PRESS RELEASE
LAROUCHE TO SPEAKER PELOSI:
BAE Scandal Demands Cheney's Immediate Impeachment
June 25, 2007 (EIRNS)—The following statement was released today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee, which at the same time announced its intention to make it into in a mass-run leaflet for distribution in the nation's capital and throughout the United States.
New revelations that Vice President Dick Cheney has been behind the now-failed effort to cover up an $80-100 billion criminal slush fund, run through the British arms cartel BAE Systems, adds new urgency to Lyndon LaRouche's longstanding demand that Vice President Dick Cheney be impeached or otherwise removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. LaRouche, following his June 21, 2007 international webcast, has demanded that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi drop her stubborn and ill-conceived rejection of the need to remove Cheney from office, and take the lead in his immediate impeachment.
"I know," LaRouche said on June 24, "that some of Speaker Pelosi's friends, including Felix Rohatyn, will rant and rave that British imperial asset Dick Cheney must be kept in place, but Cheney's role in the recently bungled BAE coverup makes him a prime candidate for early removal from office; and the survival of the United States and the world depends on that action. Speaker Pelosi must put those considerations above the desires of Rohatyn, George Shultz, and other Cheney protectors, or else the Democratic Party may self-destruct before the November 2008 Presidential elections, in light of growing voter anger that the new Democratic Congressional leadership has failed to act on the public mandate for impeachment."
A late June 2007 four-part Washington Post front-page exposé of Vice President Cheney's role in the ripping up of the U.S. Constitution in pursuit of an Executive Branch wartime dictatorship—echoing LaRouche's Jan. 3, 2001 pre-9/11 warnings that Cheney would be the "Hermann Göring" of the Bush Administration, and the architect of a future "Reichstag fire" incident, aimed at establishing totalitarian rule—further sets the stage for Cheney's immediate ouster. Clearly, Cheney's failure to bury the BAE scandal in both Britain and the United States, as LaRouche observed in his June 21 webcast, has angered Cheney's backers, and they may find themselves now in common cause with the vast majority of Americans who want him removed from office, albeit for different motives.
The LaRouche Political Action Committee website, www.larouchepac.com, has assembled a comprehensive dossier on the unfolding BAE scandal, which already represents the "Scandal of the Century," beyond even the 9/11 story, which has more to do with BAE than most people can imagine. LPAC, along with the investigative staff of Executive Intelligence Review, the weekly magazine and online journal founded by LaRouche, will continue to provide the only comprehensive source of information on the BAE scandal, as it fully unravels. To date, the international media has been either silent, or has avoided the most significant features of the BAE-centered off-budget criminal enterprise. If you are serious about your responsibilities as a citizen, you must understand the significance and implications of the BAE scandal. You owe it to yourself to go to the LaRouche PAC website now, and make sure that your friends, your neighbors, your relatives, and your elected officials do the same.
The Essentials of the BAE Scandal—
And Dick Cheney's Role
A brief summary of the BAE scandal should make the point all the more obvious, why you must go to the LaRouche PAC website for the real, unfolding story.
In 1985, the Margaret Thatcher-led British government, signed a long-term agreement with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, under which the British arms cartel, BAE Systems, provided fighter jets and other military equipment and services, in return for vast quantities of Saudi oil. The barter agreement, known as "Al-Yamamah" (the Arabic word for "the dove") has remained in force up to the present day. Under Al-Yamamah, a tightly interlocking consortium of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-American cartels—including BAE, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Lazard Bank, HSBC (formerly the British East India Company's Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation), and the Carlyle Group—has amassed an estimated $80-100 billion in off-budget, hidden funds, which have been utilized for covert operations and gun-running on a global scale—totally outside the jurisdiction and oversight of any government. This massive offshore fund is at the center of the power of the Anglo-Dutch financial oligarchy, which has promoted globalization and perpetual war for the last three decades and longer.
Under the Al-Yamamah agreements, which have been perpetuated by every British government, from Thatcher through John Major, to outgoing "New Labour" Prime Minister Tony Blair, Saudi Arabia has provided 600,000 barrels of crude oil to BAE every day since September 1985. According to the authorized biography of Saudi Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the architect of the Al-Yamamah deal on the Saudi side, and a long-suspected recruit of Britain's MI6, working through BP and Royal Dutch Shell, BAE has sold this oil on the international retail markets. According to BP's own data base on world oil prices, the value of the cumulative oil sales, in current U.S. dollars, is an estimated $160 billion. The military equipment and services provided to Saudi Arabia in return for the oil, over the past 22 years of Al-Yamamah, is estimated at $40 billion—before the prices were boosted by a reported 30-40%, to provide for "commissions" and other payoffs, including $2 billion to Prince Bandar.
The question to be raised: What happened to the rest of the money? Evidence suggests that tens of billions of dollars went to the black market purchase of weapons, to fuel wars from Afghanistan, to Africa, to Central America. Bandar's biographer William Simpson described it as "a backdoor method of covertly buying U.S. arms ... military purchases that would not be visible to Congress."
Cheney's Bungled Coverup
In November 2006, Prince Bandar, the former Saudi Ambassador to the United States, now back in Riyadh as the national security advisor to King Abdullah, orchestrated a secret visit to the Kingdom by Vice President Dick Cheney. The primary topic was Cheney's promotion of an American military strike against Iran, and a larger Sunni versus Shi'ite perpetual war confrontation within the Muslim world. But the other issue on the table was the BAE scandal, which was again grabbing media attention in Great Britain and was the subject of an ongoing probe by the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Cheney vowed to shut down the probe and bury any further interference in the Al-Yamamah deal, according to two subsequent reports in the U.S. media. Within weeks of the Cheney meetings in Riyadh, Blair and his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, announced the shutdown of the Al-Yamamah probe for "national security" reasons.
However, this time, Cheney's strongarm tactics backfired, and an international furor was ignited by the British coverup, triggering new investigations by the OECD, the Swiss government, the Hungarian government, and even the U.S. Department of Justice. In that context, the EIR revelations about the "Scandal of the Century" have delivered a further shock to the system, and have created the conditions where, in LaRouche's words, Cheney's "role has been depreciated greatly. He has failed to put the lid on the story. The story is now out. Cheney is in deep kimchee, and those who don't want to impeach Cheney are in deep kimchee too."
