"Mind control" survivors claim to have been used as high-tech slaves. U.s. Intelligence agencies and top-ranking politicians use mind-control technology. President obama says he's committed to preventing mind control.
"Mind control" survivors claim to have been used as high-tech slaves. U.s. Intelligence agencies and top-ranking politicians use mind-control technology. President obama says he's committed to preventing mind control.
"Mind control" survivors claim to have been used as high-tech slaves. U.s. Intelligence agencies and top-ranking politicians use mind-control technology. President obama says he's committed to preventing mind control.
LOCAL MOTIVE: PRESIDENT CLINTON IN SAN DIEGO ALAN BERSIN CHARLES LABELLA COPLEY PRESS JACK MURPHY STADIUM BARBARA WARDEN Private corporate Mob Bosses Criminal Public Servants QUALCOMM- IRWIN JACOBS Clinton Administration in Hot Seat Over Oil, Senator Demands Answers http://www.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/10/17/04320 Wes Vernon Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2000 Clinton administration officials have been summoned to testify on Capitol Hill Thursday in a growing scandal surrounding the proposed exchange of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In announcing the hearing Monday, Senate Energy Chairman Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, says he is alarmed over reports that the Energy Department failed to make even rudimentary checks on some of the successful bidders, including one that operates out of an apartment in New York City's Harlem, that were having trouble raising money to complete the deals. Failure to secure the needed financing could force the department to re-open some of the bids. That could prevent release of all 30 billion barrels of oil in time to meet the planned late November deadline. Murkowski intends to grill administration officials about the release of the oil, an action which the senator says is intended only to meet emergencies such as severe supply disruption, "not to lower prices when politics demand." In the land of Clinton/Gore, say Republican critics, anything that threatens Al Gore's election to the White House constitutes a "national emergency." HILLARYS MARXIST HEALTH CARE: MIND CONTROL Mind Control Slavery and the New World Order According to this extremely disturbing report, Monarch Program mind-control survivors claim to have been used as high-tech slaves by certain intelligence agencies and top-ranking politicians. www.nexusmagazine.com by Uri Dowbenko 1998 High-tech slavery is alive and well on planet Earth. Ever since World War II when the United States Government's Project Paperclip sponsored the resettlement of about 2,000 high-level Nazis in the United States, the technology of mind-control programming has advanced rapidly. "The Germans under the Nazi government began to do serious scientific research into trauma-based mind control," write Fritz Springmeier and Cisco Wheeler in their book, The Illuminati Formula used to create an Undetectable Total Mind Controlled Slave. "Under the auspices of the Kaiser Wilhelm Medical Institute in Berlin, Josef Mengele conducted mind-control research on thousands of twins and thousands of other hapless victims." Mengele, known as "the Angel of Death", was one of the approximately 900 military scientists and medical researchers secretly exfiltrated into the United States, where he continued his 'research' and trained others in the black arts of mind control. This work in behaviour manipulation was later incorporated into the CIA's projects Bluebird and Artichoke which, in 1953, became the notorious MKULTRA. The CIA claims that these programs were discontinued, but there is no credible evidence that "The Search for the Manchurian Candidate" (the title of the definitive book by John Marks) ever ceased. In fact, Captain John McCarthy, US Army Special Forces (Ret.), who ran CIA assassination teams out of Saigon during the Vietnam War, told his friend, LAPD whistleblower Mike Ruppert, that "MKULTRA is a CIA acronym that officially stands for 'Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassinations'". Thus the CIA's official obsession with producing programmed killers through the MKULTRA contained more than 149 sub- programs in fields ranging from biology, pharmacology, psychology to laser physics and ESP. More recently, new evidence points to the continuous use of so-called trauma- based programming techniques to accomplish the same goal. This includes the deliberate induction of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) in involuntary human subjects - in essence, human guinea pigs. .... No matter what name is assigned to the problem, however, to create this condition by conscious intent is an atrocity so depraved that trauma-based mind-control programming remains the de facto Secret Holocaust of the 20th century. ..."Drugs are not the deepest level of government-sponsored evil," he writes. "I think the lowest level of Hell is reserved for those who conjured up and carried out the 'Monarch Project'. 'Monarch' refers to young people in America who were victims of mind-control experiments run either by US government agencies such as CIA or military intelligence agencies." ....An alter can be accessed by anyone who knows the "codes" or "triggers". These triggers, which induce an altered or trance state in a programmed victim, can be anything including telephone tones, nursery rhymes, dialogue from certain movies or hand signals. HILLARY DOCTORED HIS IDEAS Sunday,October 29,2000 By ROD DREHER ------------------------------------------------------------------------ THE doctor whose ideas formed the basis for the 1993 Clinton health-care proposal blames "know-it-all" Hillary Rodham Clinton's arrogance, hunger for recognition and ideological rigidity for dooming the plan he'd worked on over two decades. From the barricades of the Hillary-care revolution, Dr. Paul Ellwood picked up a hard-knocks education in the way the temperamental first lady handles public-policy matters. "Blame the other side for your own failings, arrogantly approach things that you don't necessarily know anything about and be pretty much for greater government control of things rather than having the private sector involved in solving problems," he says. "The Bush campaign likes to call the plan a government takeover of America's health-care system," Dr. Ellwood says. "It wasn't when it was handed to the Clintons." Dr. Ellwood, a physician who describes his political leanings as "obsessively independent," came to the project with more than 20 years of full-time experience thinking about and debating health-care policy. He had worked on health policy with every presidential administration since Lyndon Johnson's. In 1970, he began convening meetings of professionals from various branches of the health-care industry at his Wyoming condominium. They became known as the Jackson Hole Group. "This group reached a market-oriented consensus on an approach to health care that was called managed competition,'" he says. "There was pretty much agreement that everybody was going to have to make some sacrifices if we were going to proceed in that direction." The Jackson Hole Group first came to Bill Clinton's attention during the 1992 Democratic primaries, when a New York Times reporter (!) phoned Dr. Ellwood and asked him to send some material to the Arkansas governor, who felt politically vulnerable on the health-care issue. Dr. Ellwood did as he was asked, and never heard back from the campaign. Five days after Clinton was inaugurated, he appointed his wife to head a task force charged with developing and selling a proposal to rein in health-care costs and give medical coverage to all Americans. "Then the next thing we heard was that they were going to appoint this massive committee, and anybody connected with the health-care industry was going to be excluded," he says. "We were the enemy. We needed to be reformed. You cannot imagine how insulting this was." The committee Mrs. Clinton eventually assembled was packed with opponents of managed competition, Dr. Ellwood asserts. "That was a warning. Managed competition really moved health care toward the market, to the right. These advisers were the people who didn't want it that way. They wanted it to be all Medicare." After first being rebuffed, Dr. Ellwood and several allies got the opportunity to meet Mrs. Clinton to explain their concerns, including those about rumors the Clintons wanted to impose price controls on the health-care industry. "One of the points I tried to make in the meeting was that health-care costs were moderating, and if they wanted to turn the health-care system against them, they should push the price-control idea," he says. "When I said that prices were moderating, Mrs. Clinton said You're wrong about that!'" he says, still incredulous. "Aside from being a doctor, I had been working on health-care policy for 25 years." How did Team Hillary mangle the Jackson Hole plan? "They moved it to the left. They've had much more in the way of public controls and intervention in the plan," says Dr. Ellwood. "Furthermore, they proposed using price controls as the way of saving money if the market didn't work. We would never have done that. And they were unwilling to go along with any of the bipartisan approaches." Mrs. Clinton's unwillingness to collaborate with members of Congress - which the Democrats controlled - is what sticks most in the doctor's mind from those days. "She found it difficult, I think, to share power and the limelight with other members of Congress." Although he won't take sides in the New York Senate contest, the physician says he suspects Rick Lazio would be a more bipartisan, collaborative senator. "He's much less ideological, and that's certainly what's needed if we're going to make any progress on health care, or anything else in the Senate." E-mail: dreher@nypost.com Back to News Columnists | Home FROM FRITZ SRPINGMEIER ILLUMINAT FORMULA: http://hermes.spaceports.com/~eddy4god/Introduction.htm For many years, they were able to shut-up and quietly discard their programmed multiples by labelling them Paranoid Schizophrenics. But therapists are now correctly identifying these people as programmed multiples and are not only diagnosing them better but giving them better treatment. After Candy Joness husband deprogrammed her enough that she could participate in writing a book exposing some of what had been done to her, the secret was out. (See The Control of Candy Jones Hypnotism and the CIA by Donald Bain.) Ever since then, the intelligence agencies and the Illuminati have been carrying out damage control. Their biggest damage control campaign has enlisted the power of Hollywood and the controlled Media. This campaign is known as the False Memory Syndrome campaign, or as those of us who know the facts like to call it the false memory spin-drome. The headquarters of the False Memory Spin-drom Foundation is located at 3401 Market St., Suite 130, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Some of the original founders were doctors of the University of Pennslyvannia. The inside story about these early FMS doctors of the University of Pennslyvannia is that they practiced Satanic Rituals during their work days. What is unusual about this--is that generally satanic rituals are performed at night, but these doctors did their coven work during the day. I know about these men. Now you can see why these men started the FMS! They started it to cover their own sins, because many of them were abusers themselves. In other words many of the EMS people are abusers of trauma-based mind-controlled slaves, or the victims of abuse who are in denial about their own abuse from trauma-based mind-control. Martin T. Orn (the person credited with founding the FMS) had ties to the CIA. Two members of the EMS advisory board, Ralph Underwager, Ph.D. and theologian, along with Hollida Wakefield, M.A. let the cat out of the bag when they publicly supported pedophilia (that is adults having sex with children). Their support of pedophilia came in an interview with a Dutch magazine Paidika, The Journal of Paedophilia (Winter, 1993). Although the False Memory Syndrome Foundation gets upset at any mention that there might be a conspiracy by the perpetrators of mind-control, because conspiracies supposedly dont and cant happen, they want us to believe that all therapists are conspiring together to implant false memories of abuse into their clients, which could not be further from the truth. Monarch slaves typically run into a great deal of denial by their therapists that anything like this could be happening. The bottom line is that Multiple Personality Disorder (now refered to as Dissociative Identity Disorder) is a recognized bona fide diagnosis. False Memory Syndrome is not a recognized medical or psychological diagnosis and does not appear in the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III-R nor the recently released DSM-IV. ... In fact, many of the concepts in this book have been purposely obscurred by the Illuminatis control over the media and universities. These obscurred concepts include M.P.D. (DID), recovered memories, hypnosis, demonic possession, aliens, mind-control, the subconscious, a conspiracy to bring in a NWO, truth, etc. The smokescreens of controversy will continue; but those who love the truth, if they seek it, will realize the importance of this book. Its on public record that MK ULTRA, the mind control research which CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner admitted to in 1977 spent millions of dollars studing Voodoo, witchcraft, and psychics. On August 3, 1977, at a Senate hearing the then CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner disclosed that the CIA had been conducting mind control on countless numbers of unsuspecting victims for years, without their knowledge or consent. These CIA mind-control operations were carried out with the participation of a least 185 scientists and at least 80 American institutions, including prisons, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and 44 medical colleges & universities. Many of Americas most prestigious institutes of medical research, had cooperated with the CIA. as well as numerous big name corporations. Casey admitted that day that the CIA did mind-control consisting of drugs, hypnosis & electro-shock. ... Many evil geniuses within the Illuminati added their contributions to the Monarch programming. One of the most important was John Gittinger of Oklahoma, because he was the genius who could understand how a little childs mind was when it was in infancy. In order to work with something, you must know what you are working with. John Gittinger, who is no longer alive, worked at programming for years. His contribution was in the mental assessment area. John Gittinger (b. 1909) was the director of psychological services at the state hospital in Norman, Oklahoma. He got a masters degree at age 30, and joined the CIAs MK Ultra Mind Control in 1950. He was a high school guidance counselor and a Navy lieutenant commander during W.W.II. In the late 1970s, he moved back to Oklahoma. He was heavy set and goateed. Its been said he looked like the actor Walter Slezak. He had an insatiable curiosity about understanding human personality. When the Illuminati looked around for men skilled in personality assessment to assist the Monarch Programming, John W. Gittinger was one of their men who they selected. Gittinger was not the only researcher into personality that the CIA hired, but he was their top man in terms of the programming of children. From the end of W.W. II until he began with the CIA in 1950, Gittinger was studying how to assess personality. At the Oklahoma State Hospital, he had large numbers of adults who could be studied. After Gittinger started doing personality assessment for the CIA. most of his work became highly classified. The Rolling Stone article of July 18, 1974 asked why years of research into personality assessment should be so secret. In fact it was so secret, that Gittinger was not allowed to talk to journalists, even though it was public knowledge that Gittinger did personality assessment work/research. The reason that such an apparently