Home > Corrupt Congressman Cunningham illustrates how US ended up in Iraq

Corrupt Congressman Cunningham illustrates how US ended up in Iraq

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 29 November 2005
16 comments

Wars and conflicts Justice International USA

Crying in Public, Congressman Cunningham hoping to gain sympathy for his crimes against humanity, admits to taking bribes and resigns from congress. Does anyone believe this display of regret would have occured had he not been caught?

from Washington Post

Prosecutors said Cunningham, an eight-term House member, “demanded, sought and received” illicit payments in the form of cash, home payments, furnishings, cars and vacations from four co-conspirators, including two defense contractors, over the past five years.

Cunningham, a member of the influential House Appropriations defense subcommittee and the intelligence committee, answered “Yes, Your Honor,” when asked by U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns if he had accepted bribes in exchange for his performance of official duties.

U.S. Attorney Carol C. Lam told reporters that Cunningham “did the worst thing an elected official can do - he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those that put him there.”

The question I have not seen asked very often is why was he given bribes? What did he do on his end? This is not just a crime against the American people, this is a crime against humanity, most obviously the Iraqi people, because there is no doubt that these bribes secured his vote for the illegal invasion of Iraq. Being on both the House Appropriations committee and House intelligence committee, besides steering lucrative defense contracts, these bribes secured his silence on the obvious corruption in Iraq and his no vote on any sort hearing that might lead to accountability of those responsible.

I hope that the rest of our corrupt congress is running scared because they should be. The American people have finally realized the depth of greed of politicians in this country and this is only the beginning of the revolution in congress. One by one we will expose these greedy immoral bastards....who is next?

Forum posts

  • Just hold it LULA---why not tell us -How Where Whom When did this weasel get to own such a multi $million home.And why not include all the other crooks in Washington—their palaces.Recall their rant about Saddam’s king style living.What rats!
    Why only rat this creep out, when all senators after 1 and 1/2 terms become multi millionairs.
    The rot goes deeper. How is it a guy that served in the military gets to live like a king?Take POW-POW Powel—the1/2 Black-t-rd,he declared he was worth 21$million in 2000.How do these scums get so rich and the Clintons cried poverty and had to get a zionist loan mortgage—$13million for their retirement home.
    Stupid Americans-It is them Politicks sucking blood from us obtuse folks and we deserve it-cause you don’t question the $glitter $ acquired—from WHOM!

    • They can everything do what they want! You let them!

    • Is it a mere irrelevant co-incidence that he spent time in the Israeli Air Force (according to some)?
      Where did Governor Mcgreevy find his male "lover" (Mossad agent).

      Why do we allow our polititions and policemen to constantly visit Israel?

      His dishonesty may have caused countless people to loose theirs lives including US servicemen
      fighting the crazy war for israel.

      If it weren’t for his military service he should be hung in the public square!

    • A Congressman crying in public---how heart rending. I just have to ask myself the question—now could it be, is it possible, that the money used to pay for big houses and boats started off as federal contract money paid to MZM by, heavens forbid, the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia? I have to wonder, how many high ranking NGIC employees, and family members, obtained high paying jobs at MZM??? One wonders, what is the exchange rate of this particular currency? Is it true that a Virginia Congressman took all the money donated by MZM/NGICers and gave it to charity? Incredible generosity I say! How high minded!

      Perhaps there are ex MZM employees out there that can provide details on this heart warming example of federal government and private industry collaborating in yet another example of service to the American taxpayer.......

    • Curious minds want to know-

      Was NGIC MZM’s biggest client, by far, for more than a few years?

      Did NGIC contract money to MZM help, well, perhaps assist in buying a mansion, boat and other things that the rich and famous require?

      Did several dozen NGIC employees, and perhaps family members, get high paying jobs at MZM after they retired from NGIC—or then again, if the money was really good, could they not wait to retire and joined MZM a bit early?

      Would it be a good idea to answer questions like these, before the culpable are allowed to cop pleas to lesser charges ???

      Could it be that a member of the US Congressional office on Ethics once visited NGIC and, shortly thereafter, the onetime "Boss Hogg" of NGIC left MZM employment??? Hmm, just how quickly, after retiring from NGIC, did "Big Daddy" hop onto the MZM gravy train??? Months? Weeks? Certainly not less than one week??? What do federal regulations say about the "appearance of impropriety" in cases such as this?

