Pulling Back the Curtain Part 2: The Wall Street Circle of Hell

Two days ago, on January 11th, it was reported that it will take until November of 2018 before we will be able to fully understand the actions behind the bailout of American International Group. Information has come to light detailing that the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a request from AIG in May of last year to keep secret "confidential commercial or financial information", in particular, information regarding the transferring of bailout money from AIG to the coffers of companies like Merril Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.The story, as usual, was glossed over, but has been brought to public attention in light of the revelation last week of a batch of emails showing then-Fed president Timothy Geithner asking AIG to keep the bailout information secret. That's a lot on the plate of an administration that has a memorandum on the White House website stating

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

But then again, the Obama administration seems more concerned with corporate backroom shenanigans than with the horse he rode in on: being concerned for the safety and well being of the everyday, working class citizen. And of course, at the center of these particular corporate shenanigans is Timothy Geither, who, when we left off, just left the Treasury Department after serving under the tutelage of Bob Rubin and Larry Summers to take positions in the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund and at some point the Trilateral Commission.

In 2003 Geithner would be appointed as the 9th President of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Though generally painted by the Right-wing media as a leftist or communist conspiratorial plot, the Federal Reserve is in reality quite the opposite: almost every person involved in the creation of the Fed was tied to the Pilgrims Society, an organization comprised of the capitalist elite interested in the close cooperation of the U.S. and Great Britain. This is a fascinating topic that unfortunately must be extremely abridged here, yet hopefully covered in depth in the future. According to the now defunct (though cached through Google!) Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics, banks, insurance firms and other companies with extensive ties to the Pilgrim's Society include AIG, Blackstone (mentioned in Part 1, linked to AIG and Kissinger Associates), Chase Manhattan, Citibank, General Electric, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (instrumental in the creation of the Federal Reserve), J.P. Morgan and Co, J.P. Morgan and Chase, Morgan Stanley, etc. Trilateralist/former Chairman of the Federal Reserve/head of Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board Paul Volcker is a member of the Pilgrim's Society.

In 2006 Tim Geithner was invited to join the Group of Thirty, "an international body of leading financiers and academics which aims to deepen understanding of economic and financial issues and to examine consequences of decisions made in the public and private sectors related to these issues.". Founded in 1978 by Geoffery Bell on behalf on the Rockefeller Foundation, G30 has an extremely prestigious membership list: Paul Volcker is the Chairman of the Board of Trustee, while Vice Chairman is Jacob A. Frenkel, a Trilateralist who works for American International Group. The Consular and Director Jamie Caruana works at the IMF, the Governor of the organization Stanley Fischer is member of the Trilateral Commission (and also president of CitiGroup), as is William R. Rhodes (Senior Vice Chairman of CitiGroup) and E. Gerald Corrigan of Goldman Sachs. Corrigan, not surprisingly, is part of Geithner's 'economic brain trust' alongside fellow G30ers Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Lawrence Summers. Given the people and ties with the G30, it would seem that this may be the nucleus that formed the beginning of the bailout era.

The first bailouts would occur in 2008, under the Bush administration Secretary of Treasury Henry M. Paulson. Paulson, of course, was an eight year veteran of Goldman Sachs prior to his appointment as Treasury Secretary. Bear Sterns would be bailed out in in March, followed later by the first bailout of American International Group and then CitiGroup. At the center of the negotiations with Paulson would be Timothy Geithner, all the while mingling with the executives of the bailed out companies at organizations such as the G30. And yet Obama would give Tim a key position in the administration. Why? Is it that Obama is simply a bumbling buffoon, overlooking the incestuous connections between Wall Street and his those of his so-called "progressive" agenda and the tremendous fuck-ups that have resulted, or is he, like the of the emblem of the Fabian society, a wolf in sheep's clothing, seducing the country with Utopian Lullabies so people won't wake up and the smell the coffee that he is just another Bush?