benign science was kept secret is that it plays a major part in the success of the Monarch Programming. John Gittinger designed the PAS (Personality Assessment System). This is an extraordinary method to evaluate human behavior and predict their future behavior. As far as we know, most of the PAS is still classified SECRET. The PAS is based on the ability to differentiate different types of people. There are 3 major differentiations (or dimensions). They are called the E-I dimension, the R-F dimension, and the A- U dimension. People are born with their original placement within each of these three spectrums. In other words there are 3 axes that can be graphed to describe a babys personality. HILLARYS MARXIST EDUCATION SYSTEM Advertise Your Banner Here November 1, 2000 New Blockbuster Book: News Alerts U.S. News Links U.K. News Int'l News Links MoneyNews Contact Us NewsMax Store Classifieds Get Your Site Listed Hillary's Radical Education Agenda Candace de Russy Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2000 Hillary Clinton nebulously represents her three-decades-plus involvement with education as a long "re-imagining" of education. Although she has no voting record to offer New Yorkers in this area, her present plan for, and past roles in, school reform are anything but nebulous: She has consistently advocated the radical expansion of governments power over schools, at the expense of parental and local control. One of Mrs. Clintons proposals is the creation of a national teacher corps, which, as even the Washington Post warily acknowledges, "would plunge the federal government into areas of education where it has not gone before," including the recruiting, licensing and payment of teachers. For this and other new federal forays into education Mrs. Clinton advocates spending $175 billion over the next 10 years. But for more than three decades Big Brother has spent more than $150 billion on 760 "education" programs in reality, self-serving employment programs for educators, who are among her staunchest supporters which have done virtually nothing to raise academic performance of disadvantaged students. She vowed recently that she and Al Gore would finish implementing all the programs begun in her husbands administration. This would include extending the already powerful influence of the three 1994 federal laws strongly endorsed by President Clinton: Goals 2000, School-To-Work, and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. This legislation set up an insidious system of state standards based not on academics but on attitudes and beliefs as well as merely training children for specific jobs. As these laws have worked their way through state education departments to the local level, schools have increasingly adopted ideological and vocational curricula while abandoning knowledge- based truths found in traditional literature, mathematics and history. Mrs. Clintons enthusiasm for controlling how other peoples children should be educated and what careers they should choose predates her husbands presidency. In the late '80s and early '90s, she promoted the "Workforce Skills" program of the then Rochester-based National Center for Education and the Economy (NCEE). This think tank aims at integrating education into a federally controlled, German-style system labeled "human resources development" a "seamless" system for nationalizing education, training and labor policy. The NCEEs workplace plan provided the basis for the Clinton administrations School-To- Work Act, which, in the view of Rep. Bob Schaffer of Colorado, "has gone tragically awry." Students, he explains, have been "forced into the program, required to leave the classroom to job-shadow and to work in menial, entry-level jobs": they have been disconnected from their "dreams, goals and ambitions." This same readiness to use government for molding others lives was also apparent when Mrs. Clinton headed education reform while her husband was governor of Arkansas. Together "Billary" or the "know-it-alls," as Thomas Sowell notes, inaugurated programs for "gifted" students that subjected them to a curriculum biased in favor of pacifism, homosexuality, "animal liberation" and a roster of other left-wing causes. This substitution of indoctrination for academics (combined with the undermining of their own teacher-testing reforms in face of opposition from the teachers unions) did not improve Arkansas schools: students scores on the American College Test for students in Arkansas dropped after Mrs. Clintons reform blitz, and fourth-graders there perform poorly to this day on national reading tests by comparison with most other states. (Her pandering to unions, by the way, continues unabated: the teacher competency testing she is currently trumpeting in the name of "accountability" is a sham; 90 percent of new teachers pass this lax, already state-required exam.) Mrs. Clintons earlier leadership roles reveal more of this same appetite for control via centralization. In the late '70s and early '80s she helped run the Childrens Defense Fund (CDF), an organization that "defends" children from their parents. Like her, the CDF sees child rearing as less a parental prerogative than that of a "village" of government-directed teachers, pediatricians and social workers. In "Hell to Pay," Barbara Olson cites many of her earlier articles that reflect this same utopian, quasi-socialist vision. Mrs. Clinton rejects the belief, for example, that "families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children." She recommends intervening in "family decisions [involving minors] that could have long-term effects." "Decisions," she writes, "about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetics [sic] surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others should not be made unilaterally by parents." In light of such convictions, Mrs. Clintons vehement dismissal of school vouchers as "gimmicks" is entirely logical. Besides, giving needy children a way out of failing public schools would alienate her union backers. Yet she herself reserved the right to choose a school for her daughter, as does most of the educational and political elite for their children. Mrs. Clintons education platform and record leave little doubt that her election to the Senate would greatly advance her and her fellow social engineers educational "imaginings." And what of after, after their grand scheme immeasurably harms even more children and society, what then might she have to say for herself? Alas, one can well imagine a response akin to her recent description of how she feels about the failure of her 1993 plan to nationalize health care: "I would rather refer to it as a learning experience." * * * Candace de Russy chairs the Academic Standards Committee of the SUNY Board of Trustees.
CLINTON: RUSSIAN MIND CONTROLLED PUPPET Advertise Your Banner Here October 29, 2000 Zogby: Lazio Leads in Poll : NewsMax.com Broke Hillary FEC Lie Home Columnists Late Night Jokes Forum Archives News Alerts U.S. News Links U.K. News Int'l News Links MoneyNews Contact Us NewsMax Store Classifieds Get Your Site ListedWith Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com StaffFor the story behind the story... Thursday September 2, 9:23 AM Clinton Mind Control at the CIA -- Congressman Burton Stunned by Intimidation Tactics Today's top NewsMax headline story "FBI Whistleblower Sues White House, FBI" is not an isolated one. There have been dozens of examples of the Clinton administration using Nazi-style police tactics against government whistleblowers. FBI Agent Sculimbrene's account is indeed horrifying. Though the most senior FBI agent at the White House, he was subjected to drug tests, demands for psychiatric examinations and threats to his job -- all because he wouldn't go along with the party line. One of the things that irritated the Clintons was Sculimbrene's decision to testify as a character witness on behalf of former White House Travel Office chief Billy Dale. At the time, the Clintons were trying to put Dale in jail on trumped-up charges. And then there were more: Remember the two Secret Service agents who testified to Congress that the administration lied when they claimed nearly 1,000 FBI files were taken by the White House because of "a bureaucratic snafu"? The agents were quickly put under investigation within their agency. Apparently, the Clintons' inquisition against opponents is permeating many federal agencies, including the nation's security agencies. This past summer, Rep. Dan Burton, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, held hearings on "Retaliation at the Departments of Defense and Energy: Do Advocates of Tighter Security for U.S. Technology Face Intimidation?" NewsMax.com has obtained a copy of some of the testimony given before Burton's committee on June 24, 1999. Republican Rep. Curt Weldon told the committee there were "a couple of cases" of intimidation at the CIA, including one agent who "will not show [at the committee hearing] because his career is still in jeopardy." Weldon said the agent "revealed to his superiors that an intelligence leak was occurring in Somalia that compromised U.S. security." Because "he was doing his job" by warning about the transfer of classified material, Weldon said the career CIA agent "was asked to submit to a drug test, a medical exam for brain tumors, and a psychiatric evaluation." Burton was clearly shocked by Weldon's report: "I have heard of that kind of activity in Russia, where they used to charge people with crimes against the state and commit them to pyschiatric institutions. I have never heard of a professional intelligence analyst in this country being asked to undergo a psychiatric examination."
Printer Friendly Version Reprint Information Contact Us Financial News UK News Late Night Jokes Forum Article Archives Employment Ops.All Rights Reserved NewsMax.com EXCERPTS FROM: FIRST DOCTOR | Clinton's physician, a San Diegan, to be honored by UCSD Leslie Wolf Branscomb UNION TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER 17-Jun-2000 Saturday Connie Mariano Dr. Connie Mariano, personal physician to the president of the United States, travels the world with one goal: keeping the leader of the free world alive and well. This weekend, Mariano's travels will bring her home. Tonight the 45-year-old from Imperial Beach will be one of the outstanding graduates of the University of California San Diego to be honored at the university's 40th birthday gala. Mariano's parents, Angel and Lu Mariano, immigrated to the United States from the Philippines in the 1950s. Angel Mariano served in the U.S. Navy as a steward, one of the few military jobs available to Filipinos at the time, his daughter said. Connie Mariano, who is not only the president's doctor but also commander of the White House Medical Unit, was recently nominated for flag rank. If confirmed by the Senate, she will become a rear admiral and the first Filipino-American Navy flag officer. "My father had served six admirals in their homes," Mariano said. "So, 45 years later, for this to happen in my family is quite an honor." The elder Mariano settled his family in Imperial Beach when he retired from the Navy. Connie Mariano spent three years there -- an eternity for a self-proclaimed "Navy brat" used to moving at least every two years. She graduated from Mar Vista High School in 1973 and obtained a degree in biology from UCSD in 1977. She went to the Military Medical School in Bethesda, Md., then served three tours of duty at the San Diego Naval Medical Center, most recently in 1990 and 1991, when she was selected as the hospital's head of internal medicine. That year, she was nominated to be the White House physician. Besides having excellent credentials as a doctor, candidates for the position must be "squeaky-clean," Mariano said. "They just don't hand you the medical bag and say, `OK, go follow the president,' " she said. Obtaining her security clearance took six months, she said. Though she began as physician to President Bush, President Clinton asked her to stay when he took office. Such tours of duty normally last two years, but Clinton extended her service for as long as he is in office. Mariano and her staff are not just responsible for the president. They also tend to his family, the vice president and his family and every person working in the White House. She and her staff serve visiting tourists, too. "If you come to the White House and pass out on the floor, we'll take care of you," Mariano said. "Come to think of it, we have met the most interesting people from around the world that way." In addition to the White House's human occupants, Mariano also is responsible for the health of the first pets, Socks and Buddy. "We're full-service here," she said. Mariano's husband, Richard Stevens, also is a UCSD graduate. They married while she was in medical school, and he went to law school while she was on an overseas assignment. Their two boys, 13 and 11, have been around the White House so long they take it for granted, Mariano said. "When I say, `Do you want to go to work with me and see the president?' they say, `No, we just want to see the cat,' " Mariano said, laughing. From what she has seen, she said, it does not appear that the strains of the presidency have unduly aged Bush or Clinton. Both have successfully kept stress at arm's length by "compartmentalizing" and concentrating on the task at hand, Mariano said. "The two presidents I've served have an incredible ability to tune things out that worry them," she said. Clinton becomes extraordinarily focused when playing golf, she said, "and then all the troubles of the world don't bother him." Mariano has had plenty of opportunity to observe Clinton. Wherever he goes, she goes. When her friends and family complain that they don't see her on television when the president makes public appearances, Mariano says that's because she is backstage with the limousines and ambulances. "If you do see me on TV, that's not good, because it means the president is in some kind of pain," Mariano said. Her biggest challenge as Clinton's personal physician? "Trying to keep up with the guy," she said. "He's got incredible energy. "Even on the overseas flights, when the rest of us are exhausted, he's still genuinely concerned about people, and he's funny. It's amazing to watch him." Mariano will receive her award at the UCSD Alumni Awards for Excellence Gala 2000, scheduled from 6 to 9:30 tonight in the Price Center Ballroom on the La Jolla campus. The event is open to the public. Tickets are $75, and the proceeds will benefit the National Merit Scholarship Program. Mariano is one of 40 highly successful UCSD graduates to be honored. The honorees represent a wide range of careers and include state Sen. Steve Peace; Abby Leibman, founder of the California Women's Law Center; six-time Ironman Triathlon champion Mark Allen; and Mike Judge, creator of the "Beavis and Butt-head" television cartoons. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Are we moving full circle on universal health care? Presidential campaign brings hot issue back to stage center http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?580831 Tony Fong STAFF WRITER 4-Jul-2000 Tuesday Long before Monica-gate put a stamp of disapproval on his presidency, President Clinton's failed push for universal health coverage took on all the appearances of being the Waterloo for which his administration would be remembered. Blunted by an extraordinary coalition of physicians, insurers and business groups -- players that have often been at cross-purposes with each other -- the administration's plans to reform health care quickly fizzled once the infamous "Harry and Louise" ads hit the airwaves, warning of ruined patient-doctor relationships and government intrusion in personal health decisions. Yet, six years after a fork was all but stuck into the idea of universal coverage, it has become a centerpiece issue in the presidential campaign. Meanwhile, California is pondering the feasibility of incorporating it into state health policy. And the group that originally commissioned the "Harry and Louise" ads assailing universal coverage has brought the characters back -- this time advocating insurance for all.
