Evidence surfacing in the widening scandal around Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff indicates the cabal being lavishly funding in recent years though his efforts was originally supported through the infamous "off the books" Enterprise headed by Marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North, only partially exposed in the Iran Contra Scandal.

"Bayonets ready? Okay...Cue the stunt baby!"

Craig Fuller, the man responsible for the discredited 1991 propaganda about Iraqi soldiers bayoneting babies in Kuwaiti nurseries, for example, was also part involved in an operation in 1999 which included Abramoff associates in the Republican Party as well as members of the Sicilian Mafia, a joint push to establish a Cuban "beachhead" in anticipation of an "opening to Cuba" after the death of Fidel Castro.

This may explain why, while legal imbroglios consume Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Bill Frist, David Safavian, chief of staff at the General Services Administration, and pest-exterminator- turned-‘Hammer’ Tom DeLay, according to published reports it’s Abramoff Republican strategists are most worried about.

"The one (scandal) that people are most worried about is Abramoff, because it seems to have such long tentacles," former congressman Vin Weber, a lobbyist with close ties to the White House, told the Los Angeles Times. "This seems to be something that could spread almost anywhere. That has a lot of people worried."

As our contribution to the effort to make the world safe for democracy, we offer our own "Top Ten Reasons Why the Abramoff Scandal Could Spread Almost Anywhere."

10. ABRAMOFF’S INVOLVED IN SIX CURRENT SCANDALS

Setting some kind of new record, ‘Casino Jack’ Abramoff is the common denominator in at least six current scandals swirling around the Bush White House.

The first Abramoff scandal to be exposed was the Indian gambling scandal, a raging river of unregulated cash which provided the revenue stream for the cabal’s current bid for power.

A History of Violence...GOP-Style

He and the now Headless Hammer Tom DeLay are also being investigated for trips to the Pacific Marianas Islands, ostensibly for the purpose of visiting Abramoff’s “sweatshop patrons.”

Abramoff is now under indictment, along with henchman Adam Kidan, for the SunCruz gambling cruise scandal, with a gangland-style murder attached offering a vivid example of the GOPMOB making someone an offer they couldn't refuse and then whacking them before they could squeal.

Abramoff is also the target of the indictment of David Safavian, and the reason as well for the newest scandal, which leads directly to George W. Bush, the obstruction of justice of a federal probe in Guam.

That's five scandals. The sixth scandal involving Abramoff, we can exclusively report, is...

9. ABRAMOFF LINKED TO WHITE HOUSE SPY SCANDAL.

Through his representation in Washington of members of the political faction on the receiving end of purloined classified data, Casino Jack’ Abramoff is linked to the White House Spy scandal involving former Marine Leandro Aragoncillo, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.

This began to become clear several months ago in a move which received little attention at the time, when the federal grand jury investigating Abramoff subpoenaed Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. Observers had puzzled over what she could possibly have to do with Abramoff.

Imelda Marcos is an ally of Abramoff’s clients in Manila, one of two warring Philippine factions competing for ownership of a Guam-based telecommunications company, which—if Abramoff’s pals get their way—will be used as a home portal for worldwide Internet gambling in a venue (Guam) which offers more opportunities for money laundering than almost anywhere in the world.

Abramoff’s faction was alarmed over reports that the Governor of the nearby territory of the Mariana’s was expressing concerns that Abramoff client (and Tom DeLay host) Willie Tan, one of Hong Kong’s richest tycoons, was behind the telephone-based gambling and online lottery push in the islands.

We'll have more on this later. But, as you can imagine, intrigue ensued.

8. FIGURE INVOLVED IN ENTERPRISE’S ‘OPENING’ TO CUBA USED ‘BILL OF GOODS’ TO SELL FIRST IRAQ WAR

Washington-based PR firm Hill & Knowlton, under the leadership of George Bush Senior's former chief of staff Craig Fuller, devised a remarkable "hook" for the propaganda campaign which sold the first Iraq war to the American people: a heartrending story of invading Iraqi troops tearing newborn infants from hospital incubators, and leaving them to die.

"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," asserted a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl identified only as "Nayirah" during a meeting of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990.

"While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where…babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."

Other "witnesses" coached by Hill & Knowlton offered similar accounts before the UN Security Council, and a video produced by the PR agency was shown to the Council.