Either way, key to the picking of Timothy Geithner for Obama's Secretary of Treasury is Michael Froman, the deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. Oh yeah, he's also a member of the Trilateral Commission. Matt Taibbi's excellent Rolling Stone magazine article "Obama's Big Sellout" has covered these circumstances in depth, showing just how deep these series of underhanded backroom political maneuvers run. Froman, a close friend of Barack Obama since their Harvard days, has a lot in common with Geithner: they both share a common mentor in Robert Rubin, who he would later introduce to Obama. Froman would also donate the large sum of $200,000 to the Obama campaign, but I'm sure he could afford it; after all, he is a high ranking executive at Citigroup. He actually got his job there from his former boss, Bob Rubin, who took up residence at the company after his disastrous stint in the Clinton administration, but as Taibbi points out, it doesn't end there. Froman's hand picks for Obama's economic team include Bob Rubin's son, Jamie Rubin, another veteran of the Clinton White House. In fact, Rubin cohorts are filling the current administration: Larry Summers, the director of the NEC, worked with Rubin, Geithner and Froman at the Treasury, and his direct underling Jason Furmann is a director of the Hamilton Project, an economic initiative at the Brookings Institute founded by Rubin. Another person from Obama's NEC is Diana Farrell, known for her defense of shipping U.S. jobs oversees. She worked at Goldman Sachs under Rubin. Goldman alum Gary Gensler was appointed by Obama to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and he worked with Rubin under Clinton. The first director of Rubin's Hamilton Project is liberal capitalist Peter Orszag, Obama's pick for head of the Office and Management and Budget. The list goes on and on, and ultimately gives more questions than answers. Though we do have one answer: with people like Bob Rubin and Jamie Rubin and Michael Froman, all interconnected at multiple levels with Obama and CitiGroup, can it be any surprise that the man who helped negotiate the bailout of the company would be rewarded in such a manner?

And what of ol' Henry Paulson? What benefit would he have with bailing out CitiGroup? Well, one thing to consider is that in October of 2008 there were rumours of Goldman Sachs buying out CitiGroup. Henry M. Paulson is a former Goldman Sachs executive, and any doubt about his allegiance to his former corporation should be shattered when you consider that billions of dollars of his $185 billion bailout to A.I.G. wound up in the hands of Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs was actually the second biggest campaign contributor to Obama at $994,795, with CitiGroup not falling far behind with $701,290. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co, which according Bloomberg is the biggest asset of Goldman Sachs, donated $695,132.

So now we have the circumstances that led to Geithner being picked for the Treasury in Obama's administration, thus setting the stage for the Obama bailouts that have led to the greatest robbery in American history by a consortium of big businesses - both national and international - by an apparent money laundering device - American International Group. Next we'll cover the role of AIG and Goldman Sachs in the U.S. government in our further attempt to pull back the curtain.

Pulling Back the Curtain: Timothy Geithner, AIG and the Trilateral Commission

Today an article appeared on Bloomberg entitled “Federal Reserve Seeks to Protect U.S. Bailout Secrets”. The article details that the Fed has asked an appeals court to stop a ruling that is currently attempting to force the revelation of what financial firms that were tittering on the verge of collapse until the bailouts. For a country that prides itself on the idea that markets and capitalism are the cornerstones of patriotism, this is certainly unprecedented; in fact this is part of the most blatant example of lemon socialism in American history. While the corporate fat cats get the sweat wiped from their brow by the government, the rest of us are spoon fed propaganda that capitalism and free markets are the end-all-be-all, the only surefire way to achieve the God-given freedom that the Founding Fathers bestowed upon us. So we wallow contently in the shit-storm known as the rat race and complain about the “Dems” and the “Repubs” bending us over, not questioning the ideology we’ve been raised to believe in like a religion. Right-wing pundits assault the Obama administration, labeling the President elect and his cronies with the new fear-mongering term of “progressives”, which is actually code word for “Communists in American political clothing”. But they don’t look at the facts. They don’t look at who actually profits from this presidency, and when they do, they ignore the implications unless they can be worked into the tapestry of a supposed century old commie plot whose goal is to turn America into a two-class feudal society. I wonder, of course, if these pundits (and you know of who I’m speaking) have ever cracked open Marx’s dusty ol’ Manifesto before peddling this nonsense.

