Posted on 11/12/2001

Bush Law

In a conversation with GNN Executive Editor Anthony Lappe, journalist Greg
Palast breaks down two of the biggest scoops you've never heard and
explains how they, and other groundbreaking stories, are ignored by most
mainstream news outlets.

Palast is no conspiracy nut. His special investigations regularly lead the
BBCs Newsnight program. His bi-weekly column for London's Observer
newspaper has earned him numerous awards including the Financial Times
David Thomas Prize. Last year, Salon.com selected his report on the U.S.
elections as politics story of the year. Yet despite all the props, Palast,
a Canadian, works in exile in London - unable to find work in what he calls
the gutless North American media. Like the best muckrakers, he is angry,
opinionated and armed with a tireless desire to expose the truth.

LAPPE: Thanks Mr. Palast for talking with us today.

You have broken two major stories concerning President Bush in the last
year - both of which have gotten little play here in the U.S. Lets start
out by looking back at Florida: Last week, the final report on the Florida
recount funded by a consortium of various media outlets was released. They
found: Bush would have won if you only recounted the counties the Gore team
had requested, Gore would have won if it was statewide.

But prior to all this, you reported a story that looked into something that
went down before the election that in many ways makes these findings
insignificant. What did you find?

PALAST: Yeah, insignificant. No kidding. Maybe that's what The New York
Times sub-heading should be "All the news that's insignificant we print".
First of all, the story I broke was simple:

After looking at my evidence printed in Britain, the Civil Rights
Commission said the issue is not the count of the votes in Florida the
issue is the no-count. What the commission meant by the no-count is that it
looks like maybe 100,000 people, at least 80,000 people, most of them
black, were not permitted to vote who had a legal right to vote in Florida.
That story was simply not covered in the U.S. press. And that is how the
election was won.

I reported that story for the main paper of the nation. Unfortunately, it
was the wrong nation. I reported that story for the Guardian newspapers of
Britain, and its related sister paper The Observer, where I have a column
on Sunday. I also reported it for BBC television at the top of the nightly
news, but again, it was the nightly news of Britain where they found out
who really won that election, just not in the U.S.

Here's how they did it:

A few months before the election, Katherine Harris office used computer
systems to make up a list of people to purge from the voter rolls of people
who were supposedly felons people who committed serious crimes and
therefore in Florida were not allowed to vote. We now know those lists were
as phony as a three-dollar bill. That maybe approximately 90% of the people
on those lists, and there were 57,700 people on that list, approximately
90% were not felons and had the right to vote. Surprise, surprise. At least
54% of the names on that list were black. We know that because Florida is
one of the few states under the U.S. Civil Rights Act that actually has to
track the race of each voter.

They used this racial targeting system as a way to target and purge black
voters. This was a very sophisticated Jim Crow operation done by computers,
completely hidden from the public eye. And when they were asked about it
they basically lied. The Governor, the Secretary of State, and the head of
the Florida Department of Elections all lied under oath to the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission about how that was done. Now that was completely covered
in the British and European press. That is one of the reasons why when Bush
came over to Europe he was seen as a usurper and a pretender to the
presidency - not elected, but a guy who had conducted a sort of racial coup
detat. He was not seen as legitimate.

The U.S. press did little bits of the story and then buried it. My sister
paper the Washington Post, (the Guardian papers co-publish with the
Washington Post) did run my story, buried, 7 months after the election. I
wrote the story within 3 weeks of the election and they didnt publish it
until seven months later, when it didnt really mater. And they only
published it because the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said my findings were
correct. If I didnt have that official approval, I dont think we would have
seen that story at all. And now these newspapers, including the Washington
Post and The New York Times, spent easily a couple of million dollars doing
what they called a recount. But in fact it was not a recount. There were
180,000 votes in Florida that were never counted on order of Katherine
Harris, the Republican Secretary of State. These were 180,000 votes that
were never counted because they had some kind of technical error in them
like a stray mark in it, or someone circled Al Gores name instead of
punching a hole, and it was not counted as an Al Gore vote.

Now you have to know I did not support Al Gore, I am not here carrying his
flag. I don't care if he was elected either way. That is not my interest. I
am concerned about democracy. The thing that those ballots showed was
something very simple: by a notable majority the people in Florida voted
for, and believed they voted for, and assumed their ballots would be
counted for, Al Gore.

