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From the Archives A Bestiary of Extreme-Right Financiers with CIA Ties Behind ABC’s “The Path to 9/11”

Alex Constantine - December 18, 2013

Possum in the Road

On June 2, 2006, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical whose religion is stitched indelibly on his sleeve, learned the meaning of existential terror.

"There were some frightening moments for Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and his family last week," Aero-News sympathized, "as the business jet they were on experienced engine failure at 43,000 feet."

Huckabee, his wife Janet Huckabee, daughter Sarah, staffer Chad Rockett and a state trooper were on board. The jet climbed to circumvent storm clouds when "a noise came from the jet's right engine. 'We were flying over Tennessee, enjoying the flight, when suddenly a most horrible sound started coming from the airplane engine,' Huckabee said in a speech to North Carolina Republicans Tuesday. 'It was doing all sorts of funny things airplane engines are not supposed to do.'... "

The close call, "which the southern governor likened to 'running over a great big possum in the road,'ended with everyone safe on the ground." Mechanics repaired the malfunctioning engine, everyone climbed back on board and were on their way.

"Huckabee wouldn't say who the plane's owner was, saying it wouldn't be fair to single out the aircraft's owner as 'it wasn't the fault of the airplane.'" You wouldn't want to trample on a Cessna's feelings ... or publicize a violation of federal political campaign laws ...

Southeastern Asset Management Inc 217953 - From the ArchivesHuckabee refused to answer inquiries from the politrazzi, but the incident report filed at the Chatanooga airport listed the owner of the Cessna, Southeastern Asset Management (SAM), based in New Hampshire.

Huckabee blogger Michael Powell, an NYU grad student, describes SAM as "a New Hampshire-based company of which Ted Suhl is the manager. Suhl is a past contributor to Huckabee campaigns, a Huckabee-appointee to the state Child Welfare Agency Review Board, and also the director of the Lord’s Ranch in Warm Springs, a religious-based youth home whose $8.5 million contract with the state is paid through Medicaid." ...

The airplane with the "funny" engine generated a hogshead of headlines, but none of them concerned the title holder of the Cessna, Southeastern Assets Management, itself.

SAM holdings include a sizable share of General Motors. Disney. Renault. Phillips Electronics ....

Southeastern Assets Management, the Lord's Ranch operator, currently owns owns Yum! Brands and KFC through the Longleaf Partners Fund. Both companies of course, were run by Kenneth Langone.

The Longleaf Partners Fund was the financial eminence gris of much-despised "The Path to 9/11," the Pixar/Disney propaganda piece that recalls the most blatantly dishonest anti-communist bandwagons of the Cold War.

Editor & Publisher reported with an offended air ...

COMPANIES DIRECTLY INVOLVED OR CONNECTED WITH THE MOVIE

"The Path to 9/11"

AKA Longleaf Partners Funds
6410 Poplar Ave., Suite 900, Memphis, TN 38119
O. Mason Hawkins, Chairman/CEO
http://forums.therandirhodesshow.com/lofiversion/index.php/t96251.html

TOP DISNEY INSTITUTIONAL SHAREHOLDERS

Vanguard Group, Inc.
Morgan Stanley
Barclays Global Investors UK Holdings Ltd
FMR Corp. (Fidelity Management & Research Corp)
Wellington Management Company, LLP
Capital Research and Management Company ...

About Capital Research and Management Company and General Re, the re-insurer of the World Trade Center when it fell. Capital is a subsidiary of Warren Buffett's Berkshire HathawayThe New York Times reported on June 22, 1988:

" ... At the end of March, five institutions each owned more than 3 percent of General Re's shares, according to Technimetrics Inc., which tracks institutional stock data. Capital Research and Management, which oversees the American Funds family of mutual funds, was the largest holder, owning 6 percent of the shares, followed by Fidelity Investments, the Regents of the University of California, Davis Selected Advisers and Invesco Capital Management. ... "

TOP MUTUAL FUND HOLDERS

Longleaf Partners Fund
[see Southeastern Asset Management above]
Vanguard 500 Index Fund
[see Vanguard Group above]
College Retirement Equities Fund-stock Account
Administered by TIAA-CREF Investment Management, LLC(324)

ABC was cursed far-and-wide for the 9/11 "documentary" – particularly for the imaginary scene in which President Clinton casually waves off a chance to kill Osama bin Laden.