It’s not to be unexpected, though. The New Amerikan Way of Privatizing the Wins and Socializing the Losses (read – socialism for The Rich, capitalism for the poor) benefits exactly the companies and corporate shareholders those run all the mainstream media providers. Wall Street is an incestuous beast, a tangled web of subsidiaries and overlapping board membership and easily circumvented anti-trust laws that would topple like dominos if their cornerstones suddenly disappeared. So logically, the Obama administration is actually a friend to the corporate machine, utilizing what appears at a glance to be underhanded left wing tactics to destroy the capitalist powerbase, but is actually radically different when the curtains are pulled away. To pull the curtain away, we must examine the man who engineered the bailouts under Obama – the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner.

Timothy Geithner and Barack Obama’s ties go back further than this administration: according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Peter Geithner, the father or Timothy, and Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, met once in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. Dunham had been developing microfinance programs for the Ford Foundation, a project overseen by Peter Geithner, but this might not be anything more important than a curious historical side note. What is important, however, is that at this time a young Timothy Geither, recently graduated from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in 1985, was working at Kissinger Associates, a consulting firm dedicated to providing “strategic advisory and advocacy services to a select group of U.S. and multinational companies.” Kissinger Associates was founded by – you guessed it – former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The firm’s establishment was funded in 1982 by – no surprise here – Goldman Sachs.

Kissinger Associates is an extremely secretive group, rumored to have been involved in both the BCCI scandal and “Iraqgate” scandals, but also has multiple ties to American International Group – a fact that makes it most interesting in this investigation. The chairman and CEO of AIG at the time was Maurice Greenberg, a friend so close of Kissinger that the two conducted business years later with Iran-Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi over UnoCal oil pipelines in Uzbekistan… but best to save that for another article. Maurice Greenberg would hire Kissinger Associates to be the main consultant for AIG. At the same time the Blackstone Group, a private investment banking firm, would also be in business with Kissinger Associates; according to SourceWatch, at some point in the companies’ history AIG acquired a 7% non-voting interest in the company in 1998 for $150 million "and committed to invest $1.2 billion in future Blackstone-sponsored funds".). In 1987 Greenberg appointed Henry Kissinger to the International Advisory Board of AIG.

In 1988 Timothy Geithner joined the U.S. Treasury Department’s International Affairs Division, working at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo before working various Treasury jobs, such as deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy, and assistant secretary for international affairs before ‘catching his big break’ by becoming Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under the two men who would later be known as his mentors: former Goldman Sachs chairman/CitiGroup chairman/Clinton National Economic Council director Robert Rubin and future Obama National Economic Council member Lawrence Summers. Geithner would work at the Treasury until 2002, when he became the Senior Fellow in the International Economics department of the Council on the Foreign Relations, while simultaneously working at the International Monetary Fund. At some point he would also join the Trilateral Commission.

If Kissinger Associates is any indication that Timothy Geithner is big on joining secretive organizations, the Trilateral Commission seals the deal. Essentially an off-shoot and counterpart of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission was founded at the behest of then-CFR director David Rockefeller, who wished to establish closer economic cooperation between the United States, Japan and Europe. Joining Rockefeller in this Ford Foundation funded endeavor was Zbigniew Brzezinski (briefly mentioned in the earlier blog post "Profiles in Military Contracting"), who would later be the National Security Advisor for Jimmy Carter and strong Obama supporter. Other founding Trilateralists included Paul Volcker (head of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board) and Alan Greenspan, both of whom were past chairmen of the Federal Reserve.