The result was an Article Seven resolution against Iraq – the world body’s equivalent of a declaration of war, used by President Bush as the authority to attack Iraq.

Fuller, when he's not conjuring dead infants left on cold floors to die, participated in other "cabal ops" as well...

Several weeks ago we reported that Abramoff associate Adam Kidan was in business with a capo in the the Sicilian Mafia.

Republican “fund-raiser” Adam Kidan was a partner and general counsel for a hotel in the Caribbean owned by a member of the Sicilian Mafia, a man recently taken into custody in Italy as part of a major investigation into international arms trafficking.

“St. Maarten hotel owner arrested, linked to Mafia” was the headline of an Associated Press story about Kidan’s partner in St Maarten, Rosario Spadaro, 72.

Spadaro had other interests as well, according to a Miami Herald story on May 17, 1999 headlined “MAFIA HAS EYES ON CUBA,” which detailed his efforts on behalf of the Sicilian Mafia to set up shop in Cuba once President Fidel Castro had been removed from the scene, presumably through natural causes.

Odd, the secretive Naples, FL financier who owned the Venice FL flight school attended by terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was also engaged in an “opening to Cuba” at the same time the Miami Herald says the Sicilian Mafia was seeking to re-enter Cuba, passing out Presidential Rolexes (see photo) to top comandantes.

“Highly Unusual Coalition Has Eyes on Cuba" was the droll headline in a National Journal article.

The coalition is chaired by Craig Fuller of the U. S.-Cuba Trade Association, which seeks to strengthen contacts between U.S. companies and Cuba. "Economic sanctions applied for political reasons, simply, do not work," said Craig Fuller, former chief of staff under President Bush, and member of Americans For Humanitarian Trade With Cuba.

At the very same time, as if acting in concert, terror flight school owner Hilliard, the Sicilian Mafia, and the former chief of staff to the elder President Bush, Craig Fuller, were all looking to cut themselves into Cuba in anticipation of the resumption of normal diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States.

Prosecuting attorneys get criminal conspiracy convictions on less all day long.

Fuller's group included David Rockefeller and Archer Daniels Midland Chairman Dwayne Andreas. The Sicilian Mafia, Mohamed Atta’s U.S. contact, and David Rockefeller... just a case of "great minds run in similar channels?

You make the call.

7.ABRAMOFF INDICTMENT FOR BOULIS MURDER LIKELY

When three Gambino Mob associates were charged in the Gus Boulis murder three weeks ago, authorities in Fort Lauderdale wouldn’t say what led investigators to the suspects.

What they did say was further arrests are anticipated.

"There are facts that will eventually come out publicly;I just can't talk about them at the moment," said assistant state attorney Brian Cavanaugh, who heads the prosecution team. "It is possible, as well as plausible that others were involved."

When the first murder indictments were handed down, lawyers representing Abramoff and his henchman Adam Kidan hurried to insist their that clients, both free on bail on fraud charges involving their purchase of SunCruz, had nothing at all to do with Mr. Boulis’s unfortunate demise.

Abramoff's Miami attorney, Neal Sonnett, told the Los Angeles Times, "Jack Abramoff has no knowledge of the facts of the murder," adding that his client has no connections to the underworld.

Adam Kidan's lawyer Martin Jaffe said there's no connection between the SunCruz fraud case and the Boulis murder allegations.

Alas for both men (not to mention the unfortunate Boulis)...nothing could be further from the truth.

As we've already reported, Boulis knew he was about to be “hit.”

Murmurs that Abramoff has 'exposure' in the assassination of Boulis have been growing. They will grow louder if, as expected, henchman Adam Kidan is indicted for murder.

His defense—a gambit pioneered by terror flight school owner and secretive Republican financier Wally Hilliard—will be that he was the innocent victim of unscrupulous employees.

Given that famous Republican attorney Roy Cohn is (at least reportedly) still dead, the chances of this defense flying before jurors hover somewhere between 'slim and none.'

6. ABRAMOFF’S SCANDAL PARTNERS INCLUDE BUSH PIONEERS, THE MOB, U.S. DEFENSE CONTRACTORS, AND "PROFESSIONAL CHRISTIANS"

The Gus Boulis murder was clearly designed to remove him as an obstacle. But an obstacle to what? Fortunately, Abramoff ‘boy wonder’ Adam Kidan spilled the beans to reporters in more innocent times...

