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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.

The Multi-Million Dollar Trade Route
New documents link Clarke's firm with smuggling of cigarettes

By Duncan Campbell

August 22, 2001 — When Kenneth Clarke formally became deputy chairman of British American Tobacco in 1998, the documents that have now surfaced suggest that - unknown to him - one of the firm's exclusive distributors, Romar Freezone Trading, was smuggling at least $12m worth of cigarettes a month into Latin America from Aruba, the tiny Dutch dependency off the Venezuelan coast. 
The scale of this smuggling route alone would have made a lucrative contribution to BAT's 719bn annual worldwide "stick" (cigarette) sales.

IN THIS REPORT

Romar's operations, if the documents are to be believed, may only have been a fraction of BAT's global "transit" (smuggling) trade whose structure is discreetly centralised in Switzerland.

Hundreds of pages of accounts, sales and marketing reports have been supplied by whistleblower Alex Solagnier. During 20 years with the Romar agency and its predecessors, he says the BATtransit trade through Aruba rose by 1998 to 45,000 cases a month. Each case contained 10,000 cigarettes.

Solagnier had just become a director of Romar when, in July 1990, BAT regional director Peter Hazel visited Aruba to meet Romar's boss. According to company papers, "the objective of this visit en route to London was to acknowledge the increasingly important amount of business they were doing for Biggott [a BAT subsidiary]. They enlightened me on what is really rather a murky business - my main concern I must say being whether drugs money could be being used".

READ THE DOCUMENTS

The invoices show floods of cigarettes flowing into Aruba from the US, Venezuela and Brazil, manufactured by BAT subsidiaries in each country. According to Colombia's customs authorities, during 1998 only 16.8m BAT cigarettes were legally imported. But 8bn were shipped by Romar from Aruba to the northern trading outpost of Maicao in Colombia, where a dozen further agents shipped the contraband into black markets across the country.

Until now, BAT's position has been to admit that smuggling takes place but to deny any knowledge of where companies like Romar send the cigarettes they purchase. This is "completely untrue", says Solagnier. "They controlled and planned what we did."

BAT's control of the smuggling operation, he says, included twice-weekly surveys in Maicao on the mainland to check stock levels and prices for each brand. The information was then faxed to a BAT manager in Costa Rica.

Until 1995, according to Solagnier, BAT received the survey information from their own employee on the mainland in Maicao.

The reports were faxed directly to BAT (UK and Exports) in Woking in Britain and to Biggott, the Venezuela-based manufacturer of Belmont cigarettes, the main smuggled brand.

But in 1997, in an apparent increase of caution, they were told to fax sales re ports only to the Costa Rica office, which would send the information on to Geneva.

The company signed a "consignment agreement" with Romar over their huge stocks, stipulating that the Belmont cigarettes remained BAT's property, until they had been disposed off in Maicao and a "depletion report" had been sent to Geneva.

By the mid 1990s, Venezuelan and Colombian authorities were aware of the smuggling trade through Aruba, Solagnier says. At BAT's suggestion, Romar established two new companies in order to reduce their visibility, Interex of Panama and Arcubon of the island of Curaao.

During 1998, according to Solagnier, BAT also smuggled cigarettes into Brazil. The scheme involved shipping Brazilian-made cigarettes duty free to Aruba island, and then having them re-enter Brazil across its border with Venezuela. In 1998, Romar staff visited Venezuela and made plans for a new warehouse at the border outpost of Santa Helena, en route to Brazil's Amazon capital, Manaus, Solagnier says. But the plan was thwarted when the Brazilian government slapped a 150% tax on cigarettes exported to other parts of Latin America.

BAT documents from Switzerland presented by Solagnier reveal a bizarre tale. Shipping documents and invoices show that, by late 1999, the company was sending at least two containers a month (nearly 20m cigarettes) from Brazil to Finland. But the cigarettes do not appear to have been sold there.

BAT International put the cigarettes on ships from Helsinki back to Aruba. From there, they could re-enter Colombia, Venezuela or Brazil itself.

We asked BAT for an explanation. They told us yesterday: "The stock of the Hollywood brand in Finland was intended for sale in Europe. When the sales did not materialise, stock was sold to Romar."

ICIJ's original exposs on cigarette smuggling, money laundering and organized crime can be found at:

Major Tobacco Multinational Implicated In Cigarette Smuggling, Tax Evasion, Documents Show

Global Reach of Tobacco Company's Involvement in Cigarette Smuggling Exposed in Company Papers

Tobacco Companies Linked To Criminal Organizations In Lucrative Cigarette Smuggling

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