Since its inception, the Trilateral Commission has counted in its rosters a virtual who’s who of government and business figures, including Carla Hills (briefly mentioned in the previous blog post), who serves on the board of AIG, former President George H.W. Bush, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci of Iran-Contra, Wackenhut and the Carlyle Group, former Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton, as well as Hillary Clinton, Maurice Greenberg and Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor under George H.W. Bush and Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates Brent Scowcroft, Bush Secretary of Defense and former World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz and former Bush Deputy Secretary of Defense and U.S. Trade Representative – and current World Bank president – Robert Zoellick. The Trilateralists played a large role in the Carter administration – Carter himself was a Trilateralist, Carter’s VP Walter Mondale was a Trilateralist, Carter’s White House Advisor on Domestic and Foreign Policy Hedley Donovan was a founding member, Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi was a founding member and Carter’s Deputy Secretary of State (as well as Clinton’s Secretary of State) Warren Christopher was a member.

The same holds true for the Obama administration. A Project Censored article entitled “Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team” points out that “Obama’s appointments [of key players in his administration] encompassed more than 12 percent of Commission’s entire US membership.” Indeed, as noted earlier Timothy Geithner is a member, as is Paul Volcker. But so is UN Ambassador Susan Rice, State Department Envoy and AIG board member Richard Holbrooke (mentioned in previous blog post. There sure is a lot of Trilateralists in the Partnership for a Secure America.), National Security Advisor James L. Jones, Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair and Dennis Ross, the special advisor to Hillary Clinton (also a Trilateralist) for the Persian Gulf (read: Iran). Mr. Ross has a most interest set of credentials: he worked under Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon when Wolfowitz was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Carter administration and was accused as being a member of the Israeli lobby by John Mearsheimer in the book The Israel Lobby and the U.S. Foreign Policy. In 1985 he worked with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to create the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which seeks to "to advance a balanced and realistic understanding of American interests in the Middle East." The membership of WINEP reads exactly as you would expect it: Warren Christopher (mentioned above, Trilateralist), Lawrence Eagleburger (assistant to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration, Trilateralist), Alexander Haig (Reagan Secretary of State, Trilateralist) Henry Kissinger, Max Kampelman (Trilateralist) and Robert MacFarlane (mentioned in previous blog post. Jeez.) Given the heightened state of tension between Israel and Iran right now, I would say that Dennis Ross might not be the best choice of “special advisor” relating to the Middle East.

So let us recap:

1. Timothy Geithner worked at Kissinger Associates, a firm founded on a loan from Goldman Sachs that also had numerous ties to American International Group.
2. At the Treasury Geithner would be the protégé of two men – one of whom was a former Goldman Sachs employee that worked in the Clinton administration and another than would work in the Obama administration.
3. Timothy Geithner is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a quasi-secretive financial organization that lumps a large part of the Obama administration, and ultimately a huge part of the U.S. government, into one group.

Professor Carrol Quigley’s 1966 book Tragedy and Hope claimed to reveal information on a secret organization of arch-capitalists that sought to create a global financial system that would be controlled by few whose ultimate goal would be to completely dominate the political system. While this may sound like a crazy conspiracy theory at first glance, stop and consider the idea of globalization. Capitalism is now an instantaneous process, where fortunes are made and are broken in the blink of an eye – or the click of a mouse. Goods are manufactured by the oppressed and exploited in Third World countries while an ever pervasive ad machine screams to us to buy, buy and buy… all the while a handful get richer, and richer and richer. A handful like American International Group, a handful like Goldman Sachs. They are tittering on the brink, needing to compromise their sacred Free Market by perverting ideas that were designed to destroy them – all the while keeping the American populace subdued with the ideas that Consumption and Hierarchies are the Laws By Which We Must Follow. This is done largely at the expense of the Third World, and all that it has gained is power in both the financial and political realms; realms that in fact are now rapidly one and the same.


Next time we’ll continue looking at Timothy Geithner and then get into the bail out itself.

Profiles in Military Contracting: Aegis Defense Services

In a list released by the Center for Corporate Policy, the number one war profiteer of 2004 was a company known as Aegis Defense Services, a private military company (PMC) based out of London. Established in 2004, Aegis, not even a year old at the time, was awarded a contract of $295 million by the Pentagon (to act as a managing hub for the numerous corporations involved in the reconstruction of Iraq); by May of 2005 the contract had risen to hefty sum of $430 million. In 2007, the DoD resigned the contract with Aegis for an additional $475 million. The company is parted of the corporate membership group known as the “Private Security Company Association of Iraq”, alongside fellow mercenary groups such as Blackwater USA (known known as ‘Xe’), DynCorp (accused of, among other things, sex trafficking in Bosnia and fraud in Iraq), Rubicon International Services (an organization formed mainly of former SAS soldiers that, as of 2005, has been acquired by Aegis) and Erinys International Ltd (which has contracted Rubicon to guard oil pipelines in Iraq).