(Page A-1 ) Managed care idea: Too little is known | It lowers costs, but does it spur health? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SUSAN DUERKSEN Staff Writer 20-Apr-1993 Tuesday Propelled by an intense drive to save money, the nation's health-care system is shifting wholesale into a process called managed care. Among Californians, 85 percent of residents with health insurance already are in managed-care plans; nationally, 51 percent. And as a cornerstone of President Clinton's health-care reforms, managed care could soon become the law of the land. Yet no one really knows if it works. Full-scale managed care -- the system used by health maintenance organizations like Kaiser Permanente -- does reduce costs, although studies differ on how much. But very little is known about how well the method keeps people healthy. Even Dr. Paul Ellwood, who coined the term "health maintenance organization" (HMO) and championed the explosion in managed care two decades ago, recently deplored the failure to measure its results. "After 50 years of prepaid group practice, we still have very little evidence as to whether one system of paying for health care produces more health than another," he said. "We just haven't looked at it. It's appalling." Despite the shortage of data, an urgent need to control costs has made managed care the undisputed trend in U.S. health care. Under managed care, the insurer paying the bills also monitors and limits the use of medical services. By contrast, traditional indemnity health insurance pays a large portion of the bill for whatever medical care patients seek. Watered-down version The purest form of managed care, the HMO, covers only care from a specified list of doctors and hospitals. Most doctors and many consumers resist the restrictions of HMOs and increasingly choose a watered-down version called a preferred provider organization (PPO), which manages care less closely and cuts costs less effectively. PPOs also have core groups of doctors, but pay part of the bill if a patient goes elsewhere. The doctors in managed-care systems often have financial incentives to limit patients' use of laboratory tests, specialists and other services. The question is whether managed care saves money by preventing unnecessary and inappropriate treatment, as it is designed to do, or by denying patients medical services that may be needed. "Managed care hasn't fulfilled its promises to manage cost and guarantee quality," said Andrea Castell, executive director of the Health Care Purchasers Association, a Seattle employers group. "No one is really asking the employers how it's working." National polls -- and one conducted in San Diego County for the Union-Tribune last month -- show HMO members are just as satisfied as people with more traditional insurance. Yet aversion to HMOs is still strong, especially in rural areas of the nation. In northeastern Pennsylvania, for instance, Blue Cross started an HMO 10 years ago that still has only 52,000 members, while 650,000 people continue to pay $35 a month more for the company's indemnity plan, said senior program director Yvonne Bozinski. The region's relatively few doctors don't need more patients, and residents want coverage that includes their personal doctors as well as the freedom to seek specialist care in larger cities, she said. "Our area has been very slow to accept the HMO concept," she said. "We had a hard time recruiting doctors, and people wouldn't join the HMO because their physician wasn't in it. And the flexibility to go outside the area is so important." Doctors dislike managed care, says Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University health economist, because "one person's efficiency is another person's income loss." In addition, physicians resent working in a "statistical fishbowl," with their treatment of patients monitored, he said. The doctor as "heavy" Managed care also requires doctors to abandon their traditional "all-out advocacy" of each patient in order to give all patients "reasonable, proportionate advocacy," said Dr. John LaPuma, director of the Center for Clinical Ethics at Lutheran General Hospital in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge. "In managed care, the financial health of the group has to be at least as important as the individual health of the patient," LaPuma said. "Physicians have to think not just of the person in the examining room in front of you but of someone who might be in the waiting room, and you have to save resources for that patient. "If physicians are going to manage patients with the health of other people in mind, which is what managed-care organizations ask, then physicians need training in the management of limited resources," he said. And that is not a role many doctors relish. "The physician is going to be the heavy," said Dr. Daniel Allan, of Las Cruces, N.M. "I don't want to be the heavy." For people with serious chronic illnesses, managed care can be particularly difficult, if not harmful, said Laura Mitchell of the Multiple Sclerosis California Action Network. In some plans, she said, a person who must see specialists regularly is required to go back for a referral every time from a primary-care doctor -- the designated "gatekeeper" -- and sometimes are refused. "They wind up getting inappropriate care or no care at all, or they go outside the plan and pay out of their pocket," Mitchell said. Advocates of managed care say it can improve health because the plans have a financial incentive to keep their members healthy and therefore emphasize preventive care. "Report cards" planned But efforts have begun only recently to document whether that argument holds up in practice. In January, 30 large and small managed-care organizations joined with several major companies to begin developing a standardized system of measuring and verifying the health plans' performance and quality. They have promised to make "report cards" publicly available next year, grading the health plans on such items as prenatal care, preventive care such as mammography and immunizations, patient status after surgery, whether chronic conditions such as asthma and diabetes worsen, and overall patient satisfaction. Employers want to begin basing payment for health care on performance, and "many people feel managed care is yet to be proved," said Mary Jane England, who leads the effort as president of the Washington Business Group on Health. "There's so much ignorance about what works and what doesn't," said Richard Kronick, a UCSD health policy analyst and an adviser to Clinton's health-care reform task force. "We need to try to measure outcomes." Kronick co-wrote the health-care reform theory called managed competition, which relies heavily on expanding managed care and making it more cost-effective by forcing price competition among plans. The theory is the basis of the reform proposal Clinton is expected to announce in mid-May. Although evidence is sketchy, Kronick said some studies indicate HMOs succeed at limiting unnecessary care. He said Kaiser members in California are 25 percent less likely to be hospitalized than people with regular insurance, especially for discretionary reasons such as hysterectomies and questionable lower back pain, but hospitalization rates are equal for serious conditions such as heart attacks. Are patients satisfied? But almost all evaluation of managed care so far has been financial, Ellwood said, and much better methods are needed for measuring patient satisfaction and the medical results of HMO membership. "We must make health plans accountable for their impact on patients' functioning and well-being," Ellwood said. He said much of that information should be based on patients' perceptions, and could be gathered easily with questionnaires. Despite the lack of proof that HMOs provide good health care, their financial advantages are better documented and are driving their growth. According to a survey of 2,448 employers nationwide by Foster Higgins, a benefits consulting firm, the average annual cost of providing HMO coverage per employee was $3,313 in 1992. That was $400 less than PPOs and $770 less than indemnity coverage. But enrollment in the less-managed PPOs is growing faster than HMOs, because employees demand a greater choice of physicians, said survey director John Erb. HMOs are most accepted in California, where Kaiser, the nation's largest HMO, was born 50 years ago. Membership in HMOs accounts for more than half the health insurance in California, compared to 26 percent nationwide, according to the Foster Higgins survey. "You have folks in California who have been in HMOs a long time and their kids are in them now," Erb said. By contrast, he said, in New York state 65 percent of the insured still have indemnity insurance, primarily due to the strength there of Blue Cross/Blue Shield and labor unions. Like it or not, most Americans will have to get accustomed to managed care, many analysts and policy-makers say. "Basically, I think the HMOs will replace the insurance carriers in this country," said Kenneth Abramowitz, a senior health-care analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "If we have a lot of choices of HMOs, I think we'll be happy. Everybody has a God-given right to join a good HMO. No more, no less." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
(Page A-1 ) Health Care: Who Pays? SECOND OF FIVE PARTS. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Clinton prescription: managed competition ------------------------------------------------------------------------ SUSAN DUERKSEN Staff Writer 22-Feb-1993 Monday It's 1996. Recently triumphant in a battle against breast cancer, Jane has just been hired as marketing director for a La Jolla biotechnology firm. Allen works in a three-person auto repair shop in San Marcos. Mary is unemployed, having lost her job in an Oceanside restaurant after she often missed work because of her youngest son's severe asthma. All three, like everyone in the United States, have medical insurance. They are members of a Health Insurance Purchasing Cooperative that includes half the population of North County. Another HIPC -- pronounced hip-ic -- covers most people under age 65 in the southern half of the county. Under the system known as managed competition, these regional cooperatives are the backbone of the health-care reform program shepherded through Congress by President Clinton back in 1993. HIPCs across the nation act as clearinghouses and negotiators to help consumers select and buy into the most cost-effective health insurance plans. From a menu of six health plans, Allen picked the cheapest option, which costs, let's say, $200 a month. The auto shop is required to pay three-quarters of that -- with a tax break to ease the burden -- so $50 comes out of Allen's pocket. His co-worker, Ray, chose a higher-priced plan with offices near his home, so to the same monthly $150 contribution from his employer, Ray adds $70. Jane's company contributes the maximum allowed toward her health insurance, equal to the cost of the cheapest $200 plan chosen by Allen. But Jane is highly paid and wants access to the best cancer specialists in town, so she opted to pay an extra $180 a month. That buys her the most expensive health plan available, a traditional insurance policy that pays 80 percent of government-set prices for any doctor or hospital service. Mary, like Allen, is in the cheapest health plan, but not by choice; that is what the government buys for her and her children. The cooperative collects all the premiums -- from employers, individuals and the government -- keeps an administrative fee and distributes the rest to the health plans. For a set monthly payment per person, the health plans -- networks of hospitals, clinics, doctor groups and sometimes an insurance company -- are responsible for providing a standard package of health services as needed. Whether Mary's son is hospitalized for asthma or Allen doesn't need health care at all, the monthly payment to the health plan is the same. Allen and Mary can see only the doctors in their health plan and must get approval from a physician-gatekeeper for every test, procedure or visit to a specialist. They pay $5 for each service. Since the core package of benefits offered by all health plans is identical, those that aren't cheapest compete for members by advertising better quality and convenience. Once a year, during the month for switching health plans, the cooperative reports on customer satisfaction and treatment outcomes for each plan to help consumers decide.
This is a glimpse of how the health-care system favored by President Clinton might work. The reforms he proposed during his campaign revolve around the theory called managed competition, a strategy based on both market economics and government regulation. The idea is to arrange and manage the competition among health insurers so individuals can shop more effectively, to create tax incentives for thrifty shopping and to concentrate consumers' buying power in large groups -- all aimed at forcing health plans to hold down costs. "Health care has historically been characterized by strong providers and weak purchasers; managed competition equalizes the relationship," wrote Paul Starr, a Princeton University sociologist specializing in health care. "By combining individuals and employee groups into large purchasing cooperatives, managed competition creates a powerful, knowledgeable countervailing force on the demand side of the market." Clinton also wants to impose budget controls in case those market forces are out-muscled by rising costs. And he has promised to extend health insurance to everyone by redirecting savings to buy access to the system for the estimated 36 million Americans now uninsured. Central framework Many details are undecided, and even the basic ideas may change as a task force headed by first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton hammers out a legislative proposal over the next two months. But managed competition clearly is the central framework. Several leading proponents of the theory, including Starr and Richard Kronick, a UCSD health-care analyst, are on the task force. Under the system they envision, employers would have to provide health insurance. Economics would steer most people into health maintenance organizations or other prepaid health plans that limit choice of doctors and scrutinize the use of services. The cost of standard coverage would be spread equally among everyone in a community, probably raising costs for the young and healthy who now have the lowest rates and lowering costs for others, advocates say. The program would be a major new expense for businesses that don't provide health insurance to employees and individuals who don't now buy it and don't qualify for federal aid, but the rest of society would be relieved of the cost of their emergency medical needs. Opponents fear most low-income and unemployed people could be forced into bargain-basement health plans that will save money only by restricting services and providing inadequate care, said Consumers Union attorney Nettie Hoge. Middle-income Americans will be pinched, critics say, because a central cost-saving mechanism of managed competition is to make consumers bear more of their own medical costs so they make cost-conscious choices. "The average insured person will find they're paying much more out of their pocket for health insurance," said Dr. Kevin Grumbach, West Coast director of Physicians for a National Health Program. "That's the whole thrust -- that the only way to induce restraint is to make people feel the (financial) pain." What about extras? Among the unresolved questions are what the basic benefit package would include and whether the health plans could offer extra benefits for extra cost. Bruce Fried, a health-care adviser to Clinton's campaign and transition team, said the standard benefit package guaranteed for everyone would be "fairly comprehensive -- all the things people think of as being necessary to ensure good health." But although a major goal is to equalize health care, Fried said, he believes individuals and employers would have to be free to buy supplemental insurance. However, anything an employer pays over the basic level probably would be taxed as employee income, a major "political land mine" still being debated, Kronick said. Another open question is how to impose the budget controls Clinton favors -- by setting doctor and hospital fees, restricting premium rate increases to the inflation rate or both. Kronick, a co-author of the original theory, said he expects the HIPCs to contain 50 percent to 70 percent of a region's population, more than enough bargaining power to "call the shots" on premium rate growth. But debate is raging over how many employers would be required to join the HIPCs. Larger companies probably will be allowed to provide insurance on their own, but suggested cut-off points have ranged from 100 employees to 1,000. If the cooperatives include all companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, that would be two-thirds of the employed population, enough to "effectively regulate total spending," Starr wrote. Medicaid -- known as Medi-Cal in California -- the federal health-care program for low-income families, is expected to be rolled into the cooperatives, while the Medicare program for people over 65 and the disabled would remain separate for the time being. Tax credits proposed Most managed-competition proposals limit each employer's health-care costs to 7 percent of payroll, with tax credits for small companies if costs exceed that. Some propose that individuals get tax credits if their out-of-pocket cost for the basic health plan is more than 2 percent of income. Another big issue is how to pay for subsidizing coverage for unemployed and low-wage workers, which will take between $48 billion and $59 billion in new federal spending to get started, said John Sheils, vice president of Lewin-VHI, a health-care consulting firm. Taxing supplemental benefits as income could provide up to $16 billion, he said, and the rest might come from new taxes on health-care services or on health enemies such as cigarettes. "When the American people hear how it's proposed to be financed, they're going to zoom right up the wall," said Tony Mazzocchi, an organizer of a coalition of 12 major labor unions advocating a national system in which the government pays directly for all health care. Mazzocchi said taxes to buy insurance for the uninsured would be a windfall for the insurance industry. But most analysts agree that many health insurance companies would be driven out of business. Health insurance pool Although full-scale managed competition has never been tested, federal and state of California employees get their health insurance through purchasing cooperatives. The California Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) runs a health insurance pool for employees of the state and 787 small public agencies, a total of 887,000 workers and their dependents. Using the strength of its numbers, PERS has kept premium increases to 1.5 percent this year, far below the national average, said Director Tom Elkin. The organization contracts with 26 insurance plans. Collette Sweeney, office manager of a state water quality office here, said most of her co-workers choose the lowest-priced plans and are happy with the program, "as compared to what's out there in private industry, which is really restricted." In August, the program will shift to standardized benefits, requiring that all insurers offer identical benefit packages, with very few extras allowed. The change was made because the unwieldy array of options impeded intelligent shopping, Elkin said. Another managed-competition system is being set up as a voluntary program for any company with five to 50 employees in California. Established by insurance reform legislation passed last year and administered by the state's Major Risk Medical Insurance Board, the program opens July 1. Employers will pay half of the lowest premium available, and employees who want to participate will select plans and pay the remaining cost. Their options will offer identical benefit packages, with two levels of deductibles. "The basic tenet of managed competition is to force the insurance companies to compete on price and service, not on who can think up the cutest benefit package," said John Ramey, executive director of the new program. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. (Page A-3 ) NEIL MORGAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Experts seek way around second-best health care ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NEIL MORGAN 12-Jun-1997 Thursday Six men and women who have emerged as respected voices in the national health-care debate are here today to begin work toward a plan protecting San Diegans from the spreading scourge of "second-best" health care. If they succeed in their unique quest, it will be a political miracle. Yet a symbolic giant leap could be made this afternoon. Rival leaders of the Big Four providers -- Sharp, Scripps/Mercy, UCSD and Kaiser -- gather in the same hall at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot for the first meeting of the Regional Health Care Advisory Council. It is open to all. Major providers, including UCSD Dean John Alksne and Children's Hospital's Blair Sadler, who have led repeated but fruitless consolidation talks, will give status reports on their institutions. Open discussion could help to resolve stalemates that have prevented breakthroughs in San Diego's troubled health-care industry. This unusual public policy effort is launched by the county Board of Supervisors, seeking participation from mayors and citizens of each of the region's 18 cities. Nothing quite like it has gone forward elsewhere, and the course ahead brims with the hazards of egos, profits and prestige. In San Antonio, where a major hospital was taken over by Columbia/HCA, the for-profit giant in health care, a citizens' panel had been convened to seek a master health-care plan for the region. "It crashed," says cardiologist Brant Mittler, a member of the San Diego panel and a senior fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation. "Basically it fell apart because we couldn't resolve turf wars." San Diego is one of the two or three most competitive health-care markets in America. Each city had lavish Cadillac-quality facilities that hummed along until governments and employers began to reduce the 15 percent of gross national product paid for health care, a share far exceeding that of any other nation. Since the Clintons failed at health-care reform, managed care has swept the nation. Half of San Diego's hospital beds are empty. Many specialists have left the region. Layoffs have begun. Mergers have seemed inevitable. Now the specter is fear of second-best quality in health care. Dr. Linda Peeno, a Louisville physician, triggered a round of confessionals from managed-care executives when she told a congressional committee that she had caused the death of a patient by refusing him "a necessary operation to save his heart. It contributed to my advancement. I saved a half-million dollars. . . . I went from making a few hundred dollars a week to an annual six-figure income." Marc Gardner, who managed three Columbia hospitals for three years, told Lucette Lagnado of The Wall Street Journal: "I committed felonies every day." In the respected New England Journal of Medicine last week, editor Jerome P. Kassirer asked whether physicians can be content prescribing "second-best but cheaper" procedures and drugs. His warning should alert patients unconcerned about their future care. "Should we remain silent if dialysis is denied to the elderly or to patients with diabetes who have lost their vision?" he asks. "Should we tolerate long waiting lists for hip replacements? Are we prepared to accept the reality of a two-tiered system in which the rich receive care and the poor are denied it? . . . Should we continue to comply with for-profit health-care systems that make a millionaire a month out of venture capitalists and simultaneously drain money away from patient care? "Sooner or later, we must have an open colloquy on these issues. . . . So far, except for a few voices in this country, the air is filled with a strained silence." Dr. Robert K. Ross, a courageous man who directs the county's health and human services, hopes to break that silence as he introduces local and out-of-city members of the new council today at 2 in Martini Hall, Building 622, at the Recruit Depot. NEIL MORGAN's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. San Diego's political power shift | Democrats wield clout once reserved for GOP http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?441203Gerry Braun STAFF WRITER 31-Jan-1999 Sunday
SLA-CLINTON-SAN DIEGO-CONNECTION PAYZANT- San Diego (SDUSD) and Boston Superintendent, Rhodes Scholar (?) Goals 2000 with Hillary. Friend of Bill Clinton and former Asst Secretary of Education under Clinton. Put murderer Maruta Gardner in touch with Clinton and University of Pennslyvannia (Communist-UN Educational Agenda) DEUTCH -CIA Director SAIC Board, San Diego, MIT, in Boston Mind control being used in SDUSD. Mind Control in Columbine. One of SAICs sub companies is ATG with a branch in Littleton Colorado. Harold Ickes who worked with Hillary Clinton on health care, when he left Clintons service went to Denver which is near Littleton. The original SLA crimes were government orchestrated and government protected for the purpose of passing laws that met the political agenda of President Richard Nixon and others. One outcome of the SLA crimes was the militarization of police, including adding SWAT teams to police forces. The copycats being planned followed the same pattern involving corrupt government officials. The SLA was an offshoot of the SDS and the Underground Weathermen. Hillary Clinton can be tied to the SDS and the Black Panthers which can be tied to the SLA from her college days. As Board President of New World Foundation which was a CIA front that organized and dispatched CIA created radicals such as the Black Panthers, SLA, SDS, Weathermen, Chicago Eight, etc. Hillary Clinton can be tied to the SLA. The SLAs original name had the words New World in them. New World Liberation Army . The SLA and the Black Panthers can be tied DIRECTLY to Hillary Rodham Clinton as Board Director of New World CIA provocateurs: http://www.skolnicksreport.com/dragonlady1.html http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200007318.shtm Hillary Clintons pet education project was a UN education plan called Goals 2000. (the deliberate dumbing down of america by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt - (207) 442-0543) At the time of the Frey-Tomblin murders, Superintendent of San Diego Unified Schools (SDUSD) was working closely with Hillary Clinton through Goals 2000. Murderer Maruta Gardner was working with Tom Payzant and can be tied to President Clinton through him. Immediately after the murderers there was a massive shift in the upper echelon of the school district with many people leaving for reasons I am not aware of and many of Dr. Gardners affiliates being promoted. Two years after the murders, Tom Payzant went to work for President Clinton as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Education, a Department that is missing one billion dollars in public funds. A Congressional ordered audit could not be conducted because of an absence of records. Tom Payzant left that position after a few years and is now Superintendent of Boston Schools. He immediately instituted a policy to check for weapons on campuses which included metal detectors. Through his work in Boston, he is affiliated with John Deutch through Deutchs MIT teaching post. After Tom Payzant left his San Diego Superintendent post, his Deputy Superintendent Bertha Pendleton, who had cleaned up the murdered Dr. Freys Integration account was promoted to Superintendent. Dr. Pendleton would have known the truth about the Frey- Tomblin murders and when she took her position immediately targeted those who were affiliated or who had knowledge of the embezzlement/murders. Race/Human Relations a program of which Dr. Frey was at the helm, ceased to exist and the district deteriorated into an uncaring, unaccountable, and hostile place to work. The SLA, before it kidnapped Patty Hearst, assassinated Oaklands African-American Superintendent. Dr. Pendleton was an African-American Superintendent. Gary Atwood was brought into the school district right after the murders. My work assignments were manipulated through extreme hostile and criminal actions against me until I was moved to the classroom next door to his. Years later, Gary would expose that he had inside knowledge of the Frey-Tomblin murders. LOCAL MOTIVE: PRESIDENT CLINTON IN SAN DIEGO | Clinton issues call for healing | President sees similarities in hostility to immigrants and burning of churches http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?290021 John Marelius STAFF WRITER 11-Jun-1996 Tuesday President Bill Clinton Rhetorically linking the recent wave of church burnings with hostility toward immigrants, President Clinton cautioned Americans yesterday against scapegoating people who are "different from us." Clinton surrounded himself with San Diego law enforcement officials as he sought to counter criticism from Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting Bob Dole that his administration was lax in fighting drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexican border. But Clinton abbreviated his prepared remarks on crime-fighting efforts at the border to issue a call for healing in the wake of a wave of arson destroying black churches across the South. "Because we're people and because we're imperfect, the country will always have problems," the president said in a late-morning speech in front of the San Diego Police Department headquarters downtown. "But we really fall into a dangerous trap when we start blaming our problems on other people just because they are different from us." ...ountering Dole Clinton's speech followed by 12 days a San Diego appearance by Dole in which the Senate majority leader denounced the Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for San Diego, Alan Bersin, for routinely freeing drug trafficking suspects apprehended at the border. The president put the administration's spin on the situation as Attorney General Janet Reno was on hand to present a report touting a successful plan to "return the rule of law to the Southwest border." Without mentioning Bersin by name, Clinton declared his drug enforcement efforts a success because of the unity he has fostered among agencies at different levels of government here. "We can be grateful that here there is one American law enforcement team," he said. "And I tell you, that's what we're trying to create for all the citizens of the United States, wherever they live, and I am very proud of what they've done. They've put aside politics and put the people of this community first." Police reaction While many San Diego police officers said they were gratified by the president's overall praise, some said the visit violates department policy of remaining politically neutral. "He was using the department as a political platform, and we're supposed to be neutral," one officer said. "We're basically making an endorsement. We are violating our own policies and procedures by giving him a forum here." But many officers seemed eager to meet Clinton, who lingered to shake hands and offer praise to officers. "You'd think as police officers we'd say, `No big deal,' but people were really trying to shake his hand," Detective Shirley Black said. "For him to come to our building -- that was really nice." Others not on the agenda considered the president's visit an opportunity to advance their cause. Outside police headquarters, federal firefighters from Camp Pendleton presented a Clinton aide a letter trying to bring the president's attention to their pay, which they say is subpar. After a leisurely afternoon of golf at the Coronado Municipal Golf Course, the president flew to Los Angeles, where he attended a fund-raising event at the Beverly Hills home of entertainment executive Lew Wasserman. The guest list included actors Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand. ALAN BERSIN Bersin defends Customs http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?287583----------------------------- --------------------- Marcus Stern COPLEY NEWS SERVICE 24-Apr-1997 Thursday WASHINGTON -- U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, testifying yesterday before a House subcommittee, defended the Customs Service against allegations of corruption and assured Congress that the Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service were managing the border effectively in San Diego. The questions about corruption were prompted by a "60 Minutes" show broadcast Sunday evening on CBS. The show focused on allegations that some Customs officials in San Diego are on the payroll of Mexican drug cartels. The allegations, which have been swirling around San Diego for years, have been investigated by a grand jury and a House subcommittee and remain uncorroborated. Asked about the program by members of the House immigration subcommittee, Bersin largely declined to give his own views. Instead, he read portions of an editorial published in Tuesday's edition of The San Diego Union-Tribune that sharply criticized the "60 Minutes" news broadcast, saying it was based on old and unsubstantiated information. BERSIN:
(Page A-15 ) Bersin has friends, and foes, in high places | Won't be first time he has taken a job without experience http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?364513+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Valerie Alvord STAFF WRITER 09-Mar-1998 Monday Alan Bersin When Alan Bersin takes the helm of the San Diego Unified School District, it won't be the first time he has walked into a high-profile, public job with no on-point experience. Five years ago, Bersin, an old law school buddy of President Clinton's, took over as U.S. attorney for San Diego and Imperial counties with only civil litigation on his resume. The man who was to lead law officers in one of the busiest criminal courthouses in the country had never been a prosecutor. His friendships with local defense lawyers caused one of Bersin's employees to remark early on, "I feel like I'm out on the field, ready for the big game and I look around and see my quarterback in the other team's huddle." Today, many of Bersin's doubters have been converted. Anticipated problems didn't materialize. Other problems did, however, and along with them came a new cast of critics. During a brief honeymoon as U.S. attorney and so-called "border czar," Bersin, who speaks Spanish fluently, earned the respect of law enforcement on both sides of the border. But as he eased into the new role, it became apparent that Bersin was a man who would change things, quickly, and not always to popular satisfaction. Intimidating style He started out with a management team chosen from the office's elite. But within a year the inside joke was that management changed faster than the weather. Many of the best-known trial lawyers in his office were unhappy. The first to leave was Gay Hugo, who prosecuted J. David Dominelli and Nancy Hoover, a pair who bilked hundreds of San Diegans in a financial fraud scheme. Hugo took a few shots at Bersin as she left, then declined further comment. The head of the financial fraud unit also left, and later filed an age-discrimination action he wouldn't talk about. There have been others, all with good public reasons for their departures. But some privately told friends they left in reaction to Bersin's management style, which they felt was intimidating. Bersin has dismissed complaints as the grousing of a small segment of disgruntled employees. Those who are unhappy, he contends, are victims of their own performance inequities. In the office, Bersin has fans like Philip Halpern, who has risen to a top advisory position and calls Bersin a brilliant lawyer and the best boss he has ever had. Bersin's supporters say he has increased productivity and professionalism and raised respect for the office nationwide by forging relationships in Washington and bringing new federal resources to the county. He broke down the "old boys' network," they say. Women now fill most top positions. San Diego insider Born in New York, Bersin, 51, graduated from Harvard and received his law degree from Yale. After leaving Los Angeles, where he was a partner in the law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson, Bersin taught law briefly at the University of San Diego and ran Clinton's local election campaign. Much has been made of Bersin's reputed closeness to the president, whom he met in England when they were both Rhodes scholars. But Bersin also knows Hillary Rodham Clinton from their days at Yale -- his first marriage was to a good friend of the first lady's -- and Vice President Al Gore, a pal from Harvard. And there's actor Tommy Lee Jones -- Bersin seems proudest of that connection. They were gridiron teammates at Harvard. It was partly because of football that Bersin no longer has healthy knees, a condition that led him to take up horseback riding as a sport. An enduring image of his term as U.S. attorney may be Bersin on the "CBS Evening News" surveying the U.S.-Mexico border on horseback. Mike Wallace later used the footage in an attempt to make Bersin look ridiculous on his show, "60 Minutes." It is a mark of Bersin's personality, it seems, that he can make both friends -- and enemies -- in high places. Bersin came to San Diego in 1992 -- and the U.S. Attorney's Office a year later -- pinned with the label of carpetbagger. But by virtue of his marriage, he is, perhaps, the ultimate San Diego insider. Bersin is married to Lisa Foster, whose family is at the center of the city's business, social, political and philanthropic circles. Her grandfather, now deceased, was Abraham Ratner, described in social columns as a prominent businessman and philanthropist. Bersin accompanied his wife and her large extended family to the 1995 gala dedication of the Abraham Ratner Children's Eye Center at the UCSD Medical Center. Also in attendance was her father, Stan Foster, who owned Hang Ten and Lightning Bolt clothing labels. Foster is now president of an investment company and is former president of the Men's Fashion Association. His fortune has been estimated at around $10 million. But Stan Foster is not simply a wealthy businessman. He is a patriarch in Democratic and social activist circles. He has lobbied for handgun control and supported higher standards in the garment industry for the use of child labor. Activism runs in the family. Lisa Foster, a lawyer and former head of California's Common Cause, took on the state's most prominent Democrat, Willie Brown, in seeking tougher campaign-disclosure laws in the 1980s. Why schools chief? Bersin has one grown daughter from his first marriage and two young daughters from his marriage to Lisa Foster. He has said he is interested in education because of the children, but some critics contend Bersin would use the position of schools superintendent as a steppingstone to something else. Allegations of ambition have dogged him from his beginnings in San Diego. "Everyone knows he's ambitious," one skeptic said several years ago. "The only question is, `What does Alan want?' " At the time, the word was that he wanted to be the U.S. attorney general. Bersin scoffed at the gossiping, saying he was content to stay where he was, but later it was confirmed that he was a candidate for the Number 2 and 3 positions in the Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno. There was also talk that he might have been considered for the top spot at the U.S. Customs Service after its commissioner resigned last summer. Why he didn't get any of these jobs was the subject of heated speculation in some circles. Those who admire Bersin say he lost out because he was too close to the president and would have been perceived as having a conflict of interest, given the ongoing investigations of Clinton and his top advisers. Critics said it was because Bersin was light in management background, and because he had angered the Latino community in San Diego, partially over Operation Gatekeeper, the government's crackdown at the border. Bersin has both taken credit for it and tried to distance himself from a policy-making role. But as the attorney general's so-called border czar, Latinos say, he is morally and operationally responsible for the ramifications of Gatekeeper, including deaths of border-crossers in the rugged terrain of East County. His aggressive enforcement of the initiative has angered judges, the U.S. marshal and defense lawyers, who have accused him of overburdening the jails and the justice system with prosecutions. Meanwhile, heads of local law enforcement agencies credit Bersin with helping to bring down the crime rate by focusing on illegal immigrants with prior records and therefore getting known criminals off the streets. Some officers on the front lines, however, have accused him of simplistic approaches that make him look good, but don't work. On a personal level, friends call Bersin charming and inclusive. They say his strengths include his ability to forge new partnerships and to persuade people inside the bureaucracy to do things differently. Critics contend that his personality is abrasive and divisive and that his expectations of people are unrealistic. It may be another mark of Bersin's personality that he is perceived in contradictions, but one thing is clear, critics and supporters agree: Bersin has done the job he was brought here to do.