Now how in the heck after spending more than a million dollars and going
through each of those ballots that these so-called news organizations
decided that Bush would have won it anyway? What they said was under state
of Florida rulings we exclude what people wanted to do, we exclude what we
see on the ballots, and we go by the Florida rulings on what ballots should
be excluded for technical reasons and Bush wins. Well, we knew that. We
knew that because Katherine Harris already said that Bush won on technical
grounds. So we didn't need to spend a million dollars.

We have to remember that these news organizations had this information for
months and withheld it. And then in the middle of a war they release
information and futsed with it so it looked like Bush would have won
anyway, or its hard to see, or Bush would have won one way and Gore would
have won another way. Thats nonsense. In a democracy the intent of the
voter is all that counts. In fact, the U.S. took that position in two other
elections in 2000: when Slobodan Milosevic disqualified ballots and
therefore won the presidency of Yugoslavia we refused to recognize his
government. And when Alberto Fujimori of Peru knocked out counting of rural
ballots for technical reasons, once again the U.S. refused to recognize his
presidency. The U.S. said you cannot win a presidency on a technicality. We
said that for Milosevic and for Fujimori but somehow we didn't say that to
Mr. Bush. It's the votes that count in a democracy. If the votes don't
count then its not a democracy.

LAPPE: Speaking of which, lets jump to the present and to another bombshell
you recently reported: that Bush has hindered the FBI's investigation into
various terrorist organizations. What did you find?

PALAST: We obtained documents from inside the FBI showing that
investigations had been shut down on the bin Laden family, the royal family
of Saudi Arabia - and that is big because there are 20,000 princes in the
royal family - and their connections to the financing of terrorism.

Now there is one exception. The FBI, the CIA and all the rest of the
agencies are allowed to investigate Osama, the so-called black sheep of the
family. But what we were finding was that there was an awful lot of gray
sheeps in this family which is a family of billionaires which is tied in
with the Saudi royal household which appears to be involved in the funding
of terrorist organizations or organizations linked to terrorism. If you go
the BBC site you will see me holding up documents from the FBI talking
about Abdullah bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and an organization called the
World Assembly of Muslim Youth which may or may not be a conduit for funds
to terrorists. Now the problem was the investigations were shut down. There
were problems that go back to Father Bush - when he was head of the CIA, he
tried to stop investigations of the Saudis, continued on under Reagan,
Daddy Bushs president, and it continued under Clinton too, but not as
severely. What I was told by agents was that under Clinton agents were
constrained but not prohibited from taking on these investigations into the
Saudis.

LAPPE: Now what would be behind all of this?

PALAST: Let me get to this one final point. While we did say FBI [in the
article], I have to add it was also CIA and all the other international
agencies. You should know we were attacked by friends of Bush for just
mentioning the FBI. I have been trying to protect my sources. But I can say
that the sources are not just FBI trying to get even with the other
agencies, but in fact other agencies. The information was that they were
absolutely prohibited, until Sept. 11, at looking at the Saudi funding of
the Al-Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations.

There is no question we had what looked like the biggest failure of the
intelligence community since Pearl Harbor but what we are learning now is
it wasn't a failure, it was a directive. Now I am not part of the
conspiracy nut crowd that believes George Bush came up with a plan for an
attack on the United States to save his popularity. There is no evidence of
that. That is completely outside of any evidence I have seen. But what we
find is something that, in a way, where the effect is just the same and its
chilling. Which is that they blinded the intelligence agencies and said you
cannot look at the Saudis. Now the question is why . . .

Now the answer kept coming back with two words: One is Arbusto. The other
was Carlyle. Now Arbusto is Arbusto Oil. Arbusto means shrub in Spanish.
Arbusto was the company that made young George W. his first million. Now he
had millions inherited from daddy and grandpa, but this was his first
million. He had established this basically worthless company that kept
digging dry holes in Texas and suddenly it got financing from the Gulf
region and Saudi Arabian-connected financiers and it was taken over by a
company called Harken Oil, which then received a very surprise contract to
drill in the Gulf. Suddenly, Arbusto Oil shares became worth quite a bit.