But how does a company that wasn’t even a year old at the time rise to such prominence so quickly? The answer may lie in the prominence of several members of their Board of Directors. Take Robert MacFarlane, a non-Executive Director, for example. A National Security Adviser for Ronald Reagan, MacFarlane, like his successor John Poindexter, was deeply embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal: he strongly urged President Reagan to allow negotiations with the Iranians, and in 1986 he was the unofficial envoy for the delivery of two planes of weaponry to the country. Over a decade later, in early 2000, MacFarlane would return to the Middle East, this time on behalf of a group of speculators who were interested in organizing anti-Taliban guerrillas from Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. Robert MacFarlane also sits on the advisory board of the so-called “bi-partisan center in American national security and foreign policy”, the Partnership for a Secure America, alongside former Clinton National Security Adviser Samuel Berger, former Carter National Security Adviser (not to mention proponent of ‘geo-politics’ and organizer of Afghan militant groups to be used against the Soviets in the late 70s) Zbigniew Brzezinski, former H.W. Bush U.S. Trade Rep Carla Hills of AIG, AOL Time Warner and ChevronTexaco, former Clinton and Carter cabinet member/Special Representative for the Middle East for the Obama administration Richard Holbrooke (who also sits on the Board for AIG, AOL Time Warner, the CFR and the United Against a Nuclear Iran) and Frank Wisner Jr., vice chairman of AIG and former chairman of Enron.

Even more interesting is the first CEO of Aegis – and its founder – Tim Spicer, a notable anti-war hippie turned Scotts Guard and SAS soldier. By 1992 he was working alongside Simon Mann, the founder of the now defunct mercenary organization Executive Outcomes who was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2004 for his role the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. In 1995 Spicer left the military to create one of the first PMCs known as “Sandline International.” Sandline, in two years time, found itself entangled in what is now known as the “Sandline Affair”: in January of 1997 Prime Minister Julius Chan of Papua New Guinea entered negotiations with Spicer and his mercenary organization over the conflict in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A deal was struck in exchange for $36 million, but before the operation to neutralize the Bougainville Resistance Army in time for the elections could take place, the story was leaked to an Australian newspaper. On March 17th, a revolt that led to the arrest of the Sandline mercenaries and a standoff between the military and police occurred, reaching a fever pitch until Prime Minister Chan resigned on March 25th.

A year after the events in Papua New Guinea, Sandline found itself involved in a civil war in Sierra Leone. Ousted from Presidency after attempting to organize a peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary United Front (which, in fact, occurred due to the IMF withdrawing their funding from the country because of the presence of Executive Outcomes, which had been contracted to keep peace during the elections), Ahmad Tejan Kabbah attempted to strike a deal with Sandline to sale arms to militias who were loyal to him. The problem was that arms deals with Sierra Leone was, and still is, banned by the United Nations and the United Kingdom, so when Spicer and Sandline delivered of Bulgarian-bought shipment of 1,000 Soviet assault rifles, machine guns, mortars and ammunition to the Sierra Leone capital of Freetown, the armament was confiscated by peace-keeping forces.

Following the political fall-out from the doomed operation, Spicer cut his losses and left Sandline, though the company lingered on until 2004, when it finally closed up with the following message: “The general lack of governmental support for Private Military Companies willing to help end armed conflicts in places like Africa, in the absence of effective international intervention, is the reason for this decision. Without such support the ability of Sandline to make a positive difference in countries where there is widespread brutality and genocidal behavior is materially diminished.”