“Recently, Kidan charted an aggressive, expansionist course toward exotic ports of call 10,000 miles away in the Pacific Ocean,” the Miami Daily Business Review reported on June 15, 2001.

“Kidan and other...SunCruz executives traveled to Saipan in December, and again in April to discuss with government officials plans to open a 150-foot casino ship equipped with 165 slot machines and 25 gaming tables,” according to the Saipan Tribune.

“We are continuously deploying floating casinos to areas where there are good potentials," Kidan was quoted as saying.

SunCruz was in the "final stages" of bringing casino ships to berths in Hong Kong and to the former Portuguese colony of Macao, and that SunCruz officials had visited Guam, where they also intended to start a floating casino, the paper reported.

"The Northern Marianas can be a casino hub in the Pacific region, especially with its proximity to Asia, where millions play cards and machines.”

The idea was to turn the tiny island of Tinian in the Mariana’s, a three-hour flight from most major Asian population centers, into a Mecca of glittering casinos and gambling cruise ships.

Until now, the island has been a mere footnote in world history: The Enola Gay took off in August, 1945 from Tinian's airfield to drop the first atomic bomb.

World almanacs mention that the US military leases northern Tinian, then refer to “Tinian's attempts to become the Monte Carlo of Micronesia.”

The Monte Carlo of Micronesia?

It must be stated that the major players in Tinian’s gambling efforts do not appear to have wandered in off the street...

An outfit calling itself The Lone Star Casino Corp., we found, had been first with a foot in the door.

“Tinian, some three hours flying time from half the world's population, has been the Lone Star Casino Corp.'s great adventure,” read a company press release in 1995.

“Guam has an annual tourism base of more than a million people... a jaunt to Tinian beats a tiring trip to Las Vegas of 20-plus hours from South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Tokyo.”

The now-defunct Lone Star Casino Corp. was the first land-based casino company on Tinian. It had been owned by United Gaming, one of the nation's largest owners of video poker and other electronic gaming machines, a company controlled by a Texan named Richard Rainwater.

Who is Richard Rainwater?

At least 60 percent of George W. Bush's income in the year he first ran for Texas Governor came from businesses he invested in with Fort Worth financier Richard E. Rainwater, records show.

Rainwater was the major investor behind George W. Bush’s purchase of the Texas Rangers. He was also one of Bush’s biggest campaign supporters.

This is no doubt just a freak coincidence.

Also involved in Lone Star was South African Lesley Greyling, a man who was also in business with Iran-Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi in a casino in the Bahamas supported by weekly flights on terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard’s Lear jets.

"Khashoggi was among a number of prominent Arab businessmen, like Khalid Mahfouz, who agreed to continue what have been described by US intelligence officials as "protection payments" to bin Laden at a meeting in Paris in 1998, said London's Sunday Post October 7, 2001.

The airline that had been tapped by the group, and approved by local government officials to serve the island’s casinos, was Texas-based Pacific Island Aviation, a company partially funded by the Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Pacific Island Aviation was being used in support of some 'sensitive' international assignments. During the recent American expansion of influence in the oil-rich former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, for example, the company operated flights into and out of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and the Azerbaijan capital Baku.

So we at least know they're discreet.

5.SAFAVIAN INDICTMENT NOT ABOUT HEBREW SCHOOL

Then there's the indictment of White House apparatchik David Safavian, the first government official in Washington charged in the corruption inquiry related to Abramoff's activities, which is most assuredly not about providing “surplus” government property for a Abramoff-funded Hebrew school.

When a telecommunications company on the tiny Mariana’s island of Tinian exchanged hands last year, the Mariana’s Governor expressed concern that one of the partners, Abramoff client Willie Tan, might use it to expand his push into telephone- and Internet–based gambling on the island.

Described in newspaper reports as the most powerful man in the Northern Mariana Islands, his Tan Holdings “has a vice-like grip on the island economy as the biggest garment manufacturer in an industry that has come under Washington's scrutiny, as well as the owner of poker machines that stand in seedy dens on nearly every Saipan corner. Tan was so powerful on the Mariana’s main island of Saipan that some joked it should be renamed "Sai-Tan."

"Can we get away with a few discreet poker tables at the Hebrew School?"