The second company is Carlyle. While people know companies like Boeing
Aircraft and Lockheed, Carlyle is just about the biggest defense contractor
in the U.S. because behind a lot of these companies like United Technology
is the Carlyle investment group. Carlyle is headed by Frank Carlucci who
was Secretary of Defense under Daddy Bush and it includes on its payroll
James Baker, the Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, who was very pro-Arab
and pro-Saudi when he was in power. They have on their payroll Daddy Bush,
who is an advisor to their Asian panel, and he also represented the company
to the Saudi royal household in a couple of trips he made there. In
addition, our president George W. was collecting money from the company by
being on the Board of Directors of one of its subsidiaries, where I am sure
he added a lot of his business acumen to their operations. He picked up
$15,000-plus a year for showing up to a couple of board meetings. What is
also interesting in this company is that you have investment in the company
by the bin Laden family.

Now, lets be careful I am not a conspiracy nutter. I dont think completely
ill of the Bush family, and I don't think what happened here is that the
bin Laden family and the Saudis bought themselves two presidents of the
United States, a simple purchase: We give you money and you call off the
dogs and don't let the CIA look at us.

That is not what is going on . .

PALAST: What is going on is the Bush family is an oil family. They have a
natural business and political inclination to support the royal household
and their retainers like the bin Laden family. These relationships are
cemented by joint business ventures, by the Saudis making your son, who
becomes president, rich. It is not a pay-off. But lets put it this way:
would you think that the people who just made your family wealthier than it
already is, made you a couple of a million bucks, would you immediately
think these people are also happen to be funding people who are blowing up
buildings in New York? You tend to say to your agencies which you control:
Those are really good guys, leave them alone especially because if we annoy
them they will cut off our oil.

There seems to be this great fear that the Saudi royal family will, I don't
know, fold their tents, get in their Leer jets and go off to Monaco and let
the fanatics take over Saudi Arabia . . .

LAPPE: Or if this comes out this will weaken the rest of the American
governments resolve to support them which will further weaken their ability
to control the more radical forces within the country . . .

PALAST: Yeah, one of the problems is exactly what is their relationship to
the terror networks. One thing you should know is that the Saudis say that
they have removed Osama bin Laden's citizenship in Saudi Arabia. Of course,
there are no citizens of Saudi Arabia, there are only subjects. So he is
not allowed to be a subject of the king of Saudi Arabia. What a loss. And
they have frozen his assets, supposedly. But the information I am getting
from other sources is that they have given tens of millions of dollars to
his networks. This is being done as much as a protection racket as anything
else.

LAPPE: Some of this was reported, or at least alluded to, in the recent
Frontline report.

PALAST: There was a little bit of whispering in the Frontline by my buddy
Lowell Bergman. He could go further. At least you got a little bit of it on
PBS. What is interesting is Bergman, who is also a reporter for The New
York Times, did not have this in The New York Times.

LAPPE: That is interesting, I actually noticed that myself.

PALAST: Now here is a guy who has an agreement that whatever he puts on
Frontline by contract can be put in The New York Times exclusively. And
here The New York Times skips the report. Now we went further on BBC
Newsnight, we had some of the same sources, and we have been digging
further. We are allowed to dig further.

We also had another source explaining a meeting that was held, and I can't
give the details because I would be scooping myself. But I got particulars
of a meeting in which Saudi billionaires up who would be responsible to
paying what to Osama. And apparently around the time of the meeting is when
Osama blew up the Kohbar Towers in Saudi Arabia killing 19 American
servicemen. It was seen by the group as not so much a political or
emotional point, but as a reminder to make your darn payment.

Osama is often compared to Hitler but he should be seen as John Gotti times
one hundred. He is running a massive international protection racket: Pay
me or I will blow you up. The fact these payments are made is one of the
things the Bush administration is trying very hard to cover-up. Now whether
these payments were paid because they want to or it was coercion the Bush
administration does not want to make a point of it. I have to tell you the
Clinton administration was not exactly wonderful on this either. One of the
points I made on the BBC was there was a Saudi diplomat who defected. He
had 14,000 documents in his possession showing Saudi royal involvement in
everything from assassinations to terror funding. He offered the 14,000
documents to the FBI but they would not accept them. The low-level agents
wanted this stuff because they were tremendous leads. But the upper-level
people would not permit this, did not want to touch this material. That is
quite extraordinary. We don't even want to look. We don't want to know.
Because obviously going through 14,000 documents from the Saudi government
files would anger the Saudis. And it seems to be policy number one is we
don't get these boys angry. Unfortunately, we see the results. We are
blowing up Afghanistan when 15 of the 19 bombers were from Saudi Arabia.