      Now, in the spirit of a real investigation, rather than just another election year spoof on the public, one might ask, well, in order to maximize contributions to politicians, did the spouses give money IN ADDITION to the NGICers turned MZMers, not to mention those who were only MZMers??? Surely MZMers were not REQUIRED to donate, why, that just won’t do at all!!

      Oh, lest we forget, just how many contracts did NGIC have with MZM? What was the total dollar amount and out of this, how many contracts were bid upon by companies other than MZM??? After all, America’s true strength and moral high ground lies in it’s wonderful economic system, deeply rooted in the spirit of free enterprise and open, honest, competitive bidding that is untainted by favoritism, nepotism, cronyism; things that the more superficial ethics briefings sometimes, well, sort of treat lightly......

      Just a few offered thoughts—I’m quite sure there is nothing to ANY of this and no one has done ANYTHING questionable.

  • Hey Lula, well said. The war in Iraq is the "fraud of frauds", with scum like Cunningham using his Buzz Lightyear chin, war-hero, status to vote for the lies leading to large scale torture and death. And of course make a few bucks in the backpocket by mis-appropriating YOUR tax dollars. This guy went round with a reputation of a Mr Squeaky Clean who is tough on crime. What a hypocrite! Let’s hope and pray to God that he is the first of many to fall now, and let’s hope and pray to God that they become a learning experience for all those other political wannabies, because not only do we need to get rid of the criminals, but we need to somehow stop them achieving authority in the first place. Maybe a tougher vetting process and periodic investigation etc etc

    • What a splendid idea!!! Senators and Congressional representatives, along with staffers, having to pass a Special Background Investigation (SBI) like the one normal federal employees have to pass in order to get and keep a job in the "intelligence community." Better yet, why not make our leaders pass a lifestyle polygraph, make it CIA and NSA style, from the old days, where questions aren’t curved or slanted, watered down, in order to compensate for an individual’s ethnic or individual background? Make sure they go through this before levers are pulled in their behalf in the primary elections!!! Yes, lifestyle includes ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING a person has done in their life. Personally I like this idea---absolutely nothing else has worked during the past 2 centuries.......

  • When will Americans wake up? Are there enough intelligent, thoughtful citizens left in the U.S. to see through these institutionalized lies? WHY DO WE TRUST POLITICIANS? WHY DO WE TRUST POLICE? The majority of people who want to become politicians or police are corrupt, power-hungry scumbags.

    But Americans are so distracted with all this JUNK that we call our "culture"---it’s gonna take some deep financial hurt to really wake Americans up, to make them realize that THE SYSTEM DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOU!

    Will they wake up in time to change anything or to demand the truth for once???

  • I agree.We LET them.

  • Answers to a number of posts in one"

    C. Powell is much richer than a mere $21 million... Kuwait and Saudi Arabia gave him much, much more at the end of GW I.

    The end result of the the rewards of the crooks is what is being argued here but it is the fact that White Americans are a scared bunch of people. We want to believe and do believe strongly all of the spooky/negative/hateful comments made about any nation and peoples who do not look like us.

    Hell, we even hate the French because they did not back us in this little adventure.

    The fact of the matter is that our leaders are us and we are them. Coupled this with the need for a boogie-man to fight - well that is what one of the goals of this war is. Think for a moment... If USSR was not there, do you think that there would be as much innovation and technology developed in the US in those years?

    Think... Think of the space program... The main reason was to show up the USSR... Once we did that it all fell to peaces. It is a former of itself.

    We actually want the Muslims to hate us and thus give us reason to hate them. We re the only ones who keep repeating the mantra that they hae us and our freedoms. Fat chance. Most of the billion Muslims of the world are looking to merely making enough to sustain themselves. But the "They hate our freedoms" rings with the American and makes him more focused and makes his hate more focused — allowing the conduct of this war. And the future wars for "civilization".

    But soon enough, and outside of the anti-war crowds influnce, the USA will burn itself out. It is hallow of true heart. It is hallow of true wealth. It has no family. The struggle has already been won by the Muslims.

    • I’m not so sure. The Muslims are afraid of their own women getting to vote one day---I don’t see where they have won any struggles. But yes, Americans love to hate. It’s doggone good for business. As they say in the Pentagon "big budgets need big threats". This is why more money is now being spent to fight micro cell terrorist groups then was spent on winning a possible World War 3 with the olden day Soviet Union. Government insiders make the joke that there is at least one multimillion dollar threat database for every Muslim. To quote the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, "a people get the government that they deserve". The political leadership of this country is comprised almost exclusively of rich lawyers. Why not mandate that, in order to hold public office, the individual must first post a bond that guarantees their honesty to the public, and then, after the rich lawyer is found to be involved in corruption, that bond is forfeited to the national treasury. Let the crooks pay the country for a change. Sort of like the laws we already have on the books to seize property from drug kingpins.