Beginning with Casino Jack’s lobbying home run on behalf of the Internet gambling industry in 2000, when he stopped the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act in its tracks, Internet gambling has been a major motif in the Abramoff saga.

Unmentioned in articles about Abramoff's troubles, The Mariana island chain's main attraction to Abramoff’s group is as a platform from which to run worldwide internet gambling.

While this may violate Federal telecommunications laws, Jack Abramoff’s buddies have been working on it, the real reason behind the indictment of White House apparatchik David Safavian...

Safavian was also a passionate advocate of Internet gambling. His clients included the Interactive Gaming Council, a trade association for online betting houses. In 1999, he founded the Internet Consumer Choice Coalition, a nonprofit whose sole purpose was to fight a bill that would have made online gambling a federal crime.

While Safavian was charged with helping Abramoff try to acquire, for an Abramoff-sponsored Hebrew school, a plot of federally owned land managed by the GSA in Silver Spring, Maryland, and accused of making repeated false statements to government investigators about a congressional golf trip with Abramoff to Scotland in 2002,his attorney isn't fooled.

Suspecting something more was afoot, Barbara Van Gelder accused federal officials of "a creative use of the criminal code to secure his cooperation."

4. GUAM PROBE INTO FEMA RIP-OFFS OBSTRUCTED BY OVAL OFFICE

Then there's the recent revelation that Abramoff was the subject of a Guam grand jury probe in 2002, thwarted by George W Bush his-ownself, who intervened to remove the supervising federal prosecutor.

Abramoff spokesman Andrew Blum said the lobbyist "has no recollection of his being investigated in Guam in 2002."

Remembering every SINGLE time he's investigated must be like Wilt Chamberlain trying to remember all of his reported 20,000 dalliances.

Somebody should ask him: does the name “Carl Gutierrez” ring a bell?

Before President Bush stepped in and put a stop to it, Gutierrez, Guam’s Governor, had seen virtually his entire top staff head off to minimum security prisons, in an orgy of looting, a feeding frenzy for land-based sharks.

His former chief of staff Gil Shinohara, to cite one of a dozen examples, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

Corruption was so widespread that even the Parks and Recreation Director got into it, convicted of bid-rigging, bribery, wire fraud and money laundering, as well as ripping off large sums of money from FEMA, and was sentenced to 10 years in jail—the longest antitrust-related jail sentence ever imposed.

No wonder Guam court officials were upset...Even Guam’s Governor was charged, with using government material and personnel to work on his ranch. So they paid Abramoff almost $400,000—of U.S. taxpayer money!—to get Abramoff to get the U.S. Attorney off their backs.

Abramoff delivered. Working with Representative Tom DeLay, the Texas Republican, the two men managed to get the legislation defeated in the House, using the argument that the Marianas represented low taxes and free enterprise and should be left alone.

"Water costs money. Maybe hold off for a while."

And speaking of ripping off FEMA, Abramoff wanted to lease some of “his” Sun Cruz cruise ships to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house rescue workers off New York City after 9.11., and asked noted "professional Christian" Ralph Reed to find out who at the agency he should contact to make the proposal.

The White House, oddly enough, had recently-indicted David Safavian involved in hurricane relief until he was arrested... This may help explain why there wasn’t enough money left in the budget to pass out water to citizens at the Superdome in New Orleans...

Abramoff and DeLay are all about protecting free enterprise. And underworld gangs engaged in money laundering and drug running in the Mariana Islands and Guam, apparently. Although a US government report pleaded for U.S. legal intervention in Guam, "free market conservatives" Abramoff & DeLay were having none of it.

The result? Reduced U.S. Government interference in the criminal activities in the Mariana Islands and Guam of Chinese Triad gangs, the Japanese Yakuza, and the Russian Mafia.

3. CASINO JACK PART OF OLLIE NORTH’S “ENTERPRISE.”

Far from being an isolated miscreant blinded by greed, the proverbial “one bad apple” in an otherwise blameless barrel, Republican lobbyist ‘Casino Jack’ Abramoff is following in the footsteps of the people who showed the way by successfully skirting punishment in the unresolved American scandals (Iran Contra, BCCI, and the Savings and Loan Scandal) of the recent past.

Remember Iran Contra? "The “Enterprise?" The Enterprise Lives... Jack Abramoff is Oliver North in a $2000 suit.