Undaunted, Tim Spicer then founded Aegis Defense Services, and while the company has been granted millions upon millions of dollars by the Pentagon and the DoD, it has been no stranger to controversy. In 2005 a video appeared in the blogsphere, set to the Elvis Presley classic “Mystery Train”, showing an Aegis employee firing rounds into moving vehicles while driving down “Route Irish”, which is the notoriously dangerous stretch of highway the connects the Green Zone to the Baghdad airport.

Despite this and Spicer’s rap sheet of misdeeds and miscalculations, Aegis became a founding member of the British Association of Private Security Companies, the set goal of which is “to promote, enhance and regulate the interests and activities of UK based firms and companies that provide armed security services in countries outside the UK." Other BAPSC alumni are ArmorGroup International (contracted to provide protection for the Baghdad headquarters and protection of Bechtel and Kellogg, Brown & Root), Control Risks Group (an SAS based security company that has done business with Bechtel, Halliburton and UnoCal), and Saladin Security (allegedly aided the CIA in both the Iran-Contra debacle and with the funding the Mujahedeen in the war against the Soviet excursion into Afghanistan.)

Tensions Escalate in the Gaza Strip

"You cannot have discussions on borders while the territory you want to set up your state on is being eaten up by the settlements."

Saeb Erekat,the Chief Palestinian negotiator, has expressed skepticism at the idea of resuming peace talks with Israel after Hillary Clinton stated on Friday "Resolving borders resolves settlements; resolving Jerusalem resolves settlements."

But can anyone really blame him for his skepticism? A year on since the three-week Israeli military offensive known as Operation Cast Lead - which claimed the lives of 1,300 to 1,400 people (according to B'TSELEM - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 1,021 of the deaths were non-combatants, including 320 children and 107 women), Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip have once again began to escalate since mid December. On the 19th of December a small skirmish broke out between militants from the Popular Resistance Committees and Israeli security forces who had entered the town of Beit Lahiya, located in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. No casualties were reported from this fifteen minute firefight.

On December 26th the Israeli military conducted an air strike near the Erez crossing, a key pedestrian and cargo terminal in the Gaza Strip barrier, killing three men that they had suspected of trying to "infiltrate from Gaza". Meanwhile, in the city of Nablus in the West Bank, the IDF conducted a several hour raid that resulted in the deaths of an additional three men, two of whom were militants belonging to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said to be the militant wing of the Fatah party. The Brigades has been suspected of killing an Israeli settler that had occurred on December 24th.

A day after the Viva Palestina aid convoy led by British parliament member George Galloway arrived, December 8th saw multiple Israeli air strikes across the Strip, according to two separate Palestinian Telegraph reports (read about them here and here). The first strikes took place in western Gaza strip, conducted during the midnight hour by Israeli F16s. No causalities have yet to have been reported from these initial strikes, but four civilian deaths were reported during strikes on the food tunnels. The food tunnels, of which there are approximately 1,500, are considered a key lifeline to keep the overcrowded populace of the Gaza strip sustained, while the Israeli government alleges that they are used to smuggle guns and explosives.

Aiport Body Scanners: Who Profits?

As the nation scrambles to recollect itself after the near-miss terrorist attack on Christmas Day by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, possible infringements on our rights of privacy are slipping by on noticed, and certain people have the potential to profit from it.

On December 25th, Umar Abdulmutallab was stopped by a passenger and airline several crew members as he attempted to detonate explosives that were inside his trousers - smuggled on the aircraft inside his underwear.

Enter Michael Chertoff, the son of Livia Eisen, a rumoured Mossad agent who had been involved in the "Operation Magic Carpet" that airlifted 49,000 Yemenite Jews to the newly formed State of Israel. Chertoff has existed in the upper echelons of American politics since 1990, when George Bush Sr. appointed him as U.S. Attorney for the District New Jersey, a job he held until 1994 when he took a job at the global law firm of Latham & Watkins. Latham & Watkins is renowned for their representation of companies such as Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

In 2001, along with former Assistant Attorney General of the United States Viet Dinh, Chertoff would co-author the USA PATRIOT Act, and in 2005 George Bush would appoint him as the United States Secretary of Homeland Security, the head of the Department of Homeland Security. He would maintain this position until January 21st, 2009. These are all the well known facts about Michael Chertoff. But there are some lesser known facts about him as well.