  • MZM, the company involved in paying bribes to former California GOP Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, was also part of the cooking of intelligence on Iraq years prior to the US invasion, according to a former weapons expert at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) in Charlottesville, Virginia. MZM was sold by owner Mitchell Wade to Veritas Capital and is now known as Athena Innovative Solutions, Inc.

    According to a former IMINT and weapons analyst, who worked since 1988 for various intelligence agencies looking closely at Iraq, NGIC, which is comprised of US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) intelligence analysts and personnel detailed from the National Geo-Spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), had an all-too-cozy relationship with MZM. The firm’s single source, non-competitive contract with NGIC paved the way for the cooking of some of the intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

    After NGIC’s deputy director, Bill Rich, Sr., retired, he was quickly hired by MZM, which had replaced Battelle as the prime contractor for NGIC. Soon after taking the job with MZM, Rich’s son, who had no prior intelligence experience, was also hired by MZM, according to the former analyst. In addition, NGIC’s retired Sergeant Major was also hired by the firm, according to the same source. The links between MZM and Cunningham were so close, members of Wade’s family also reportedly steered money to Duke Cunningham’s campaign coffers.

    Since the MZM-Cunningham scandal broke, the firm has been cut off from all work at NGIC. However, according to NGIC sources that has not affected Rich, who continues to work for a new NGIC contractor, Sparta, Inc., which, like MZM, is conveniently located in the University of Virginia Research Park, across the street from NGIC.

    The weapons analyst said that NGIC purposely altered figures on the number of Russian helicopters in order to justify the Crusade gun system, which, the the time, was being built by United Defense, which, in turn, was owned by The Carlyle Group. After the analyst objected to the inflation by NGIC management of the numbers of working helicopters in Russia, he found himself subject to a security clearance investigation by US Investigations Services (USIS), a firm in which the Carlyle Group has a major financial stake, USIS’s Iraq operations were under investigation by US Army Col. Ted Westhusing last June. During that investigation, Westhusing was reported to have shot himself in the head while in a trailer near Baghdad.

    In a manner reminiscent of how the National Security Agency (NSA) treats whistleblowers, the NGIC analyst was forced to see the center’s sole psychologist, someone who was on good terms with Deputy Director Bill Rich. The psychologist determined that the analyst suffered from a psychiatric problem even though his own HMO contradicted that evaluation. In June 2001, the analyst had his security clearance revoked and was terminated in 2002.

    In August 2001, the analyst arranged to have some of his NGIC paperwork sent to him at home by NGIC security. However, when a clasped and taped enveloped arrived at his home, there were clear indications that sometime during the passage of the documents through four levels of NGIC management, including NGIC security, something was inserted into the files: a SECRET NOFORN WINTEL document [NOFORN is "no foreign dissemination" and WINTEL is "Warning - Intelligence Sources and Methods Revealed’]. The analyst dutifully informed the FBI and the Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) at Fort Monroe, Virginia about the incident. However, the analyst was never asked to sign his statement about the incident. This is eerily similar to the planting of two boxes of classified documents in the home of former NSA analyst Kenneth Ford, who is currently on trial after being charged with the possession of classified material.

    The intelligence cooking on Russian military aviation was so bad, according to the analyst, that NGIC plagiarized a September 1984 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document and tried to post it in an intelligence report on INTELINK, the intelligence community-wide internal "Internet" for classified information. The only problem was that in "cutting and pasting" 1984 Russian helicopter threat information to justify the Crusader project, the term "Soviet Union" was left in the Fall 1999 intelligence report. The Soviet Union ceased to exist nine years earlier.

    The NGIC analyst also was well aware as early as 2000 that the aluminum tubes discovered in Iraq and were later claimed by the Bush administration to be for nuclear centrifuges for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program were nothing more than artillery replacement barrels for the Italian "Medusa 81" artillery rocket that had been produced in Egypt. The analyst has personally briefed Dick Cheney, while he was Secretary of Defense, during Desert Shield in 1990 about the anti-aircraft gun barrels. The analyst was on loan to the Pentagon’s National Military Joint Intelligence Center (NMJIC) from the Intelligence Threat Analysis Center (ITAC) at the Washington Navy Yard during Desert Storm and maintains that Cheney, who he described as a "prick," knew what the aluminum tubes in 1990 and knew about them when he lied about their being part of Iraq’s nuclear reconstitution program. Also present at the same 1990 intelligence briefing for Cheney was Pete Williams, the then-Pentagon press spokesman and currently an NBC TV news reporter.