The “guided” tours to the Abramoff scandals being conducted by the major media resemble nothing so much as a trip to a “Potemkin village,” named for Grigori Potemkin, who played Karl Rove to Russian Czarina’s Catherine the Great’s George W. Bush by ordering the creation of elaborate fake villages along her route, in places where turmoil and poverty reigned, to give her a false impression of peace and prosperity as she toured her far-flung empire.

Apparently, we are to believe that Jack Abramoff has carved out a vast Indian gambling empire and a cozy little Republican slave state set amid the coral reefs and azure seas of the small island chain of the Marianas 7,000 miles from the Californian coast... all by himself, with modest assistance from former pest exterminator Delay.

What’s being hidden from view is a graveyard filled with spirits from the major unresolved American scandals of the recent past.

The story being retailed to date about Abramoff bears frightening similarities to the official version of 9.11, a fable of two separate Dutch nationals—the Magic Dutch Boys—who just happen to purchase two flight schools in tiny Venice Florida at the same time which then just happen to begin training Al Qaeda operatives.

Missing from the official version of 9.11 is that the flight school where Mohamed Atta learned to fly just happened to be owned by a man whose planes were just then trafficking in quantities of heroin rarely seen... even in Florida.

Things equally important are being left out of accounts of Abramoff.

2. ‘ALL OUR SCANDALS ARE THE SAME.”

The SunCruz fraud case and the Boulis murder allegations are clearly linked, both to each other and to Abramoff and Delay’s Indian gambling scandal as well.

Within weeks of closing the original SunCruz sale with Boulis, Abramoff and Kidan began seeking to refinance the company. They gave copies of its financial statements to a battery of investment bankers, bond underwriters, and at least one Native American tribe with gaming interests—the Oklahoma-based Kiowa Indians.

They also were discussing possible land-based casino ventures with a branch of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and made inquiries into buying two more Long Island, N.Y.-based gambling ships.

Plans were afoot to diversify the Republican’s Mariana’s protectorate from its base in sweat shops, involuntary servitude and forced prostitution and into casino and internet gambling.

Attempts to decouple the various Abramoff scandals rely on arguments like the ones made in court by former Mob Boss John Gotti’s lawyer Bruce Cutler against the RICO indictments against his client.

Alleging a continuing criminal enterprise was utterly without merit because the various rackets engaged in by the Gambino Family have nothing whatever in common, said Cutler.

Loan sharking and murder, presumably, existed as independent franchises distinct from the Gambino Family’s trade in murder and mayhem. The argument didn’t fly.

Gotti spent the rest of his life in prison.

And, finally...The #1 THING YOU NEVER KNEW ABOUT THE ABRAMOFF SCANDALS:

1. NOTHING IS WHAT IT SEEMS.

Newspapers called Boulis’s killing a “gangland-style murder.”

But there is another word which more accurately describes it: “Assassination,” says Webster’s dictionary, is “murder which changes the world.”

What does a scandal involving Indian casinos, gambling boat “cruises to nowhere” & pay-for-play government officials have to do with the story of 19 hijackers planning a mass murder in supposed isolation in Florida?

Over three years ago—within a month of the 9.11 attack—British Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented the case against Bin Laden. He sketched out the Cliff Notes version of the evidence. It wasn’t much, but it was the only explanation we ever received.

“Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network,” Blair said.

When NBC's Dateline did a story recently about sources of terrorist funding right here in the U.S., they announced “the emerging threat of a new alliance between al Qaeda and common criminals.”

It was hardly time to stop the presses.

“Some of the same names in the Abramoff scandal also surface in connection with Mohamed Atta’s,” we reported, in a June 21, 2005 story headlined “THE SECRET WORLD OF 9.11.”

“There remains a strong suspicion that Atta’s terrorist cadre—supposedly unknown and friendless and burrowing into the woodwork—was able to call on the assistance, when necessary, of a friendly global network.

Could it be that this network is the same one being probed so gingerly today by investigators looking into Jack Abramoff?

Far from being a rogue lobbyist who went just a few tens of millions of dollars too far, Jack Abramoff is an operative for an organization which has sold Americans a bill of goods as justification in at least three recent wars.

There are an amazing number of people described as ‘financial whizzes’ and ‘boy wonders of business’ involved in the story of Jack Abramoff.

But... are they really?