You may purchase the hard copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine (with free shipping) at HustlerMagazine.com. Comes with full length DVD and free shipping!

You may purchase a digital copy of the March 2010 Issue of HUSTLER Magazine at UnderCoverMags.com.

The people’s advocate who gave us Fahrenheit 9/11 calls health insurance companies “a criminal racket”

On June 12, 2007, filmmaker Michael Moore delivered the following remarks during State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s informational briefing of the California legislature, under the title “SiCKO : What Has Happened to Healthcare?” Moore’s
documentary SiCKO, detailing the crisis in America’s healthcare industry, was released on June 29.

In making this film for the last couple of years…actually the film grew out of a story I did back in 1999: I had a TV show called The Awful Truth, and I became aware of a young man who was fully covered by Humana Health Insurance, one of the largest health insurance companies in the country, and he works full-time at a national drugstore chain. His diabetes had reached a point where his doctor decided he needed both a kidney and a  pancreas transplant. Humana, his health insurance company, approved the kidney transplant but denied the pancreas transplant. [Laughter from the audience.] The reason why the nurses are laughing is because they know without the pancreas, the kidney—and the life—doesn’t continue to exist.

It’s one of many ways that health insurance companies try to trick up the system—make it look like they’re doing something for their clients when in fact their bottom line, their primary goal, is to make as much money as possible.

I took this young man to Humana headquarters with my camera crew, and I asked them if they would please pay for his pancreas transplant. They said not only would they not do that, they showed us the door. But out on the front lawn of this headquarters of Humana in Louisville, Kentucky, as we were ushered out, we then decided to hold the man’s funeral a few months in advance of when he’d actually be dead.

So with the man present, and his priest, and the pallbearers and the bagpipes and the casket, we conducted his funeral on the lawn of Humana Health Insurance Systems. They were so appalled and embarrassed and frightened by what we had just done—and how this would look on national television—that within three days they agreed to pay for the pancreas transplant and thus save the man’s life.

Although that ran for only ten minutes on a cable channel called Bravo, I began to think
at that moment [that] if we could save one man’s life in ten minutes with nothing more
than this tool—this camera and a microphone— what else could we do? And so I thought, What could we do in 120 minutes? How many lives could we save?

And initially I started out by [thinking], well let’s go after Aetna, let’s go after Blue Cross of California, let’s really take on these people. And then I thought, But wait a minute; that’s going to miss the point here. The problem isn’t just Blue Cross of California or Humana or Pfizer or Eli Lilly or the hospital corporations of America and the First Family. The problem isn’t just them; the problem is the system itself. It’s the system that’s broken, and fixing one little piece of it here and one little piece of it there is not going to provide universal health coverage
for all Americans. It simply won’t happen in our lifetime if we continue along this path, and so I began to feel that what had to happen here was a complete change in the system.

I don’t know how many people are aware of this, but the number one cause of bankruptcy now in the United States is medical bills. The number one cause of homelessness is medical bills.

In [SiCKO ] we obtained some of Nixon’s famous White House tapes. But these aren’t the discussions about Watergate. I will show in this film [a] February 17, 1971, conversation between John Ehrlichman and Richard Nixon. They’re about to put forth the bills that would bring us the modern-day HMOs, and Ehrlichman says to Nixon, “Now there’s one more piece of this we have to figure out.We want to talk to the Vice President about this, and it’s about these health maintenance organizations like Edgar Kaiser’s Permanente thing,” as he put it, and Nixon interrupts him and goes, “Aw, I don’t want to talk about any of these damn
medical programs.” And Ehrlichman goes, “No, wait, wait, this is a private enterprise one.” And Nixon goes, “Oh, okay, I like that.” And then Ehrlichman essentially boils down what would become the health insurance system that we now have today.

Ehrlichman says to Nixon, “The genius of Edgar Kaiser is, what they want to do here, is to try and provide as little care as possible so they can make the biggest profit possible.” And suddenly Nixon lights up, and he says, “Okay, this is great, fine, not bad, let’s do this.” And that’s what they did. Once they understood what the basic premise was, that it was to provide less care for more profit, that was something that they loved, and that is the system that we have.

The reason why we have to eliminate health insurance companies—I mean they literally have to be removed from the equation—is that there’s no room for them because there should never be room for the word profit when you’re trying to make a decision whether or not to provide somebody care when they get sick, bottom line. You can never allow this to happen. And they can’t make a profit unless they deny care, unless they deny claims, unless they keep people off the rolls who have preexisting conditions or kick people off the rolls who have
diseases that become too expensive for them. They can’t make a profit.

