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Bill Buzenberg interviews former Representative Lee H. Hamilton

The Center in the News . . .

A recent Council on Foreign Relations backgrounder titled U.S-Pakistan Military Cooperation cited the Center's Collateral Damage project, which found among its major findings that Pakistan was the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, receiving almost $5 billion since 9/11, with little in the form of federal oversight and accountability.

The House of Representatives recently amended the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Among the newly expanded public provisions, White House task forces will be prohibited from operating in secrecy, transcripts or recordings of committee meetings will be electronically available, and advisory committee appointments must be made without regard to political affiliation or activity. The Center's Shadow Government project investigated FACA loopholes and several conflict of interest cases more than a year ago.

The Wall Street Journal featured the Center's latest analysis of the lobby spending by the pharmaceutical industry, health product manufacturers, and their trade groups. The Center found that the pharmaceutical manufacturers and their trade groups spent a record $168 million on federal lobbying last year, a 32 percent increase from 2006.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), requested by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tasked the Defense Department with providing greater oversight in the way it handles Pakistan reimbursement claims for coalition support funds (CSF), a program created after 9/11 to reimburse key U.S. allies in the global war on terror. In May 2007, the Center's Collateral Damage project found that post-9/11 U.S. military aid to Pakistan, totaling more than $5 billion, was subject to virtually no congressional oversight.

Washington Post national politics reporter Shailagh Murray in the paper's daily campaign 2008 blog, 'The Trail,' cited a Center interview with James A. Johnson, who recently resigned from Senator Obama's vice presidential search committee. In the interview, Johnson had "kind words" to say about veteran senator, and potential VP contender, Christopher Dodd.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its Phase II report on prewar Iraq intelligence. Committee Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller said: "It is my belief that the Bush administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and Al Qaeda as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush administration led the nation into war under false pretenses." To read more about the Bush administration's false statements about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, check out the Center's War Card project.

A Morning Call.com editorial cited a 2003 Center survey that ranked all 50 states' lobby disclosure laws. Until 2006, Pennsylvania had no lobbying law at all and was ranked 50th in the nation by the Center's survey. Currently, the legislature will consider a measure that would forbid gifts and entertainment from lobbyists to public officials.

Harry Shearer, actor, entertainer, musician, artist, and creator of the song 935 Lies - featured in his upcoming CD, Songs of the Bushmen - said in The Huffington Post, "Just in case Scott McClellan wasn't keeping count, the Center was: at least 935 falsehoods told by the president and his aides in the run-up to the [Iraq] war."

The Sunlight Foundation's SunSpots blog featured the "eye-popping reports" from the Center's Shadow Government project. The Center's Shadow Government project investigated a few federal advisory committees, part of a vast maze of committees, tasked with influencing federal government agencies on a variety of safety and policy issues, often done under secretive conditions with little public accountability.

Douglas Feith, President Bush's undersecretary of defense for policy from July 2001 to August 2005, was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart May 12 and talked about the Iraq War. He said, "I think a lot of what the administration said was correct." The Center's Iraq War Card project, which documented 935 false statements made by Bush and six top administration officials in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, would prove otherwise.

Watch the world premier video of Harry Shearer's video "935 Lies." Shearer, best known for his work on The Simpsons, This is Spinal Tap, Le Show, Saturday Night Live, For Your Consideration and A Mighty Wind, unveiled a video satire based on the Center's Iraq War Card project, which documented the 935 false statements orchestrated by top Bush Administration officials in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune's Kirsten Mitchell reported that Sen. Pete Domenici and 16 other Republican senators, who support the easing of offshore drilling restrictions on the Outer Continental Shelf for oil and gas, have received more than $3 million in campaign contributions from individuals and PACS affiliated with the oil and gas industry since Jan. 1, 2007.

The Washington Post's Matthew Mosk reported that Steven A. Betts, a top presidential campaign fundraiser for Sen. John McCain, was one of several Arizona developers who benefited from McCain-engineered land swaps.

TheStreet.com's John Stout cited the Center's Buying of the President 2008 chapter on Stealth Campaigns in "How Much Does It Cost to Buy a Presidency?" Political non-profit groups, such as MoveOn.org and the American Leadership Project, "will probably play an important role in this presidential election," he said.

Tobacco Companies Linked to Criminal Organizations in Cigarette Smuggling
What's Next?

The proliferation of tobacco smuggling is so widespread that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between criminal organizations, which do the actual smuggling, and the manufacturers who feed it and often oversee it. RJR executives meeting with criminals in Niagara Falls to discuss smuggling into Canada, or BAT executives in Hong Kong taking bribes to feed a Triad-backed smuggling ring, or Mafia bosses in Italy with a seemingly endless supply of Marlboros via Cyprus and Montenegro, all raise serious questions about international corporate participation in a conspiracy to defraud governments. Have BAT, Philip Morris, RJR, and Japan Tobacco become mafia-like organizations involved in massive illegal operations? This is the fundamental question posed by the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) actions launched last year in the United States against the major manufacturers by countries including Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, the European Union, and several of its member states.

 
In This Report

The allegations against some of the world's largest multinational corporations are astonishing fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and conspiracy. But victory in court will not be easy, as witnesses and documents become harder to subpoena. Before selling its international operations to Japan Tobacco in 1999, RJR moved that division in 1992 to Switzerland. The RJR executives who masterminded the Canadian smuggling now work in Europe or Asia. BAT moved its transit business, under BAT International, to Zug, Switzerland, in 1997. And Philip Morris recently announced it would transfer top executives of its international tobacco operations to Lausanne, Switzerland. It already manages its European, African, and Middle East business out of the Alpine tax haven.

For now, all eyes are on the Canadian lawsuit. A U.S. federal judge dismissed it last year, ruling that it was basically about tax law and an 18th century rule that prevents U.S. courts from enforcing the tax laws of foreign countries. Canada has appealed, and the European Union has filed a supporting brief. Hearings will likely be held within the next three months. But the countries are facing a powerful adversary with huge financial resources and political clout. U.S. President George W. Bush is considered a friend of big tobacco as is his attorney general John Ashcroft. Deputy attorney general-nominee, Larry D. Thompson, comes from the Atlanta law firm of King and Spalding, which represented the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council, a defendant in Canada's racketeering lawsuit against RJR.

Members of Bush's Cabinet and inner circle are also considered pro-tobacco. Karl Rove, a longtime Bush friend who now holds the title of senior adviser to the president, was a paid political consultant for Philip Morris for five years. Lawyers and law enforcement officials privately wonder whether the new U.S. administration will continue to invest resources into investigating tobacco smuggling despite its magnitude and its criminalization of corporate entities.

"What you have is one big smuggling conspiracy from the standpoint of the cigarette manufacturers, their distributors, the money launderers; it's the same people doing the exact same thing."

—Kevin Malone,
lawyer representing European Union and Colombian governors

"What you have is one big smuggling conspiracy from the standpoint of the cigarette manufacturers, their distributors, the money launderers; it's the same people doing the exact same thing," Kevin Malone, the attorney representing the European Union and Colombia's governors, said in court last November. "It's only when the cigarettes branch out to the individual smugglers that there's any diversity in the scheme at all. Just to give you an example," Malone continued, "If a smuggler in Colombia wants to buy cigarettes, or a smuggler in Italy wants to buy cigarettes, they both order them from the same company, they get delivery from the same distributor, and they are all shipped from the same warehouse in Antwerp, Belgium. So in fact they are in essence one and the same; it's a consolidated scheme."

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