Thursday, December 01, 2005

From Black to Iraq and Back

Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Lord Black is on his way to Jail, like his role model Al Capone. Black granted $20m bail after pleading not guilty to fraud

And like Capone he is protesting his innocence, for in his mind he has committed no crime. He is after all a Baron of Capitalism, and for him it was business as usual. But his days of wine and roses are soon to become days of whining about the nosy lawyers and media he has so vilified in the past. And like his other hero and role model, Randolph Hearst, his cumupeance is based on their shared belief in the idea that the rules do not apply to men like them.

The Wall Street Journal article noted that he had a portrait of Capone on the wall of his directors’ room in New York —

Conrad Black & the Hollinger Kleptocracy

Press tycoon Conrad M. Black and other top Hollinger International Inc. officials pocketed more than $400 million in company money over seven years and Black's handpicked board of directors passively approved many of the transactions, a company investigation concluded. A report by a special board committee singled out director Richard N. Perle, a former Defense Department official, who received $5.4 million in bonuses and compensation.

This was published in 2004 and a year later Lord Black is on his way to the big house. What's interesting is that Richard Perle was not just dipping into the Hollinger funds but profiting as well from his advice to the White House and his role in the War in Iraq.

Richard Perle -- who journalist and film-maker John Pilger describes as one of George W. Bush's thinkers -- later pops up again in the 2000 Project for the New American Century document, which lays out the neocon vision for US domination of the land, seas, skies and space. Pilger writes in December 2002: "I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan; and when he spoke about 'total war', I mistakenly dismissed him as mad. He recently used the term again in describing America's 'war on terror'. 'No stages,' he said. 'This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there.

Plamegate’s Soft Underbelly

Two of the major figures in the production of phony intelligence in the run up to war were Richard ‘Prince of Darkness’ Perle and his disciple Doug "Deer in the Headlights" Feith. They busied themselves during the Bush I and Clinton years with the former in the Pentagon, supervising a massive transfer of military aid to Turkey, and the latter the principal of a firm that was a registered foreign agent representing … wait for it … the Turks. Conveniently enough, Marc Grossman was ‘deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Turkey from 1989-1992. Two years later, he was appointed ambassador, representing U.S. political, commercial, and military interests in Turkey until June 1997.’

The cronyism of the international ruling class and its pals in the White House knows no bounds, nor shame. The trial of Black will reveal that cronyism to be incipent in the entire neo-con upper echelons in Washington and internationally. Far more important than the Plamegate affair, this could bring down the American Right Wing and its administration in Washington. Oh how the mighty have fallen. Thanks to the gigantic ego of Lord Black.


Kissinger, Perle Leave Hollinger International Board
Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Hollinger International Inc. said directors including Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle are leaving the board, one week after former chief executive Conrad Black was charged with helping to steal $51.8 million from the company. Kissinger, Perle, Richard Burt, Daniel Colson, Shmuel Meitar and James Thompson, all sued for allegedly disregarding the looting of the company, won't stand for re-election at Hollinger's Jan. 24 annual meeting, the Chicago-based company said today in a statement. The board will shrink to 11 members

 Two years ago, 'ingrates' began asking awkward questions; today Black faces up to 40 years' jail

Even by the bruising standards of the newspaper business, there has been a large element of schadenfreude for those watching Black's tumble from grace. A hardline conservative, he courted power and influence, gave up Canadian citizenship for a British title and peopled the Hollinger board with the likes of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle and Alfred Taubman, the former Sotheby's chairman who in 2002 was jailed for price-fixing. Margaret Thatcher sat on an informal panel of advisers.

He has not emerged well from the public scrutiny. Lawsuits have portrayed him as a bully with "absolute power" over the rest of the board. He allegedly repeatedly threatened to sue or remove directors unless they bent to his will. A series of embarrassing emails has not helped. The Hollinger report contained a message Black sent to a former colleague in 2002, musing on the subject of the corporate jet. "There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable," he wrote. "But I'm not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility. We are proprietors after all, beleaguered though we may be."

In a telling insight, Black said in the foreword to David Nasaw's book on press baron William Randolph Hearst; "All his life, Hearst had a conviction, often outrageous but sometimes magnificent, that the rules that applied to others didn't apply to him."
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