Most newswire reports said:

"ABC responded Tuesday with a statement saying that the miniseries was 'a dramatization, not a documentary, drawn from a variety of sources, including the 9/11 commission report, other published materials and from personal interviews.'"

Governor Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, chimed in with a statement that the scene was, after all, "a composite."

That is, Pepsico's Thomas Kean, destined to be an all-too-familiar face in this story ... as it happens, the SAM/Longleaf affiliate, Yum! Brands, with {Kenneth Langone's) KFC Chickenfuehrer David Novak at its helm, is a spin-off of Pepsico.

Pepsico: The soft drink bottler, journalist Alfred McCoy reported decades ago in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, operated an opium refinery in Laos for the CIA during the Vietnam War period – with the lobbying assistance of Richard Nixon, no less. Ray Hunt, the son of domestic fascist H.L, Hunt, also sits on the Pepsico board. Pepsico was a driving force in the overthrow of Salvador Allendé and rise of Operation Condor. Reporter Greg Palast has noted in the London Observer that the coup plot "against Chile’s President-elect Salvador Allende, using CIA sub-machine guns and ammo, was the direct result of a plea for action a month earlier by Donald Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, in two telephone calls to the company’s former lawyer, President Richard Nixon. Kendall arranged for the owner of the company’s Chilean bottling operation to meet National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on September 15. Hours later, Nixon called in his CIA chief, Richard Helms, and, according to Helms’s handwritten notes, ordered the CIA to prevent Allende’s inauguration."

Corporate and CIA interests collide ... with 9/11 ... Disney/ABC ... and Jesus ... in the middle of it.

Who is David Novak? Only a loyalist of an evangelical front, of course (can our old friend Howard Ahmanson, Jr. from the theocratic Council for National Policy be far away?), Southeast Christian Church, the largest church in Godly Kentucky.

Sean Sellers, co-coordinator of the Student/Farmworker Alliance, writes:

"Southeast Christian sent busloads of people to lobby the Kentucky legislature in favor of an anti-gay marriage amendment this year. The pastor of Southeast Christian, Bob Russell, said during the recent presidential campaign, 'We [evangelicals] have more reasons to start a revolution than they did in 1776... I don't see how you can be a dedicated Christian and remain neutral.' Mr. Novak is also is a proud and vocal evangelist of what he calls 'Jesus-Centered Leadership,' joining Reverend Russell to stage motivational workshops on the topic for thousands of people at a time."

This was a curious set of connections. Longleaf Partners Fund – Lord's Ranch – Pepsico - Thomas Kean – David Novak - God - "The Path to 9/11" ...

And - wouldn't you know - GOP financier Kenneth Langone, a close associate of Novak's ...

Jesus Christ & the CIA on "The Path to 9/11"

jesus christ 712364 - From the ArchivesABC was mugged by reality and struggled to redeem its reputation in the days prior to airing "The Path to 9/11," a movie financed in large part by the Longleaf Partners Fund, the SAM partner ...

Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation on September 8, 2006, described the critical uproar preceding the broadcast of the movie as a "siege": "ABC advances the illusion that the deceptive nature of 'The Path to 9/11' is an honest mistake committed by a hardworking but admittedly fumbling team of well-intentioned Hollywood professionals who wanted nothing less than to entertain America. But this is another Big Lie. In fact, 'The Path to 9/11' is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood"

The core of this "network within the ABC network" is neo-con opinion-shaper David Horowitz, "who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by 'The Path to 9/11' director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to 'transform Hollywood' in line with its messianic vision."

Before The Path to 9/11 went into production, Disney/ABC hired David Cunningham to direct the film. "Cunningham," writes Blumenthal, "is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth with a Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father's group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is 'dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Television industry.' As part of TFI's long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission's global training network in film industry jobs 'so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,' according to a YWAM report Last June, Cunningham's TFI announced it was producing its first film, mysteriously titled 'Untitled History Project.'