(Page A-6 ) Bersin touted for high D.C. post | Could get No. 2 or 3 slot in Justice Dept. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Marcus Stern and Valerie Alvord COPLEY NEWS SERVICE | STAFF WRITER 25-Jan-1997 Saturday WASHINGTON -- White House officials are considering nominating San Diego U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, an old friend of President Clinton, to the second- or third-ranking job at the Justice Department. Both posts will be vacant soon because of the retirements of Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, the second-most-senior official at Justice, and Associate Attorney General John R. Schmidt. Their replacements are subject to confirmation by the Senate. Bersin's name has been floating around both the White House and the Justice Department, where he is known for pushing border-control innovations in the San Diego area, a high political priority for the Clinton administration. Impressed with his efforts, Attorney General Janet Reno in October 1995 gave him a second hat to wear, naming him to oversee border enforcement from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. Although Bersin bridles at the characterization, the position has been called the "border czar." One White House official called Bersin a "natural" for either the number-two or -three post because of his personal association with President Clinton and his high standing with the attorney general. He confirmed that Bersin's name has been prominently mentioned for one of the two jobs. Three other top Justice Department positions that are open are for heads of the civil rights, criminal and anti-trust divisions. In a news conference yesterday, Reno dodged a question about Bersin's future, saying only that she considered him a "wonderful U.S. attorney" and that she has "sincerely enjoyed working with him." Bersin has declined to speculate on his future. But another administration official, who did not want to be named, said Bersin was more suited for the number-three slot -- associate attorney general -- than the key deputy post. "The deputy has really been the hands-on manager here and that's just not what Alan's known for," said the official. "He's known as sort of an idea guy, a thinker, a sort of a gadfly, very smart, very focused, but not the detailed, managing-staff, running-things kind of guy. "He's not the operational person. He's not like a chief operating officer, which is how Jamie's been described," the official said. Before taking the deputy job almost three years ago, Gorelick, 46, had served as general counsel at the Defense Department, where she managed the government's second largest legal staff, including about 10,000 lawyers. The person who steps into her shoes will not only have to be a good manager but deft at dealing with sensitive issues. Among the controversies that found themselves on Gorelick's desk were Waco, Ruby Ridge and the matter of hundreds of highly-sensitive FBI personnel files that ended up in the hands of lower level White House officials. The third-ranking associate used to oversee immigration enforcement. But when Gorelick arrived at the Justice Department almost three years ago, she took over handling the politically sensitive issue. Justice officials now are considering returning responsibility for immigration matters to the associate, which also is fueling speculation that Bersin might be picked for the post. Gorelick has agreed to stay on until early March. A replacement for her is expected by then, but internal deliberations are being closely held. Yesterday, Bersin got a plug from a fellow San Diego Democrat. "They'd be smart to pick him," said former Rep. Lynn Schenk. "He's a problem solver. He's smart. Alan's very good at motivating people. He cuts through red tape. He cuts through baloney." Of course, Schenk is not altogether detached from the situation. She's been mentioned as a possible successor should Bersin's current job open up. "Who me?" Schenk said in a telephone interview. She insisted no one in the administration has even approached her about the possibility. If Bersin were to leave, his replacement would be recommended by Sen. Barbara Boxer, nominated by Clinton and confirmed by the Senate. While U.S. attorneys in San Diego usually have some background in criminal law -- Bersin was the exception -- they also must have a certain amount of political clout to win the appointment. A spokesman for Boxer said people would be asked to submit applications and would be screened by a committee of community leaders. Names that have been mentioned include Greg Vega, an assistant U.S. attorney, who applied for the job last time. Vega has a cousin who is well-placed in the Clinton administration. Attorney Jerry Coughlin, a longtime Democratic contributor, is another name that has surfaced. Coughlin is a former assistant U.S. attorney in private practice. He recently defended former Superior Court judge James Malkus, who was convicted of mail fraud and a racketeering conspiracy in a gifts-for-favors judicial scandal. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. FROMhttp://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?594991 AlanGreenspun said Horner's allegations triggered a 17-month investigation of corruption starting in 1995 and involved the questioning of 80 people. But in August 1996, Alan Bersin, the U.S. attorney at the time, closed the investigation, saying the allegations could not be substantiated. Insight Magazines Border Wars Series documents details of the above investigation. Details went to Janet Reno who shared them with Clinton. Hundreds of people - some mentioned in the investigation were murdered in Mexico by the Arellano-Felix Cartel. http://207.238.36.125/archive/investiga/borderindex.shtml Articles: (Start at bottom of list.) The Narcostate Next Door Narco-Politics: 'Absolutely Fab!' DEA Drives Off the Old Guard State Department Sells Out on U.S. Antidrug Efforts Capital Shame A Smuggler's Flying Dream Is Colombia's Hope a Hawk or a Dove? Colombia Kidnappers Raise Capitol Hill Ire Drug War on U.S. Streets is Fought in Columbia Mexico's Drug Corruption Still Embarrassing Clinton Customs Service Chief Quits Under Fire U.S. Drug Warriors Knock on Heaven's Door Exposed Border Bosses Embarrass U.S. Customs . McCaffrey's No-Win War on Drugs Border Agents in Douglas Have Waved It on Through Battle for the Border Growing Drug Corruption Panicking Agency Chiefs Mega Corruption at the Border ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Arellano Felix cartel member indicted | U.S. reportedly to offer $2 million for arrest of accused drug trafficker ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lynne Walker and Marcus Stern and Gregory Gross COPLEY NEWS SERVICE STAFF WRITER Lynne Walker reported from Mexico City and Marcus Stern from Washington, D.C. 19-Sep-1997 Friday Alan Bersin, the U.S. attorney in San Diego, has been meeting in Washington this week with Attorney General Janet Reno. Bersin, reached by telephone last night at a downtown Washington restaurant, refused to comment on the indictment or the effort to target the Arellano brothers. Widely known within the drug trade both for their generous bribes to key officials and their willingness to resort to extreme violence, the Arellano brothers make up what is referred to in Mexican law enforcement circles as the Pacific or Tijuana cartel. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?322436+unix+ + w w w . u n i o n t r i b . c o m . . 8 0 + U n i o n - T r i b u n e + U n i o n - Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%2 8%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28%28Alan Reno appoints San Diegan to head campaign inquiry ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David Johnston and Stephen Labaton NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE 17-Sep-1997 Wednesday WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Janet Reno, criticized for missteps and discord in the Justice Department's campaign finance investigation, will replace the top federal prosecutor in charge of the inquiry with a prosecutor from San Diego. Charles LaBella, right-hand man to U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin -http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?322187 Alan D. Bersin | U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 31-Aug-1997 Sunday Alan D. Bersin "We have seen in the last 24 months, more extradition from Mexico than we have ever seen before. The next stage in this process is for Mexican authorities http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?318465 CHARLES LABELLA ckes Former Clinton aide Harold Ickes under new scrutiny In this story: * Democrats and Republicans investigated * Gore probe, too? WASHINGTON (AllPolitics, Aug. 18) -- Former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes is under intensive scrutiny by the Justice Department as Attorney General Janet Reno nears a decision on whether to appoint an independent counsel to investigate campaign fund raising by both Democrats and Republicans, CNN has learned. Reno should complete by early next week a review of her department's investigation into allegations of fund-raising abuses during the 1996 election campaign, a spokesman said Tuesday. Democrats and Republicans have denied "soft money" abuse allegations before. But the issue was reinvigorated recently when Charles LaBella, former head of the department's campaign finance task force, issued a report calling for an outside investigation. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/08/19/reno.ickes/ THE CARTEL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A lack of political will | THE UNITED STATES, TOO, COULD DO MUCH MORE TO BREAK THE ARELLANO FELIX CARTEL http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?582157+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Alan ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Robert J. Caldwell INSIGHT EDITOR 9-Jul-2000 Sunday Charles G. La Bella The federal government has no plan for bringing down the AFO (drug cartel) and capturing the Arellanos," says Charles G. La Bella, with an emphasis born of frustration. Were it otherwise, at least through last year, La Bella would have known. From December 1993 through June 1998, he was First Assistant United States Attorney in San Diego, chief of the office's criminal division and the principal deputy to U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, the Justice Department's designated chief law enforcement officer on the Southwest Border. When Bersin left in June 1998 to become superintendent of the San Diego Unified School District, La Bella succeeded him. La Bella held that post until May 1999, when he resigned and accepted a private-sector job. A tough-minded prosecutor with a distinguished record, La Bella won widespread respect for his aggressive approach on drug trafficking and pursuing the Arellano Felix principals. One participant who attended closed-door meetings with La Bella said he didn't shrink from telling corrupt Mexican officials to their faces that he couldn't trust them enough to share sensitive intelligence information on the Arellanos. Evidence planted against me suggested possible bombing of the San Diego federal building. This follows the same pattern of Clintons other crimes. Reno aides urge against Clinton probe - - http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?337902+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles------------- --------------------------------------------------------- SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE and ASSOCIATED PRES 23-Nov-1997 Sunday Two months ago, amid complaints that her investigation was going nowhere, Reno brought in a new team headed by LaBella. (Page B-6 )
(Page A-1 ) Reno appoints San Diegan to head campaign inquiry http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?322187+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David Johnston and Stephen Labaton NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE 17-Sep-1997 Wednesday WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Janet Reno, criticized for missteps and discord in the Justice Department's campaign finance investigation, will replace the top federal prosecutor in charge of the inquiry with a prosecutor from San Diego. Charles LaBella, right-hand man to U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin -- himself a longtime friend of President Clinton -- was named in a Justice Department announcement yesterday. Reno also will replace the FBI agent in charge of the inquiry, Jeffrey Lampinski, with James DeSarno Jr., recently head of the FBI's New Orleans office. The reshuffling reaches beyond the Justice Department's Washington headquarters and puts more experienced, senior personnel in charge of the agency's most important investigation. Reno has been criticized for trying to protect the White House by refusing to seek independent counsel to lead the probe. The action is not expected to affect directly Reno's deliberations about whether an outside prosecutor is necessary. But Justice Department officials hope the new managerial team will provide her with a fuller understanding of the campaign fund-raising practices of the White House and Democratic Party as she considers asking a court to appoint an independent prosecutor -- a step that some law enforcement officials now regard as increasingly likely. The officials said the new team will also try to halt internal quarrels over the direction of the inquiry and to add greater depth and focus to the sprawling investigation that began late last year when Reno appointed Laura Ingersoll, a relatively unknown Justice Department prosecutor, to head what has become one of the most politically incendiary cases in recent years. Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents have disagreed over how vigorously to pursue allegations against high-level campaign and administration officials. The reshuffling of top investigators may mean more intensive scrutiny of the actions of top officials, an approach advocated by the FBI. LaBella worked under Rudolph Giuliani, when Giuliani was U.S. attorney in Manhattan, on a number of New York corruption prosecutions. In 1990, LaBella unsuccessfully prosecuted Imelda Marcos on racketeering charges in New York. LaBella came to San Diego with Bersin, also from New York, and was named chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office here. He is now first assistant U.S. attorney and recently directed the prosecution of San Diego County judges in a corruption case. In that case, San Diego Superior Court Judges G. Dennis Adams and James Malkus and San Diego attorney Patrick Frega were convicted by a jury of racketeering, conspiracy and mail fraud charges and sentenced to prison. Superior Court Judge Michael Greer got probation after pleading guilty to a related bribery charge and after testifying against the others. "He's demonstrated his capability as a good investigator and prosecutor," said Bruce Castetter, head of the federal prosecutor's criminal division in San Diego. "It's a great honor for him to be picked out of all the country." LaBella and Bersin were in Washington last night and not available for comment. Taking overall command of the FBI team and reporting to La Bella isDeSarno, an experienced criminal investigator. The ranks of lawyers, agents and support employees is being expanded from about 90 people to a force of about 130 people. Lampinski, who has run the inquiry, will remain on the case. The personnel shifts seem unlikely to quiet the storm of Republican complaints about Reno's performance in the case, including some from members of Congress who have threatened to attempt to oust her from office for her refusal to appoint an independent prosecutor. Yesterday, some Justice Department officials said they expected the decision could intensify demands for an outside prosecutor because of the perception that the Justice Department investigation has spiraled out of control in the unsteady hands of prosecutors from the department's public integrity section. One Justice Department official said the decision to bring in a new managerial team did not mean that Reno was committed to keeping the case out of the hands of an independent prosecutor. One of La Bella's first critical tasks will be to recommend whether Reno should seek such an appointment, one that Republicans have demanded for almost a year. The official said the changes could accelerate the progress of the investigation to determine whether to appoint an outside prosecutor by bringing in greater firepower and more troops to quickly and fully explore the myriad allegations and mountainous paper trail within the time limits imposed by the independent counsel statute. Reno has been pounded relentlessly by Republican lawmakers especially since she was surprised two weeks ago by news reports about aggressive fund-raising efforts by high-ranking administration officials like Vice President Al Gore. The reports disclosed key details unknown to her own investigators. Some of those reports seriously undermined Reno's principal legal rationale for resisting an independent prosecutor. On the advice of her hand-picked team, Reno had said criminal law did not apply to contributions being solicited by officials like Gore as long as they were spent for generic activities by the Democratic Party. But the reports showed that Gore had solicited funds that wound up going directly to the Clinton-Gore campaign, which seemed potentially improper under Reno's legal analysis. Yesterday, some officials predicted that if Reno asks a three-member panel of federal appellate judges to make such an appointment, her judgment will not necessarily rest solely on a legal review of Gore's actions, but on a broader assessment that the Justice Department could suffer lasting credibility damage if the investigation is kept in-house. Law enforcement officials said that the rancor between the Justice Department and the FBI was evident after the news reports about how some of the money raised by Gore went into the presidential campaign. FBI agents had complained that they had wanted to pursue senior officials more aggressively but had been rebuffed by Ingersoll. Criticism inside the department coalesced around Ingersoll, who was named by Reno last fall to spearhead an investigation that has since swollen into a multilayered inquiry checking fund-raising activities of dozens of people in Washington, the West Coast and Asia. Officials said she clashed often with Lampinski, the lead FBI agent on the case. Ingersoll, 45, a relatively junior member of the Public Integrity Section, arrived at the Justice Department in 1989 after clerking for a federal judge in Connecticut. Reno's selection of Ingersoll to head the campaign finance case was a surprise because she was not regarded in Justice Department circles as a seasoned prosecutor. The officials said Ingersoll sometimes seemed overwhelmed at the difficulties of managing a complex case under the overheated glare of close media attention and congressional scrutiny involving competing and highly partisan House and Senate inquiries. The officials said the FBI team and Ingersoll had conflicting investigative approaches. She preferred a more traditional investigative game plan in which investigators first examined the role of individual contributors before moving up the chain to officials at the Democratic National Committee and the White House. FBI officials wanted to jumpstart the investigation moving quickly into the activities of top political figures. LaBella was praised yesterday as an aggressive, disciplined and thoroughly professional prosecutor. "What an excellent choice," said Benito Romano, a former U.S. attorney in Manhattan who worked with him on a number of public corruption cases. "Chuck is a superlative investigator, dogged, and thorough and sophisticated. He's very comfortable with documents and complicated paper trails." NEIL MORGAN ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From hot seat to San Diego: Chuck LaBella as new `native' http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?493525+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NEIL MORGAN 29-Aug-1999 Sunday "In Washington, there are people with political agendas," he said, "people with personal agendas, and people with bureaucratic agendas. I've been fortunate enough to offend all three. "I had signed up with (U.S. Attorney Alan) Bersin in 1993 for two years and was going back to New York because that's where I thought the world was. But my daughters have been born here. San Diego has become our town. As a newcomer, I can tell you it really is different from other cities. "No one here is responsible, it seems to me so far, for anything. Everything gets fogged up. Nobody will stand up at the end of the day and say, `I made that decision.' But you need this for a city that's on the verge of being a big city. "In my six years in San Diego, I've learned there is no real voice for San Diego to say to the federal government, `We need this in San Diego. Right now.' That takes a leader and community with a single voice. The squeaky wheel really does get the grease. http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?531857+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles Q: How would you respond to the recent comment by Charles LaBella, former interim U.S. attorney in San Diego, that if only there were the political will in Mexico, and the United States for that matter, then the Arrellano-Felix brothers would be in custody? Reputed recruiter of killers is sentenced | Faces 30 years on narcotics convictions http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?401948+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Gregory Gross STAFF WRITER 15-Aug-1998 Saturday A Tijuana man alleged to be a top recruiter of assassins for the Arellano Felix drug cartel in Tijuana might be spending the next 30 years in a U.S. penitentiary after a pair of sentences was handed down yesterday in federal court. ... The impact, if any, of the two sentences on Mexico's extradition request was not clear yesterday. Interim U.S. Attorney Charles G. LaBella was out of town yesterday and not immediately available for comment. Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Birkmeyer, head of the narcotics enforcement division in LaBella's office, said the extradition request would now go to Attorney General Janet Reno for a decision. The frightful price of integrity in public life - - - - http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?398782+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles---------------- ---------------------------------------------------- George Mitrovich MITROVICH is president of The City Club of San Diego. 06-Aug-1998 Thursday Gregory Vega, a career civil servant in the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego, was recommended by Sen. Barbara Boxer to President Clinton to succeed U.S. Attorney Alan Bersin, who resigned to become San Diego's new school superintendent. In recommending Vega, Boxer passed over Charles La Bella, San Diego's acting U.S. Attorney, and the person Bersin's wanted most to succeed him. Why? Because Bersin had become the target of highly vocal critics in the Hispanic community who accused him of discriminating against undocumented immigrants. Those charges, despite any credible evidence, created political havoc and delayed Bersin's selection by local school trustees. F R O M : http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?374462+unix++www.uniontrib.com..80+U nion-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles DIANE BELL The president of the 22,000-member Hispanic National Bar Association, Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Vega, said yesterday he is seriously considering applying and will be in San Francisco (Boxer's home office) on business today. FROM;http://www.uniontribune.com/news/politics/20001010-0010_1n10ad.html Partnership board members also include Phillip Halpern, a federal prosecutor who worked under Bersin, and Ralph Ocampo, who served on the district search committee that recommended Bersin for the superintendency. Bersin is former U.S. attorney for San Diego and Imperial counties. The group received $100,000 each from Moores, Walton and Jacobs and $50,000 from businessman Malin Burnham. Latino is in line to be U.S. attorney | Vega might be Bersin's successor http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?396527+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jeff McDonald STAFF WRITER | The Associated Press contributed to this report. 01-Aug-1998 Saturday "I am pleased to be able to recommend Gregory Vega for the position," she said in a prepared statement. "He has a combination of qualities that make him the best person to lead the U.S. Attorney's Office at this time." Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of California handle a wide range of cases, including border issues, civil rights violations and crimes against the environment. They are based in downtown San Diego. Vega "is well-grounded in the region, having served there for many years," Boxer said. "He knows the people and the problems of the Southern District through years of personal involvement." With more than a decade of experience as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District, Vega is a popular attorney who most recently has handled financial fraud cases for the office. Vega, who is also president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, said he is confident he will do a good job because of his professional experience and because he can relate to those who live in Southern California. "I think that because we are in such a diverse geographical area, that being a Hispanic, I do bring that unique attribute to the position," said Vega, whose father came to the United States from Mexico decades ago as an undocumented worker. Bersin's appointment in 1993 was met with sharp criticism from some Latino activists, who felt Clinton was breaking campaign promises to put women and minorities in important federal posts in proportion to their percentage in the community. Support for Vega runs deep in the Latino community. Attorney Roberta Sistos, co-chairwoman of the California La Raza Lawyers Association and a regional officer of the Hispanic National Bar Association, was among those locally who had encouraged Vega to put himself in the running to replace Bersin. She described Vega as a man of "outstanding integrity." ... A native of East Chicago, Ind., Vega graduated from Indiana University in 1975 and from the Valparaiso University School of Law in 1980. He worked as a trial attorney for the Internal Revenue Service in Chicago, and was an assistant U.S. attorney in Indiana before moving to the federal prosecutor's office in San Diego in 1987. ...LaBella, who won convictions nearly two years ago of three former judges and a San Diego lawyer in a gifts-for-favors scandal, was cool about his future with the Justice Department. He said only that he would run the office until someone else is sworn in. 5 have applied to take over Bersin job http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?382205+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Valerie Alvord STAFF WRITER 27-May-1998 Wednesday Charles LaBella, who was Bersin's second in command and recently was named interim U.S. attorney, a position he will assume when Bersin leaves and keep until a candidate is confirmed by the Senate. LaBella now is in Washington, D.C., heading the investigation into allegations of Democratic campaign finance irregularities. Though he is well-respected in San Diego, LaBella has been the subject of national political columns accusing him of quitting the campaign finance team before its work is done. There even have been hints that by returning to San Diego he is allowing himself to be "bought off" by officials who would like the Washington probe to end. LaBella handled the successful prosecution two years ago of three former Superior Court judges and a prominent attorney accused in a gifts-for-favors scandal. He has said he is coming back to San Diego because his home and family are here. DIANE BELL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A real case of bonded indebtedness http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?427098+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DIANE BELL 03-Dec-1998 Thursday LaBella is in demand Interim U.S. Attorney Charles La Bella's abrupt call yesterday to Washington, D.C., in response to the House impeachment investigation, caused him to cancel today's speech to the downtown Rotary Club. Organizers were disappointed and scrambling to find a replacement. But La Bella's secretary put it in perspective: "The good news is, when he comes back, he'll be a much better program." Robert D. Novak ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Is it Independent Counsel LaBella? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?404264+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles------ Robert D. Novak (C) Creators Syndicate, Inc. 29-Aug-1998 Saturday If Attorney General Janet Reno yields to demands for an independent counsel to investigate 1996 campaign financing, the job could go to the career Justice Department prosecutor who is being shuffled out of government service: Charles LaBella. LaBella was aggressively pursuing the campaign-finance scandals as head of Justice's task force earlier this year when he was removed to become interim U.S. attorney in San Diego with clear expectation that President Clinton would make the assignment permanent. But after word leaked that LaBella's 100-page report to Reno proposed an independent counsel, he was told that a subordinate in San Diego would be nominated as U.S. attorney instead. That ended LaBella's government career at age 44.
