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Did McCain Bury the Truth about Russia?
Our weekly investigative column asks whether the GOP candidate had an early heads-up about the conflict in Georgia. Plus, was a plane crash in Mexico really an accident?
“We are all Georgians,” John McCain announced in August, when he condemned what appeared to be an unprovoked Russian attack on the disputed border area of South Ossetia. But some of us, it turns out, are more Georgian than others, and McCain most likely knew, when he spoke those words, that it was the Georgians, not the Russians, who fired first. Certainly his top foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, knew.
Scheunemann’s two-person lobbying firm, Orion, has represented Georgia since 2001 and signed its latest contract with the government of President Mikheil Saakashvili on April 17, the same day that McCain announced support for Saakashvili, following a private phone call with him. (Scheunemann officially took a leave from Orion in May.)
On the NSA recording, Saakashvili gave the McCain aide a heads-up that all hell might break out.
An active US intelligence asset tells Whistleblower that Saakashvili phoned Scheunemann on August 6, one day before Georgian rockets hit Tskhinvali, the isolated separatist capital of South Ossetia, and that this phone call was monitored by the National Security Agency. According to the intelligence analyst familiar with the NSA recording, Saakashvili was surprisingly blunt in giving the McCain aide a heads-up that all hell might break out.
On August 9 it did, when Russia launched an over-the-top retaliation for two days of Georgian shelling and started a bloody mini-war. The international press portrayed this as a full-scale Russian invasion of Georgia, which was swiftly condemned by both US presidential candidates. Only in recent weeks have independent reports by military observers cast doubt on Georgia’s version of the clash.
Did Scheunemann tell McCain that the Georgians were not the innocent victims they played so well? If so, then McCain misled the country about an event that just happened to bolster his campaign rhetoric. And if Scheunemann didn’t tell his boss, then perhaps it was another case of McCain choosing staff with unfortunate conflicts of interest.
Calls for comment to Orion and Senator McCain’s office were not returned. A public affairs specialist at the NSA said, “We do not comment on actual or alleged operations.”
Last week Whistleblower revealed that the CIA’s Initial Assessment Report on the October 11 death of Austrian rightwing politician Jörg Haider suspected foul play rather than the simple car wreck described by Austrian authorities. Now, a similar scenario is being played out in Mexico, where the US Drug Enforcement Agency has doubts that the November 6 small plane crash that killed Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriño and government security adviser José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos was an accident. Mourino, the country’s second most powerful politician after the president, had deployed thousands of troops in an aggressive war against the country’s powerful drug cartels. Vasconcelos, who was formerly responsible for extraditing Mexican drug traffickers to the U.S, had survived a previous assassination attempt.
The Learjet crashed near a main thoroughfare in Mexico City, injuring dozens on the ground and killing all nine aboard. The deaths of Mouriño and Vasconcelos were celebrated in Western Mexico by drug gangs of masked men who crammed into pickup trucks and rode around firing automatic weapons in the air in triumph.
The crash site was still under seal when Luis Téllez, the Transport Minister, wasting no time, told the press, “There have been no signs that permit another hypothesis than an accident.”
But the DEA, in an internal classified report, cites several on-the-ground witnesses who heard as many as three explosions and saw large plumes of black smoke before the plane crashed. There was no distress call from the cockpit. A conversation between the pilots and the control tower only moments before the plane began an almost vertical nosedive gave no hint of any problem.
British and U.S. aviation experts are reportedly now in Mexico, but they have been hampered by the fact that the crime scene was dismantled before they arrived, and about ten percent of the plane is missing (disintegrated or not collected say Mexican authorities). The black box has been recovered, but according to one investigator who has heard the recording, it ends with a sudden static, often the sign of a major mechanical failure or foul play. DEA and other government agencies declined to publicly comment on the matter.
“They [the drug cartels] pulled it off brilliantly,” says one Homeland Security source familiar with the investigation. “And the Mexicans aren’t even going to go after them, they are just so embarrassed that it happened.”
Gerald Posner is the award-winning author of 10 best-selling books of investigative nonfiction ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism (www.posner.com). He also has written dozens of articles for national magazines and newspapers. He is a regular contributor to NBC, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC. Posner lives in Miami Beach with his wife, the author Tricia Posner
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I hope that Obama has learned from the last administration's policy of ("When in doubt, baffle them with bull shit") routine doesn't work! America is a nation of bullshitters and you can't bullshit a bullshitters!
Loving your column here, Gerald. The Beast (The Daily, not the Devil) is lucky to have you....
Let's not forget, the involvment of our close friend Israel that gets us in hot water and leaves us out in the cold, for their own good....our partner in crime, Israel does the same thing in the Middle East and crys faul...I call Israel THE BIG LIE, because it was created on a lie and continues the same lie to today......
kamal Hassan,
This is really good stuff, Gerald! There was a lot of noise from the blogs about Georgia pulling the trigger vs Russia. Now we know. The conspiracist in me never believed that the Learjet crash was not caused by the drug cartel. For the Mexican government to come out with such a quck response after the accident was more than suspicious, particularly since the black box recordings hadn't even been studied yet. Embarrassed indeed!
Ha ha, that's one for the Drug Cartels; zero for the DEA. They deserved to die. The Drug War is the biggest load of shit and detriment to liberty in modern history. N it's only going to become more militant if you people don't wake up.