Not that I am friends of the Taliban, who are vicious, brutal maniacs, but
15 of the 19 were Saudis and we seem to be giving these guys a full and
complete pass.

LAPPE: Now lets take these two stories, the Florida election theft and the
Saudi cover-up, together as a backdrop. Paint me a picture of the Bush crew
and how they operate. Are they above the law?

PALAST: Well, they are our law. Remember they are two presidents of the
United States, they go back generations to the Mayflower. The Bush family
is the one of the true royal families of America. They have a long-term
idea of what is good for us. Other countries think it is quite spooky that
we have a guy who came out of the CIA to head of the nation. Just like
Americans have a lot of doubts about Putin because he was the head of the
KGB. These people are used to secrecy and not letting America know what
would be frightening and troubling to us in our sweet innocence. The
problem is Sept. 11 took away our innocence. The question is will it take
away our blinders? The U.S. press does not seem capable of wanting to dig.

LAPPE: Now why is that? From an outsider looking in, you have the BBC, a
news organization owned by the government, and you have the American media,
which has this great tradition of Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate.
They are independent organizations that are not answerable to any
government organization. Why is there this chasm between investigative
reporting in the U.K. and in America?

PALAST: Well, first of all you hit a good one. Woodward and Bernstein,
which everyone comes back to, was three decades ago! What has happened in
thirty years? When have we had a story in thirty years that has come close
to that? I gave a talk with Seymour Hersh, who is one of the guys who broke
the My Lai story. That was thirty years ago. He cannot work for an American
newspaper. He writes for the New Yorker magazine. Think about that. One of
our best investigative reporters in America, he has won at least two
Pulitzer prizes, can't even work for an American newspaper. What is going on?

Investigative reporting is so rare in America we had to make a movie out of
it. I was on a panel at Columbia University School of Journalism and there
was a reporter who worked on both continents who said that the odd thing he
found was the worst thing you could be called in an American newsroom is a
muckraker. Someone who looks like they are going after someone, someone who
looks like they are getting too enthusiastic about going after someone. No
one likes that guy.

Look what happened to Lowell Bergman. As soon as he said, gee we really
have to push a story that will make corporate America a bit unhappy. They
killed it. After all 60 Minutes for the most part does mostly small
potatoes stories. Small-time operators are the ones basically in their
sights. But when they took on a big operation like tobacco they killed the
story. I can tell you other stories with 60 Minutes that are just insane
that have gone by the boards. I did a story about George Bushs connections
to a brutal gold mining company out of Canada. And 60 Minutes said, Oh we
want to do a big story. And I said, Oh, no you don't. And three days later
they said, Oh, we can't do that story.

LAPPE: Why?

PALAST: They're gutless. No one has ever advanced their career in the last
thirty years by coming up with a great investigative piece. That is a way
to get unemployed. Anyone who thinks its all Murphy Brown and All the
Presidents Men out there is wrong. Thats the fantasy. Thats all television
and the movies. Its not in the newsrooms. If you say what I want to do is
expensive and difficult and involves getting inside documents, and
upsetting the established order, you are not going to get anywhere.
Businessmen are the hardest ones to go after. You can go after a crooked
politician but go after a corporation . . .

LAPPE: And their lawyers will bury you . . .

PALAST: Well, we have the First Amendment, which by the way there is no
First Amendment in Britain. There is no freedom of speech or the press.
Very difficult here legally, even though culturally its easier to report
the news here in Britain, even though you dont have the protection. But
there is a great fear in the U.S. of corporate power, which I think has a
lot to do with losing advertisers. There is a legal question because they
can't win lawsuits but they can cost you a lot of money. You are looked at
like some kind of left-wing, muckraker, conspiracy nut if you decide to go
past an official denial and say, I don't accept that. I want to see a
document.