Let me just pause for a second and say something on behalf of the health insurance corporations in America. Our laws state very clearly that they have a legal fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for the shareholders. If they don’t do that, they can be put in jail. So they are required by law to turn as big a profit as they can, and the only way they can turn the big profit is to not pay out the money, is to not provide the care. So therefore there’s no way that this can work; there’s no way that we can continue to have these health insurance companies making these decisions nor should we have private, profit-making hospitals making decisions.

The hospital that has to make the decision based on the bottom line as to whether or not they’re to provide care is absolutely antithetical to basic human rights. We’re the only country in the Western world that doesn’t believe it is a human right to provide free universal health coverage for every one of its citizens…and this is what’s so amazing, isn’t it? Because we’re all Americans, we are amongst the most generous people on earth. We’re a good people, we have a good heart and a good soul, and we have a conscience; we know right from wrong. And the fact [is] we won’t even insure [9 million] children in America.
What is wrong with us? That’s not who we are; that’s not what we used to be about.

You know this every-man-for-himself attitude, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you got your problems [and] I got mine, you know, don’t bother, this me, me, me, me, me. That’s not how they exist in these other countries—in Canada, in Britain, in Ireland, in France, these other places. They believe we’re all in the same boat, and we sink or swim together. They believe that if too many people fall between the cracks, their society suffers as a result of it. What happened to us?

I think we used to believe that somewhere along the line, somewhere way, way back. You know, my grandfather was a country doctor; he  was paid with eggs and milk and a chicken every now and then. He did it because he cared for people; he didn’t do it to make money.

The sad thing about the American Medical Association is that they have fought every good reform for the people of this country. In the last century they fought Social Security; they fought Medicare. You’ll see in my film the head of the AMA back in 1962 giving a big speech about how dare we help old people with Medicare. It’s really weird to look at it now to actually see a doctor saying such a thing.

And, of course, the AMA, they were all behind the HMOs when Nixon and that whole thing started in the ’70s. But doctors now are amongst the most demoralized people in this country because they realize they’ve been given the shaft by the insurance company.

What used to take one person sitting behind the glass when you went into the doctor’s office filling out the forms, there’s now five or six people back there arguing on the phone with the insurance company to get a $15 bill paid. How much is that costing us?

Actually, there are statistics; we know how much it’s costing us. The overhead goes up to 30% of health insurance companies’ budget. Thirty percent it costs for overhead, red tape, bureaucracy, paperwork. Now I did a little thing out on the street just stopping people, and I said, “You know these private health insurance companies, they spend up to 30% on overhead and red tape and all this. What do you think the government spends on their bureaucracy, their paperwork, for their health program Medicare, Medicaid?”

People’d say, “Well let’s see, if Aetna and Kaiser are spending 25 to 30%, it’s got to be 40%. The government’s doing it, right? The government, it’s gotta be 50%.”

I said, “No, it’s 3%—that’s how much it costs to run Medicare and Medicaid: 3%.” You know, in Canada they run their entire free universal healthcare system total overhead, total bureaucracy, 1.7% of the total healthcare budget.

We have listened to this for the last 30- plus years about how the federal government is bad, state government, big government bad, bad, you know. And it’s like, how did we ever cop the attitude that the government of, by and for the people could be bad? I don’t understand this, but they’ve done a good job, haven’t they, convincing the average American [that], “You don’t want to get the government involved.”

When somebody says that to me, you know what I say to them? “You really don’t want the government involved? Ask your grandparents if that Social Security check comes every month.” It not only comes every month; my dad says it comes on the same day through the government-sponsored U.S. mail and, remarkably, it’s the same amount every month. They actually get the check right. How do they do that? Tens of millions of seniors every month get a Social Security check on time for the exact amount.

We, the American people, have fallen for this myth that government is bad. I heard Al Franken say a couple months ago: “The Republicans, they run on a platform of the government is bad, it’s evil, you don’t want the government to run things, and then once elected, they spend the next four years proving themselves right.”

I read a story that Blue Cross of California is already promising to spend $2 million—I’m sure they’ll spend a lot more than that—fighting you. Because it’s the last thing that they want to have happen, and they’re going to fight this, and they’re going to try and scare people: socialized medicine, ooh, socialized bad. Really? Isn’t that what our police departments are: socialized? Run by the government, free service.

You think anybody would ever ask if the fire department should have to post a profit? I mean, seriously. Would we allow our fire department, when they arrive at the house, to determine whether or not this is going to affect the Fire Department’s bottom line? We wouldn’t allow that, would we?      

Well, when someone is wheeled into a hospital, that question should never be asked, never. That’s immoral…in a human society to ask that question, “Where is the profit here? How’s this going to affect our bottom line? How are we going to make money off this sick person?” I mean, this doesn’t look good, folks. It doesn’t look good to the rest of the world, and it won’t look good to the anthropologists who dig us up hundreds of years from now. They’ll wonder, “What were these people thinking?”