Chertoff has triumphantly returned in the media since the would-be bomber scorched his underwear on Flight 253 through a slew of interviews and opinion pieces, the majority of which promote a single cause: the US government needs to invest in full body scanners, and invest in them quickly!

Michael Chertoff's history with full body scanners for airport safety is nothing new. In 2005, under his supervision, DHS purchased five scanners from the California based company Rapiscan Systems, which specializes in metal detectors and x-ray machines. In the same year, Homeland Security also awarded the company a $2.7 million contract for the development of a Radiological Threat Identification System (RTIS), in order to detect dangerous radioactivity inside passenger luggage. Three years later, in 2008, the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan named Rapiscan the 2008 North American Homeland Security Inspection and Screening Company of the Year, and soon TSA would purchase one hundred and fifty machines to be used in airports. Now, as Obama denounces intelligence failures and Chertoff's cheerleading for full body scanners is splashed across the television screen, the TSA has quietly stated that it plans to purchase three hundred more scanners from DHS's golden boy. And it would have remained quiet, if Washington Post hadn't ran an article on January 1st, 2010, that revealed the former DHS head's security consulting agency, Chertoff Group, had Rapiscan on it's client list.

"Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive," says Kate Hanni of FlyersRights.org, an organization that opposes the use of full body scanners in the airport.

The Washington Post article goes on the mention that a New York based company called L-3 Communications has been qualified to supply the body scanners to airports, but whether or not this will happen has yet to be seen. A quick look, however, through L-3's history seems to indicate the answer will be "yes."

L-3 was formed in 1997 by Frank C. Lanza and Robert V. LaPenta in conjunction with Lockheed Martin and Lehman Brothers, intended to be "supplier of choice for prime contractors. In establishing the company, several advanced electronics businesses were purchased that were part of the Lockheed Martin, Loral Corporation merger that occurred in 1996. Also purchased from Lockheed Martin was a division located in Camden, NJ that had been part of GE." Keep in mind that Lockheed Martin is a recipient of a $120 million contract to run immigration call centers. In 2000 and 2002 L-3 acquired portions from Raytheon, the fifth largest defense arms manufacturer in the world who works alongside Lockheed Martin in the field of border control. According to the Washington Post, Raytheon is so closely tied to the CIA and NSA that they are "virtually indistinguishable" from one another.

In 2005 L-3 acquired the Titan Corporation, a communications company with a long history of activity in the US government: in 2003 they were given $112.1 million for translation service for the FBI, DEA and Secret Service, in 2005 they received $163.9 from US Army Space and Missile Defense Command to "to provide a full range of planning, analysis, exercise, and information technology services for Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-Yield Explosive (CBRNE) Consequence Management operations," and in 2006 they would get a $350 million five year contract from DHS for support in the National Exercise Program. Two Titan company employees, Adel Nakhia and John Israel, would be involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Another acquisition of L-3 is Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), founded in 1987 by retired Army General Vernon Lewis, on the idea that the end of the Cold War would be marked with a decline in the armed forces. They also have a long history of government contracts: in 2003 they were given two contracts worth $2.5 million by the Defense Department to work in Iraq and in 2008 an additional $300 million for another three years of operation in Iraq and Afghanistan. MPRI is also part of the Civilian Police International, LLC, a task force formed in 2004 to support the State Department in international law enforcement. The other companies involved in this joint venture, dedicated to bringing "new discipline, new efficiencies and new responsiveness to the [International Police Task Force] IPTF program." include AGS, which has worked with L-3 Communications in the Department of Justice's asset forfeiture program, Kellog, Brown & Root, a former subsidiary of the notorious Halliburton, and Wackenhut, a private security and investigation company that is rumoured to be a CIA front company.

One piece at a time our rights, our privacy and our lives are being sold off to private corporations in the name of safety.