I got to tell you, I have seen this over and over again: my story on the
Florida elections - one of the things I found out was that Jeb Bush had
deliberately excluded at least 50,000 voters, 94% of them democrats,
because they had been convicted of a crime in another state. Now Florida
under the U.S. constitution and its own constitution they cannot do that
punish someone for a crime in another state by taking away their right to
vote in Florida. You can't do that. They know that. When we spoke to Jeb
Bushs functionaries they said we know we can't do that, and then quietly
they said, but we do it anyway under instructions from our superiors. The
papers I was working for said, Well, Jeb Bush denied it. And flat out
denial from an official was enough to stop all these investigations. Dead
cold. I was with Salon.com. They killed the story. And it was only later
when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said I was correct, and then the
state of Florida admitted what they did, and then I was vindicated.

The New York Times did a story about how gold mining companies out of
Nevada have tremendous influence over the Bush administration. Nowhere in
the story did they mention that George Bush Sr. was on the board of the
biggest gold mining company in Nevada. They didnt mention the name of the
company. Here they are doing a story on gold mining in Nevada and they
don't mention the name of overwhelmingly the biggest company in Nevada,
which by the way is called Barrick. And it had on its advisory George Bush
Sr. It left out the name of the company and the fact it had on its board a
former president.

How did that happen? I can tell you because that company sued my paper when
I ran a story, and I have the same lawyer as The New York Times. You can
bet that The New York Times figured out it was going to cost them money or
create controversy. God forbid you create controversy, that would be
considered disastrous in a newsroom. When you get a letter from a lawyer
who says we disagree, the story gets blocked. The Globe and Mail, which is
the number one paper in Canada, was going to run the story. I was told that
the top people in the Globe and Mail killed the story. So you have absolute
direct corporate influence killing stories.

Most reporters understand that it is not a career-maker to have these
letters coming in. In other words, you never want to have your story
killed. Because if your story is killed by corporate big shots, from then
on you are marked as a troublemaker and a problem, and your career is in
deep trouble. When a guy like Seymour Hersh can't get a job with an
American newspaper. When Lowell Bergman has to work in the PBS ghetto. When
Greg Palast has to work in exile, there is a pretty evil pattern here. What
you see is institutionalized gutlessness. Im pissed off about it because I
want to come home and work. My kids have British accents. I wanna get home
already.

LAPPE: On that note, well wrap up. It seems that with this new war all of
these trends you have talked about are getting worse. Do you have any hope
for the future of journalism?

PALAST: My only hope for the future of journalism is one word: the Internet.

The big boys are trying to grab it and seize it and control it and own it
and stop it and freeze it and fill it up with corporate, commercialized
crap and junk. But it is still the conduit of the real information, the
real news. You are always being warned about things you read on the
Internet. But be warned what you read in The New York Times. At least when
you read the Internet you know you are getting all kinds of voices, some
nuts, some real, and you evaluate it. The problem with something like The
New York Times is it is coming to you as the stone-cold truth. It isn't
true that Bush would have won Florida anyway. When the people voted they
voted for Al Gore. He should have been inaugurated as president, not
because I like him, but because he got the vote nationwide and in Florida,
and they knew it and they didn't tell you that.

I can tell you right now the information I broadcasted on the BBC about the
chilling of the investigation of the FBI and the CIA of the bin Laden
family and the Saudi royal family, and I have more coming up, I can tell
you that information was given to The New York Times. They didnt use it. It
was given to 60 Minutes. Not that they aren't going to use it. Its like my
story about the elections. They run it seven months later in the back of
the paper. Or its just like the Florida vote count. If you go to The New
York Times web site you can get all the information that shows that Gore
won, but they either don't run it, or eviscerate it, or they give it to you
chopped up and spin it so the order of things are not disturbed.

I can't tell you all the reasons why that happens. Im not sure myself. I
think a lot of it is these guys hang out together. They go to the same
clubs and they go to each others daughters weddings. It makes me ill. It
makes me want to throw up when I watch Tom Brokaw, that fake hairdo, go to
dinner with Jiang Zemin at the White House. He's a reporter. What is he
doing eating spring rolls with a dictator? He should be reporting the story
not breaking bread with the powers-that-be. These guys can't seem to find
the distinction between being in with the power and reporting on it.

So there you go.