(Page A-1 ) LaBella is judged equipped for task | San Diegan knows of corruption cases http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?321665+unix++www.uniontrib.c om..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Anne Krueger STAFF WRITER | Copley News Service reporter Marcus Stern contributed to this report from Washington. 18-Sep-1997 Thursday Charles LaBella As the new chief of the Justice Department's campaign finance investigation, San Diego prosecutor Charles LaBella will be walking into a political firestorm. But those who know LaBella, second-in-command at the local U.S. Attorney's Office, say he won't be swayed by anything but the facts. "I don't think he will dance any political tune for anyone," said Mario Conte, chief trial attorney at Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc. "He's just too blunt and forward a guy." LaBella, a registered nonpartisan, said he plans to handle the inquiry into fund-raising practices by senior administration officials such as Vice President Al Gore no differently than he has any other. "I just put my head down and investigate cases the way they should be investigated," LaBella said in a telephone interview yesterday from Washington. "I've told that to people and some believe it and some don't." Clearly, the pressure is on. Growing Republican criticism of the Justice Department investigation preceded a shake-up by Attorney General Janet Reno that brought in LaBella and a new FBI agent to lead the inquiry. Some suggest the shake-up is a prelude to Reno's bringing in an independent prosecutor. But despite his considerable experience, neither LaBella nor the others have been involved in the kind of high-profile, politically volatile case that has enveloped a president and vice president. LaBella said he got the call from Reno Sunday night asking to see him in Washington the next day. He had some indication of what she wanted, LaBella said, and he hastily packed and flew to the capital, where Reno offered him the job. "It was sudden for me," he said. LaBella said he will keep his position in San Diego and live out of an apartment in Washington until his assignment is finished. In his career, the 46-year-old LaBella has a history of putting those accused of corruption on trial -- from a New York state senator to former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos to San Diego judges and a lawyer convicted in a gifts-for-favors scheme. LaBella led the prosecution team in the trial last fall of former Superior Court judges G. Dennis Adams, James Malkus and once-prominent San Diego attorney Patrick Frega. He struck a deal with a third former judge, Michael Greer, who pleaded guilty to bribery and testified against the others. At the trial, LaBella questioned some witnesses and gave a powerful closing argument urging jurors to convict the three defendants of racketeering-related charges. Attorney Jerry Coughlan, who represented Malkus, saw an ironic twist to LaBella's new job. He pointed out that in the San Diego case, LaBella argued that the three were guilty because Frega's gifts allowed him unique access to the judges and gave his lawsuits an unfair advantage. He didn't have to show, however, that Malkus and Adams took an improper action in any case. Similarly, Democratic officials are accused of giving access to certain individuals because they donated to the party. "If Mr. LaBella is consistent, it seems he must recommend prosecution of high-level government officials," Coughlan said. Although he disputes the legal theory, Coughlan, a former federal prosecutor, added, "I believe that Mr. LaBella will act in what he believes to be an honorable fashion." LaBella came to San Diego in late 1993 when Alan Bersin, a longtime friend of President Clinton, was appointed San Diego's U.S. attorney. LaBella, who had spent 11 years as a federal prosecutor in New York, was chosen to head the criminal division. A year ago, he was named first assistant U.S. attorney, Bersin's right-hand man. "He really is the consummate professional prosecutor," Bersin said yesterday. "There are no frills to Chuck LaBella. There is no nonsense. And there is absolute commitment to doing justice in the finest tradition of the federal prosecutor." In New York, LaBella was chief of the public corruption unit for then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Guiliani, who is now the Republican mayor. In 1984, he prosecuted former New York state Sen. Joseph Pisani, who was convicted of fraudulently taking thousands of dollars from state funds, political campaigns and his law clients. Seventeen of Pisani's 18 convictions were later reversed on appeal. LaBella also led the prosecution of Marcos, who was acquitted in 1990 of charges that she looted $222 million from the Philippines and hid the money by buying art and real estate with the help of Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi. LaBella's travels to the Philippines to investigate the case before the trial were closely followed in the media. A columnist for the Manila Standard wrote that Marcos cronies "being interrogated one by one by a team of American lawyers headed by . . . Charles LaBella are quite intimidated by the team leader's credentials, . . . not to mention the man's height, youth and good looks." Soon, after coming to San Diego, LaBella stepped into the investigation of San Diego judges, an inquiry that had wracked the local bench for years. The probe, begun by the state Commission on Judicial Performance, which disciplines judges, culminated after five years in the convictions of Greer, Adams, Malkus and Frega. Greer was put on probation. The other three were sentenced to prison terms but are free while their convictions are appealed. LaBella, who chooses his words carefully and is a perfectionist in his professional capacity, is more relaxed and easy-going off the job, said Philip Halpern, a colleague in the San Diego federal prosecutor's office. LaBella and his wife, Mary Rossi, a special-education teacher who works at various San Diego public schools, have an 2-year-old daughter, Sofia. LaBella also has two sons, 13 and 17, from a previous marriage. "He enjoys a lot of the simple things in life, such as good food and good conversation," Halpern said. Both LaBella and his wife are excellent cooks, and he has a penchant for Italian food, Halpern said. LaBella enjoys listening to music or playing drums -- he owns three sets. Halpern said LaBella's experience with high-profile white-collar cases involving lots of documents will serve him well in Washington. "He's a very intense person, a dogged, determined individual," Halpern said. With his new job, LaBella may not have much time for small pleasures like cooking and music. But Halpern is confident LaBella will handle the inquiry with aplomb. "He has a very strong sense of what's right and wrong," Halpern said. "He's a career prosecutor who will clearly do what he thinks is appropriate." William Safire ------------------------------------------------------------------------ LaBella whizzed through capital http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?3752 44+unix++www.uniontrib.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union- Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ William Safire THE NEW YORK TIMES 27-Apr-1998 Monday When it became apparent last fall that the "Public Integrity" section of the Department of Justice was impeding investigation into the Clinton conspiracy to steer foreign money illegally into the 1996 campaign, the pressure of the FBI and of public opinion came on Janet Reno to seek appointment of independent counsel. Embarrassed by the ability of the press and Congress to unearth evidence of "the Asian connection" while her Criminal Division dithered, the attorney general reached to an assistant prosecutor in San Diego for someone controllable by Clinton Justice but presentable as "professional." Charles G. LaBella was brought to Washington, we were assured, to get to the bottom of the campaign scandal even if it went to the top. His press was terrific. And for a time, he replaced foot-dragging with activity, indicting Clinton fund-raisers Charlie Trie and Maria Hsia (pronounced pshaw). But LaBella's Trie indictment made it appear that the White House fund-raisers and their Democratic National Committee agents were not running a conspiracy to undermine campaign finance laws; they were supposedly innocent dupes of a sinister band of Asian-Americans. Johnny Chung, the conduit of money from China who compared the Clinton White House gates to a subway turnstile, copped a guilty plea. His promised testimony has not, however, led to hot pursuit of John Huang. That Los Angeles resident was Clinton's personal channel to Riady family money and knows too much; he has taken the Fifth and has not been touched. Now we learn that Reno's much-touted answer to independent counsel has been negotiating for months to return to Southern California. Forced to confirm a New York Times story, Reno announced last Friday that LaBella is to be rewarded with interim appointment to head the U.S. attorney's office in San Diego. It seems that the Friend of Bill from Yale now occupying that powerful post agreed to vacate it to take a musical-chairs job as local school chief. A grateful president will soon induce a dutiful California Sen. Barbara Boxer to recommend that the opened slot be awarded to LaBella; the "interim" gimmick, a Clinton specialty with this supine Senate, avoids confirmation hearings and questions about the Reno-LaBella deal to whiz through Washington. Remember the outcry from all of us when Ken Starr wanted to return to Pepperdine before his job as prosecutor was done? Not a peep about LaBella's premeditated discontinuity. "My office in San Diego needs me," LaBella tells me, "and my loyalty is to my office." That's curious; Reno led us to believe his first loyalty would be to the United States. "Besides, it's a miserable experience to be away from your family, all alone in Washington." He informs us that Reno told his boss back home that "this mission was to turn the investigation around, get it on track, and would last three or four months. That's what the first Memorandum of Understanding said. In my own head, I figured about six or seven, or until this summer." Thus do we now learn that Reno wanted only a short-term bailout to lessen the pressure, not a prosecutor to stick with the case until it was cracked. "I'm not an independent counsel," says the itinerant lawman, "I didn't come here to spend six years of my life." How about two? "I would never have come." But doesn't the prosecutor's long-planned early departure -- accompanied by the curious reassignment of the FBI's top campaign-finance investigator to a West Virginia sinecure -- signal to Huang, Fowler, Ickes, Lindsey & Co. that Justice is interested only in small fry? "It's not going to affect the investigation in any way," the San Diego loyalist maintains. Does this mean a return to Public Integrity's cover-up? "No! Exclamation point," insists LaBella. "They're not going to do to the next guy what they did to me. It'll be a field prosecutor and there'll be time for a seamless transition." Charles LaBella is not corrupt (returners of calls get benefits of doubt), but he let himself be used corruptly. His friends say he favors independent counsel in this as he did in the related Bruce Babbitt case. Now is the time for Judiciary Committees to call him and his compliant boss to expose Reno's sham appointment, and to turn up the heat for an independent prosecutor to fight to the finish. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
(Page B-6 ) William Safire http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?380011+unix++www.uniontrib.com ..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Clinton's China `fix' was a sellout ------------------------------------------------------------------------ William Safire THE NEW YORK TIMES 18-May-1998 Monday WASHINGTON -- A president hungry for money to finance his re-election overruled the Pentagon; he sold to a Chinese military intelligence front the technology that defense experts argued would give Beijing the capacity to blind our spy satellites and launch a sneak attack. How soon we have forgotten Pearl Harbor. October 1996 must have been some tense month for Democratic fund-raisers. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times had begun to expose "the Asian connection" of John Huang and Indonesia's Riady family to the Clinton campaign. The fix was already in to sell the satellite technology to China. Clinton had switched the licensing over to Ron Brown's anything-goes Commerce Department. Johnny Chung had paid up. Commerce's Huang had delivered money big time (though one of his illegal foreign sources had already been spotted). The boss of the satellite's builder had come through as Clinton's largest contributor. But public outrage was absent. The FBI didn't read the papers and Reno Justice did not want to embarrass the president. And television news found no pictorial values in the Asian connection. Stealthily, the Clinton administration held back the implementation of the corrupt policy until Nov. 5 -- the day the campaign ended. Now the reporting of Jeff Gerth and The N.Y. Times' investigative team is putting the spotlight of pitiless publicity on the sellout of American security. We begin to see how the daughter of China's top military commander steered at least $300,000 through the Chung channel to the Democratic National Committee. (Apparently Chung skimmed off a chunk and may be spilling his guts lest he have to face his Beijing friends.) We begin to learn more of the Feb. 8, 1996, visit of the arms dealer Wang Jun to the Commerce office of Ron Brown, and Wang's "coffee" meeting that day with the president, the very day that Clinton approved four Chinese launches -- even as China was terrorizing Taiwan with missile tests. Clinton's explanation, which used to slyly suggest that China policy was not changed "solely" by contributors, has now switched to total ignorance: Shucks, we didn't know the source of the money. But this president's DNC did not know because it wanted not to know; procedures long in place to prevent the unlawful inflow of foreign funds were uprooted by the money-hungry Clintonites. Today, two years after this sale of our security, comes the unforeseen chain reaction: As China strengthens its satellite and missile technology, a new Indian government reacts to the growing threat from its longtime Asian rival and joins the nuclear club. In turn, China feels pressed to supply its threatened ally, Pakistan, with weaponry Beijing promised us not to transfer. This makes Clinton the Proliferation President. Who has helped keep this sellout of security under wraps? In the Senate, John Glenn was rewarded with a space flight by Clinton for derogating the leads to China of the Thompson committee. Fred Thompson's warnings about China's plan to penetrate this White House were then scorned by Democratic partisans; his government Operations Committee should now swarm all over this. The House's aggressive agent of the Clinton cover-up, Henry Waxman of California, is finally "troubled" by the prospect of damning evidence he prevented the Burton committee from finding. At least three Democratic partisans who foolishly followed Waxman in blocking the testimony of Asian witnesses may have difficulty explaining their cover-up vote to even more troubled voters in their districts. The Gerth revelations lead to more questions: Where were the chiefs of the CIA and the National Security Agency, their intelligence so dependent on satellites, on the satellite technology sale to China? Is anybody at Reno Justice re-examining testimony taken by independent counsel investigating corruption at Commerce before Ron Brown's death? Does Brown's former lawyer claim "dead man's privilege" on notes? Did the NSA tape overseas calls of suspect Commerce officials? Who induced Commerce to lobby Clinton for control of satellite technology? And the most immediate: Will homesick prosecutor Charles LaBella, beholden to Janet Reno for his political appointment in San Diego, dare to offend his patron by calling for independent counsel? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Donorgate finally has its `smoking gun' http://www.uniontribune.