    NGIC altered the aluminum tube intelligence by ordering two individuals — an artillery and cannon expert, respectively, to write a bogus intelligence report. The analyst who complained about this said that determination should have been made by NGIC’s Tehnical Chemical Nuclear (TCN) branch, and not by the two individuals in question. However, the TCN experts realized that the tubes in question had nothing to do with a nuclear weapons program.

    Moreover, the aluminum tubes used to justify the attack had actually been captured by US forces in Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991 and were conveniently used later to "prove" the existence of a nuclear program over a decade later.

    In essence, NGIC tainted raw and refined intelligence received from its three primary providers — INSCOM headquarters at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia; the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) HUMINT collection databases (including translated intelligence) and NGA.

    NGIC analysts and MZM contractors at the center also began altering intelligence databases containing threat data on various weapons systems, including helicopter production in Russia, Iraq, China, France, and Poland. When objections were raised to such tampering, the reply from NGIC/contractor management was "Congress is just a bunch of liberals and fags . . . we will tell them what they need to know." The analyst said that MZM, through bribery deals with Cunningham (who served on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) and GOP Representatives Katherine Harris (FL) and Virgil Goode (VA), successfully influenced Congress by successfully tampering with intelligence coming from NGIC. MZM was also involved in providing unspecified "intelligence services" for the Bush White House and purchasing furniture for the White House.

    Goode, who sits on the House Armed Services subcommittee for Military Construction, received money from MZM and shortly afterwards, the firm opened an office, complete with Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs), in Goode’s hometown of Martinsville, Virginia. However, an NGIC source said that all Goode received from MZM was $40,000, which compared to what they paid Cunningham, showed that Goode "sold his ass cheap."

    http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/

    • What is the big deal here? According to several articles by Timothy W. Maier of Insight Magazine (April 15, 2002 article "Good Ole Boys’ Still Run Spy Shop" and September 24, 2001 article "Army of Bias") NGIC has a long history of using illegal computer and telephone monitoring procedures to single out and fire white boys who are willing to defend a black, female employee in a quest for justice. Folks, according to these articles, the people were US citizens with security clearances, in this country, working for the federal government. No hunt for terrorists here, just the system using extralegal means to silence those that apparently stood up for principle, not money or power. Looks like there are good people out there after all, but the lack of real whistle blower protection allows the government to crush those that get in the way. Could it be that the US won the Cold War, only to adopt the ways of the dreaded Commies that we railed against for decades??? Perhaps the answer is, instead of complaining about a federal government that we know is hosed, to enact REAL whistle blower protection laws so as to protect those who TRY to expose corruption and get hounded as a reward for their integrity. The articles by Timothy W. Maier make for some interesting reading. After you read these 2 articles you will see that the current stink about NSA "listening in" is nothing new at all.........

    • the Insight articles are scary. Looks like there are some real set up artists in NGIC’s Middle East division.

    • the recent outbreak of tuberculosis at the National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville, Virginia makes one wonder if biological weapons research is being secretly conducted without the knowledge of the public.

  • if the POST was right when it said the Martinsville facility was never even asked for by the military then this investigation needs to be expanded. NGIC, CIFA, the dozens of federal employees who just couldn’t wait to roll in the MZM trough (Veritas Capital, Athena Innovative Solutions), I’ve always loved these name change mambos, perhaps staying one name ahead of the Justice Department, FBI, IRS and Defense Criminal Investigative Service makes a difference, need to be put under an electron microscope. The FIRES database seems to be one cash cow that is especially deserving of police and media review. A computer audit to determine the connections between NGIC and MZM appears long overdue. For decades the selling point for contractor land is that private industry can do the job faster and cheaper. This idea has always sold to the heartland, where the Republicans reign supreme. But yet, it seems that when the dozens of NGICers left for MZM, everybody’s salary went WAY WAY up and the analysis didn’t get any better??? Lavish boats and houses seem to do little to help the young guys missing arms, legs, and eyes in Veterans Administration hospitals—where they will no doubt be treated for decades to come. Maybe GAO needs to calculate these costs into the grand federal equation? I look forward to this type of cost benefit analysis.

    This investigation has barely started