How Corporations Used Podesta to Corrupt the Clintons and Obama

The Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes John Podesta

(2016)

This segment of The Empire Files focuses on the Wikileaks reveal about the obscenely corrupt relationship between John Podesta, the Clintons and Barack Obama. My immediate reaction on watching it was relief and gratitude that Hillary lost the presidency.

Hillary’s campaign manager John Podesta is, first and foremost, is a corporate lobbyist who highest loyalty is to his clients. The Podesta Group, which he owns with his brother, Tony, lobbies for the most powerful corporations in the world, as well as the brutal governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and al-Maliki (Iraqi prime minister 2006-2014). The Wikileaks emails reveal unequivocally that John Podesta systematically (and illegally) used high ranking positions in both the Clinton and Obama administration to advance the profit interests of his private clients.

Under Bill Clinton, it was also John Podesta’s role to covered up numerous instances in which Bill and Hillary Clinton used his position as Arkansas governor for personal financial gain.

When Obama became president, Podesta (who would become Obama’s senior White House advisor), allowed his client Citibank to dictate nearly all of Obama’s cabinet appointments. Podesta would go on to form the Center for American Progress, a supposedly non-profit group that illegal lobbied for private clients of the Podesta Group to receive federal subsidies and lax regulatory treatment.

CIA Cocaine Trafficking, Bill Clinton and the Mena Airport

The Mena Connection

Directed by Terry Reed (1985)

Film Review

The Mena Connection establishes unequivocally that both Vice-president George H. W. Bush and Governor Bill Clinton had direct involvement in the CIA’s cocaine smuggling operation at Arkansas’ Mena Airport during the 1980s. Aircraft loaded with illegal weapons for the Contras in Honduras returned to Mena with tons of Columbia cocaine used to finance the operation. Reprising documentary evidence Reed presents in his 1994 bestselling book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA , the film also establishes that Clinton also deliberately obstructed investigations into Mena by local and federal prosecutors and the IRS.

Half the documentary is devoted to exposes a local Arkansas TV reporter and a WMAQ (Chicago) reporter did on cocaine smuggling at Mena during the congressional investigation into Iran Contra.* The other half consists of lengthy interviews with whistleblower Terry Reed and his wife Janis.

An experienced Vietnam War pilot, in 1983 Oliver North recruited Reed to participate in The Enterprise, a CIA operation to assemble and deliver untraceable weapons to Contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Reed also trained Contra pilots in “night flying” – landing without runway lights – on a remote mountainous airstrip eleven miles from Mena.

According to Reed, the CIA shut down the Mena operation shortly Iran Contra scandal broke in 1986, shortly after movingthe guns-for-cocaine operation to Mexico. Soon after Reed moved his family to Guadalajara, his CIA control order him to participate in the cocaine smuggling side of the operation. Things got nasty when he refused to comply and submitted his resignation. The Department of Justice attempted to frame him and his wife for drug smuggling.

They spent the next two years fighting the conviction. Following their 1991 acquittal, Reed filed suit against Arkansas law enforcement and Clinton administration officials who had framed him. Both Reed and Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander, whose efforts to obtain a General Accounting Office investigation into Mena were blocked by the CIA, believed the lawsuit would lead to Clinton’s impeachment.

In a roundabout way it did. Owing to CIA interference, it proved impossible to impeach Clinton for cocaine smuggling or money laundering. Ultimately the only charge Congress could make stick was lying under oath about a sexual affair with a White House intern.

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*The Iran Contra Affair was a political scandal in which senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran (an enemy state) to secure funding for CIA-sponsored Contras in Nicaragua.

The Citizens Group that Blew Whistle on OKC Bombing

A Noble Lie

Directed by James Lane (2011)

Film Review

This documentary approaches the Oklahoma City bombing from a somewhat different angle, focusing on the citizens group that empaneled a grand jury to investigate Tim McVeigh’s accomplices, as well as his links to US intelligence. Oklahoma is one of the few states that allows citizens to convene their own grand jury.

The Oklahoma Bombing Investigation Committee was made up of Oklahoma City police and sheriff’s officers, bombing victims and their families, eyewitnesses and a supportive state legislator. Their findings showed clearly that at the time of the bombing McVeigh was still in the US Army (as indicated on his death certificate) and assigned to working with the FBI and ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) group PatCon to infiltrate militant right wing groups. The committee’s goal was to force Congress to investigate the FBI cover-up of the Oklahoma City bombing. When this failed, the published their findings two weeks prior to 9-11 in a book called The Final Report on the Bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Building.

A Noble Lie also zeroes in on the two eyewitnesses who were murdered as part of the FBI cover-up, the files the FBI and ATF removed from the Murrah federal building before they permitted search and rescue teams from entering the bomb site, and FBI memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about the involvement of McVeigh and various accomplices in PatCon. The latter was an undercover FBI operation to infiltrate right wing extremist groups.

This film also goes to great lengths to debunk the FBI claim that a truck bomb caused the Murrah Federal Building to collapse. Not only was the pattern of structural damage inconsistent with an external air blast, but a truck bomb (of the size claimed by the FBI) would have produced too much ammonia gas for rescuers to enter the building.

Independent forensic tests at an Air Force lab ascertained that the bombing had to result from explosive charges attached to one or more columns inside the building – exactly like the two bombs defused immediately after the blast. The activities of the Air Force bomb disposal squad were reported by numerous media outlets on the day.

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*An Oklahoma sheriff got a tip off from Little Rock the day of the bombing that these records likely concerned the federal investigation into CIA drug running at the Mena Airport in Arkansas. Federal records related to the Whitewater investigation, another Clinton scandal, were also stored in the Murrah building and vanished the day of the bombing.

 

Arkansas’s Unlikely Environmental Activists

The Natural State of America

Written and produced by Brian Campbell (2010)

Film Review

The Natural State of America is an inspiring documentary about an unlikely group of Arkansas environmental activists who take on their rural electric cooperative for spraying toxic herbicide in the Ozark highlands.

The Newton County Wildlife Association (NCWA) was first formed back in the 1970s, when they took on the US Forest Service over their plan to spray Agent Orange to destroy hardwood Ozark forest to benefit private timber interests seeking to replace it with quick growing pine.

Their success in obtaining a court injunction against the Forest Service inspired environmental activists in Washington and Oregon to undertake similar campaigns – resulting in an ban on domestic Agent Orange use in 1978.

A few years later the NWCA blocked the Army Corps of Engineers from damming the Buffalo River.

In recent years, the NWCA has joined with the Organic Growers Association and back-to-the-land homesteaders to protest a 2006 decision by the Carroll Electric Cooperative to spray toxic herbicides without consulting their membership.

Prior to watching this film, I was unacquainted with the pristine natural beauty of the Ozark region or the wealth of medicinal herbs found nowhere else in North America. I was also intrigued by the unusual personal profiles of the activists and their intimate knowledge of the geology and natural history of the region.

That being said, the film’s soundtrack was the high point for me. I’m pretty passionate about blue grass.

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*Agent Orange is an equal mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D that was used by the US military to defoliate the jungle during the Vietnam War. Thousands of GIs who were exposed to it developed cancer, autoimmune and neurological disease and other health problems and have seen major birth defects in their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In 2014, the EPA generated major controversy by approving a new Dow herbicide containing a combination of 2,4-D and glyphosate (Roundup) EPA approves new 2,4-D blend