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?385824+unix++www.uniontri b.com..80+Union-Tribune+Union-Tribune+Library+Library++%28Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Joseph Perkins THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE 12-Jun-1998 Friday Since the White House campaign finance scandal broke nearly two years ago, President Clinton has repeatedly denied that he has had any idea whatsoever that foreign funds were illegally donated to either his presidential campaign or Democratic Party coffers. Now comes a potentially explosive revelation by the Associated Press that Clinton actually had far more knowledge of highly questionable -- if not downright illegal -- donations than he has previously let on. The "smoking gun" is a 1992 memo written by Melinda Yee, the Democratic Party's outreach director for Asian-Americans. Yee advised Clinton that James Riady, scion of the Indonesian family that controls the Lippo Group banking and industrial empire, had "flown all the way from Indonesia" to make a six-figure campaign donation in exchange for a five-minute limo ride with the Democratic presidential nominee. Clinton happily obliged and Riady made good on his quid pro quo. After the limo ride, where the pair talked about "banking issues and international business," the Indonesian billionaire dashed off some $500,000 in checks to Clinton's party. Federal investigators have turned up bank statements and memos showing that one of the checks was from a Riady family company directly covered by foreign money laws. The other checks were drawn on a personal account that was funded before and after the campaign donations with funds from Jakarta. Of course, the White House scandal control team has a ready response to suggestions that the president knowingly and willingly accepted illegal foreign campaign donations from Riady. "In 1992," said White House spokesman Jim Kennedy, "he (Riady) was a lawful permanent resident (of the United States) and eligible to contribute to any political party." But, Yee's memo to Clinton suggests that party fund-raisers knew that Riady was no longer a "permanent" U.S. resident. "He has flown all the way from Indonesia, where he is now based . . . ," it reads. And since Indonesian citizen Riady had returned to his native land, effectively abandoning his permanent resident status in this country, that rendered him ineligible, under federal law, to donate campaign cash to either Clinton or the Democratic Party. Clinton was no fund-raising neophyte. He knew the law. And when he read Yee's memo, he had to know that campaign contributions from Riady might very well be illegal. But candidate Clinton did not care. His singular goal was to win the presidential election. So he knowingly and willfully accepted the Indonesian billionaire's donations to his party, hoping that, once elected, he would be able to deflect any criticism and, more important, derail whatever criminal investigation that might come his way. And Clinton's strategy has worked for the most part. No presidential election in American history has been as tainted with illegal foreign contributions as Clinton's 1996 re-election. Yet, the president repeatedly denies time and again having any idea whatsoever that his Indonesian car-pool buddy Jim Riady or John Huang (who replaced Yee at the DNC for the 1996 election cycle) or Chinese Army frontman Johnny Chung or shadowy Thai businesswoman Pauline Kanchanalak or any other as-yet-unindicted foreign donors or buckrakers were skirting known federal campaign finance law. Meantime, Clinton put some kind of presidential mojo on his once-respected attorney general Janet Reno. Distancing herself from her own previous congressional testimony (that the independent counsel law should be invoked to prevent "actual or perceived conflicts of interest" when there are "allegations of misconduct by high-level executive branch officials)," Reno has gone out of her way not to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate fund-raising illegalities by high-level executive branch officials, up to and including her boss, the president. Indeed, Reno's Justice Department investigators have had in their possession, for some months now, Yee's smoking memo -- the first piece of evidence to come to light that directly links Clinton to illegal foreign donations. We know Clinton knew that Riady had moved from the United States and therefore was no longer a permanent resident. And the Democratic presidential nominee -- or aides close to him -- had to have at least a sneaking suspicion that Riady's donations were illegally drawn from foreign funds. So there is enough evidence to justify an independent counsel. Yet, Reno continues to resist, rejecting the advice of not only her FBI director, Louis Freeh, but also Charles LaBella, the Justice Department official whom Reno herself selected to head up the department's investigation of the White House fund-raising scandal. Clinton could ask no more of his attorney general. By the time Reno's Justice Department finally gets to the bottom of the illegalities, Clinton will already be headed for presidential retirement. MK ULTRA/SRI /SAIC/ CIA/PENTAGON I wrote and requested several Congressional investigations. After my request, for CIA Director John Deutch came under CRIMINAL investigation although he previously had been allowed to slide on his security violations. CIA Director William Colby, who is tied to Operation Phoenix, Operation Condor, the SLA, and MK Ultra which used water to repeatedly nearly drown its trainees and then resucitate them, was drown. Was this payback from one of his students? SLA COPYCAT: SUPERINTENDENT AND NEWSPAPER HEIR TARGETS The female neighbor had White House-Pentagon-military ties and had a friend who was a double for me. She was also trying to set me up for my death after I ended my friendship with Gary Atwood because I realized he was setting up to murder San Diego Unified School District Superintendent, former U.S. Attorney and Clinton friend Alan Bersin and his friend, Charles LaBella. This woman stole files on Karin Winner, the editor; by following the pattern of SLA crimes, after the superintendent was to be assassinated, it looks as though people associated with the Union-Tribune were to be targeted as well. (Clinton friend Shelia Lawrence, whose husband, Larry Lawrence, was buried in Arlington Cemetary, has been documented as complaining about the news coverage she received from the Union-Tribune newspaper.) COPLEY PRESS CORRUPTING THE PRESS Survival of the Clinton administration has also been contingent upon successful corruption of the press. The most prominent Clinton operator at this time is Murray Waas, gaining fame in the mainstream media for finding a psychic in Arkansas whose son had seen money given to Whitewater witness David Hale. Murray Waas has actually been doing opposition research for the Clinton administration for several years. His journalistic "scoops" (or are they merely ventilations of White House FBI files?) include research into the background of Kenneth Starr and into the background of Clinton critics. In this research, his Mafia-style methods have become apparent. Waas threatened to have reporter Michael Lewis killed after Lewis wrote a New Republic story looking into murder and drugs in Arkansas--a story that was unflattering of Waas [4]. Who does Waas know who would be able to enforce such a threat? http://www.laborers.org/WashWeekly_5-4-98.html Washington Weekly Mob President SAN DIEGO TURNS ON UNION TRIBUNE- WHY? Jack Murphy Stadium named after Union Tribune Sports writer Jack Murphy Feb 97...Golding trying to get expansion for stadium...Henderson files for vote...Stadium proposal to rename stadium to Qualcom at same time. READER: Golding renegotiates with Spanos...leaving Chargers to get out of contract...Later we find out...stadium is discussed as real estate land. John Moores proposes baseball stadium...This would close out football stadium and leave new baseball stadium...but yet Golding spends 78 million of football stadium expansion to meet superbowl requirements. Qualcomm pays 18,000,000 for renaming, but could have gotten $75,000,000 John Moores owns Padres. JACK MURPHY STADIUM Perhaps we should blame Jack Murphy, the legendary, late San Diego Union sports editor who started all of this by talking Barron Hilton into bringing the young Chargers to San Diego from Los Angeles in 1961. Jack Murphy had some help from a few of us, but, in truth, he was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing San Diego professional football; and later, with the help of Buzzie Bavasi, then general manager of the Dodgers, gaining the National League's approval for granting a major league franchise for the Padres. The stadium was built without a promise of a baseball franchise, but it was built in the confidence of San Diegans that if they built the field, the team would come. It now seems likely the city will change the name of our stadium to Qualcomm in exchange for that company's generous donation, which seems likely to resolve the city's $18 million problem. Most of us over the years have enjoyed referring to the stadium by the warm nickname of "the Murph." That has a unique ring for San Diegans and sports fans nationwide. Jack never in his wildest dreams thought that the stadium would be named for him. He was as genuinely modest as anyone I have known. But if he were here, I believe he would urge that we save the stadium expansion and the teams he did so much to bring to this city. Qualcomm has a quality name Jack would respect. It would be a major mistake, however, not to include Jack Murphy's name in a prominent way connected with the new stadium complex he led us to build. Significantly, the city council's decision to name the stadium for Jack Murphy was subsequently affirmed by the voters. And City Manager Jack McGrory attested last week to the council's continuing strong attachment to the Jack Murphy name. If Murphy were alive today, even he with all of his great writing talent would find what has been happening in San Diego over recent weeks incomprehensible. Murphy was an optimist, but we would understand if he found many of the events of the past month deeply discouraging. Today anyone who attends a football owners meeting finds cities offering $140 million for a franchise and then another $200 million to $260 million to build a stadium. As NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said a few days ago, San Diego is in a position to better those cities by investing $78 million in a financially self-supporting stadium which will serve the community and its large activities well into the next century. While others tear their stadiums down and spend hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding them, we have taken the sound business approach to modernize ours at a modest cost. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?268887 And it wasn't pretty when Jack Murphy's name on the stadium was challenged in a hard-fought 1984 initiative. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?269282 Councilwoman Barbara Warden and Mayor Susan Golding said the Chargers have been advised about the city's ongoing negotiations with Qualcomm. The football club will not be brought to the table until after that deal is consummated. Golding said the Chargers and Padres, which share stadium advertising revenue, would have to agree to the deal. The city attorney has yet to advise whether selling the stadium name is part of any advertising revenue package, Golding said. Based on lease agreements with the Chargers and Padres, for the next three seasons the Padres receive 65 percent of the advertising revenue, the Chargers 25 percent and the city 10 percent. Commencing on April 1, 2000 and continuing as long as the Padres remain in the stadium, the Padres and the Chargers each receive 37.5 percent of the ad revenue and the city receives 25 percent. As soon as the Padres leave the stadium for another venue, the Chargers earn 75 percent and the city retains 25 percent. "I think that's negotiable," Warden said. "I'm confident we're going to be right in court on (tomorrow) and then we can sit down and look at some real numbers." Negotiations with Qualcomm, a San Diego-based wireless telecommunications company, are going well, said Golding. She predicts both ball clubs could be brought into the discussions within the next two weeks. "The deal is not concluded, but it could fall into place very quickly," Golding said. Through spokesman James Lee, Qualcomm said it would not discuss terms of the proposed deal. Lee did say, however, that "there are not that many companies in town with the kind of cash laying around such that they could sign a check today." By paying less than $1 million a year to put its name on the stadium, Qualcomm appears to be getting a sweetheart deal. For example, the San Francisco Giants sold the name of their projected new downtown ballpark to Pac Bell for $50 million over 24 years. But most of these sales are paid in increments over the course of the contract, said attorney Paul Anderson of the National Sports Law Institute of Marquette University. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?269899 The negotiations are being spearheaded by Councilwoman Barbara Warden, whose district includes the Golden Triangle where Qualcomm is based. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?270064 BARBARA WARDEN Deputy Mayor Warden handled the negotiations with Qualcomm which could result in the fast-growing wireless telecommunications company offering to help close an $18 million gap needed to complete the stadium expansion. In return, San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium would bear Qualcomm's name. Golding critics privately see Warden as filling a leadership void at a time the mayor's public efforts to resolve the stadium controversy seem to be going nowhere. An ally of the mayor, Warden graciously credits Golding with starting the ball rolling by asking her and City Manager Jack McGrory in late January to meet with Qualcomm officials about a potential stadium offer. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?268778 Private corporate Mob Bosses Criminal Public Servants Clinton controls China. China is the key to trade now that Most Favored Nation Status passed the Congress. If you dont cooperate with the Godfather President, you suffer:
(Page G-2 ) Waiting for China | Mobile phone market is tough to crack ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 16-Jul-2000 Sunday In trying to penetrate China's massive mobile phone market, Qualcomm Corp. is getting the runaround from Beijing. Twice during the last two years, Qualcomm appeared to be on the verge of spreading its state-of-the-art digital technology throughout China, which boasts the third-largest number of mobile phones in the world, after the United States and Japan. And both times the San Diego-based firm came up short because of roadblocks erected by the Chinese government and its state-owned telecommunications industry. Consequently, nearly all of China's 55 million mobile phones operate under GSM, a European standard, while Qualcomm's far superior CDMA standard is relegated to a meager 1 million phones. Despite this and other disappointments, Qualcomm chief executive Irwin Jacobs remains confident that China Unicom, the country's second-largest carrier, will adopt his company's third-generation CDMA standard. Meantime, Qualcomm has signed intellectual property research and development agreements with eight Chinese mobile communications equipment producers. These accords could help the company gain a toehold in a market that has plenty of growth potential. Qualcomm's scramble for a modicum of market share illustrates the difficulties Western firms have in dealing with protectionist China. Denials notwithstanding, the Chinese have been especially adept at blocking U.S. exports, while doing brisk business in the United States. Last year, for instance, the United States sold about $873 million worth of goods and services to China but imported nearly $7 billion worth of Chinese goods. U.S. exports to China are less than those going to such tiny countries as Belgium, Holland and Switzerland. Little wonder America's trade deficit with China is a whopping $74 billion, second only to Japan. This glaring imbalance is supposed to be corrected over time by China's entrance into the World Trade Organization. In fact, Beijing appeared receptive to buying more U.S. products prior to trade talks last year with the United States. But after Chinese Premier Zhu Ronghi promised to use U.S. telecommunications technology, his Ministry of Information Industry balked on an accord that would have created a CDMA network for 10 million subscribers by year's end. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal-breaker involved a Chinese demand that Qualcomm transfer the design for the silicon chips that run CDMA systems, which the company had never done and was not about to do. Thus Qualcomm has to settle for less than 2 percent of China's mobile phone market. William Bold, director of the company's government affairs, promises to keep trying to gain greater market penetration with Qualcomm's topflight wireless communications technology. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co. If you cooperate with Mob boss, you get rewarded: QUALCOMM- IRWIN JACOBS Name as Listed on Official White House Guest List Occupation and/or Employer as Listed in Federal Election Commission Records Money to Hillary Clinton Money to Al Gore Hard and Soft Money to the Democratic National Party Committees by Donors and/or Their Companies Total Money to Democrats (Including All Other Democratic Candidates & Committees) 7. Jacobs, Irwin Qualcomm Inc. $12,500 $2,000 $112,500 $138,250 8. Jacobs, Joan Travel agent Idgal Travel Service $13,500 $2,000 $112,500 $131,000 http://abcnews.go.com/onair/popoff/clinton001005_popoff3/index.html From his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., Murphy noted that the question of his brother's name remaining on the stadium already was put to a vote in San Diego. Voters decided the stadium's name should not be changed. http://www.uniontrib.com/news/utarchives/cgi/idoc.cgi?268754