Concerning the Georgia incident, although I do not take stock in the majority of his propaganda (it's still good to keep track of the fringe), Alex Jones called the Georgian aggression from day one... course he did also mention a connection between Georgia and Israel; which may be paranoia, but now... given that the first part made the mainstream media, I'm begining to wonder. And yes, 9/11 was an inside job, it's just not how you think it happened. Remember, we trained Bin Laden to get Russia out of Afgahnistan. WMD's in Iraq?.. we gave them to Saddam durring the Iran-Iraq war.
You want the truth? You cann't handle the truth!
Yes, Georgian aggression against Putin's proxy forces that are trying to rip apart Georgia's independence from the "motherland." Yes, anybody with half a brain knows that Russia's "invasion" was actually an incursion meant to warn all of the former Soviet satellite states to "stay in line."
Additionally, it is always unwise to slander fact by uttering the abominable falsehoods of works of fiction such as "Loose Change," or its lesser surrogates. Oh, and by the way, "We" did not train Bin Laden. Bin Laden was trained by the Pakistanis. He is also a billionaire that has proven more then willing to finance himself. If you really think that 9/11 was an inside job then I welcome you to travel to any major European city were you can meet with the various members of Islamofascist groups that will be more then happy to tell you that you are wrong. However, in some ways the Islamofascist groups are better then people like you Abraxas. At least they want to tear the world down and replace it with something. You just want to tear it down. So please, continue miring yourself in your self indulgent echo chamber of lies and conspiracies. Nobody will miss you (your the one that can't handle the truth).
Oh, and your "they deserved to die" comment is a testament to what little regard you must hold human life. Siding with a Drug cartel (Drug War politics aside) is indicative of the kind of person you are; obviously not one that has any kind of belief in the idea of true liberty (other then the liberty to get yourself high).
Conspiracy??? how about the emergency ramp deploying in the back of the Obama plane a few months ago. That one got swept under the rug and conveniently forgotten. Now we have "Clinton 2.0" in the white house. Didn't Bill have a convenient "plane crash" and a "Suicide" take out two of his inner circle?? The Clintons are dangerous and ruthless people.....Beware Obama
AdmiralAckbar53, you are wrong on multiple issues.
- Georgia did start this one and Russia responded as we would have: with overwhelming force and shock and awe. It does serve as a warning to others. Putin is no fool. We (the US will have to deal with him. Hopefully Barack is as wily as Putin.
- "We" did train osama bin laden in afghanistan formally and we funded him and his organization. He is NOT a billionaire. His family is rich but he has no support from them. His support comes from millions of muslims in the middle east, the far east, southeast Asia, and the West.
- Islamofascists is an inaccurate term. Facism does not tolerate any religion. Like Christianity in the crusades, Islam has a long history of subjugating other peoples and either killing them or having them convert. The current terrorism, however, is the result of policies of the the US and the UK over the last 100 years. Examples of this include the betrayal of the Arabs by the UK, the illegal creation of Israel on another sovereign nation's land, the creation of Western military bases in other sovereign nations, CIA sponsored coups and the setting up of dictators in sovereign nations. Basically, we have done whatever we have wanted, unchecked. Terrorism is just their way of rebelling against us and our policies. I do not condone it but I do understand it. I also realize that the majority of muslims are regular, normal, peace loving people like the rest of us. If they weren't, I have no doubt all of us non-muslims would already be dead or in a major war spread throughout the world. There are more than a billion muslims on the planet. You can easily do the math. I do not consider .0000001 percent of a given group to be representative of the rest of the group. So we only have a few people intrerested in fomenting rebellion and blowing things up.
- drug wars were a complete and utter failure. This has been documented extensively and is well known amongst historians and politicos and law enforcement. The same is true of the 'star wars' program with ronald reagan, as well the reaganomics and the trickle down theory. ALL of these failures' datasets are available for anyone to research. They are fact, not fiction or opinion. There have even been documentaries on public television and books on these topics.
- 9/11 event has some currently publicly unknown domestic involvement and scientific results datasets which will come out later and will be presented formally.
Russia has been a bit peeved about this because western media seemed to omit this little fact, Georgia started it. Georgia seemed to expect some sort of political backing, that seemed to be offered by some in the McCain camp. It never really materialized to Georgia's shock. That much I remember clearly, Georgia's presidents apparent surprise as to how the situation was playing out, something in the plan (US support offered by McCain staffers) didn't work out.
And yes, 9/11 was inside. As to what inside I couldn't say, but anybody that believes otherwise hasn't given the situation an honest appraisal. I am not a big conspiracy fan, just a calm and fact based engineer. Tricking some arabs into crashing some planes isn't hard. Planting explosives for a couple weeks before hand isn't hard. Tricking the American populous into believing a lie when the truth is so much stranger than the fiction is also, apparently, easy. Having those buildings drop in the way fed to us was quite ridiculously impossible.
Just look at this stupid meesly case. The truth of the matter was out there, Georgia started it. Somehow all our big sources of news managed to continually omit this fact and Russian aggression was discussed more. G, thanks media, way to not help. Did they conspire? No, complacency, and a blanket refusal to report outside the box.
As soon as I first saw the news I thought something stunk; Russia had not reason to attack out of the blue, whereas Georgia had their big brother ready to back them up. I am sick of being the bad guy! I hope the new leadership will turn things around so that the USA can be thought of as the guys in the white hats once again!
Thank you.
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