Cyrussitting - From the ArchivesCyrus Nowrasteh

"Early on, Cunningham had recruited a young Iranian-American screenwriter named Cyrus Nowrasteh to write the script of his secretive 'Untitled' film. Not only is Nowrasteh an outspoken conservative, he is also a fervent member of the emerging network of right-wing people burrowing into the film industry with ulterior sectarian political and religious agendas, like Cunningham. ... This June, while The Path to 9/11 was being filmed, LFF founders Govindini Murty and Jason Apuzzo – both friends of Nowrasteh – announced they were "partnering" with right-wing activist David Horowitz. Indeed, the 2006 LFF is listed as 'A Program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.' Since the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1992, Horowitz has labored to create a network of politically active conservatives in Hollywood.... The group's headquarters are at the offices of Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a 'think tank' bankrolled for years with millions by right-wing sugardaddies like eccentric far right billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife... "328

Scaife%2C%2BRichard%2BMellon - From the ArchivesScaife, of course, is a veteran state propagandist, a CIA Mockingbird. He was recruited to the CIA by Frank Bennett, who once wrote, "political warfare is warfare – not public relations. It is one part persuasion and two parts deception. The aim of political warfare ... is to discredit, displace, and neutralize an opponent, to destroy a competing ideology, and to reduce the adherents to political impotence."329

ahmanson - From the ArchivesHoward Ahmanason, Jr., as I say, COULDN'T be far away.

"After more than 20 years of politically-oriented philanthropy," Blumenthal wrote in Salon, January 2004, "Ahmanson is now emerging as one of the major financial angels of the right, putting him in the company of Richard Mellon Scaife, the oil and banking heir who bankrolled the groundwork for much of the conservative movement's apparatus."330

Washington Post, November 6, 2003: "The Scaife and Ahmanson families are heirs to banking fortunes who have given to a range of conservative causes. Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburg" and the CIA "bankrolled the American Spectator magazine's $2.4 million 'Arkansas Project' to turn up dirt on President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., of Newport Beach, Calif., was among the largest donors ... to the Chalcedon Foundation, a California-based religious movement that calls for a theocratic state enforcing biblical law, [and] the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), which share headquarters space in Washington, D.C."331

The IRD is also largely financed by Scaife.

god bless america - From the Archives

Scaife and Ahmanson, the fundamentalist-Mockingbird-Siamese-twin-from Hell-fountainheads-for-Jesus, are the dark beating heart of American "conservative" fundamentalist Christian extremism. Ahmanson is a major share-holder in ES&S, together with the Hunts, and the financial bridge to Diebold Voting Machines.

Lisa Burks, vice president of the Arkansas NOW chapter, writes that ES&S Vice President Todd Urosevich "is the brother to the Diebold President Bob Urosevich. The Urosevich [brothers] were fronted monies to start ES&S and then what is now Diebold by extreme right-wing financier Howard Ahmanson. Mr. Ahmanson ... believes that slavery is a 'biblical right.' There is a serious problem here that must be corrected immediately."332

A HOUSE of corrections might conceivably suit the occasion. All that remained was a joint venture with ChoicePoint to complete the election fraud connections:

NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2004 /BSNewswire/ - Diebold, ChoicePoint and Sproul - In a new partnership between government and business involving unprecedented interagency cooperation between the RNC/PNAC, the Patent Office, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security - and funded in part by venture capital from Microsoft's capital-markets division - have announced plans to form a joint venture to leverage core software patents and other intellectual property for the purpose of maintaining America's strategic edge at providing 'the best democracy money can buy.'"333

It was a consortium of election-fixing technologists fronted by ChoicePoint:

"The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is DRIVEN by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for the act was a consortium of arms dealers - those disinterested corporate citizens - including NORTHROP-GRUMMAN and LOCKHEED-MARTINThe bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized 'ineligible voter purges' system that Jeb used to eliminate 91,000 eligible black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle, ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge contracts."334

The very idea.

wtcx2 - From the ArchivesThis is the hub of it all in the context of "The Path to 9/11" – a clutch of military-industrialists with fantastically deep pockets ... a vicous technological coup disguised as an election ... 9/11 ... the drive to war with Iraq ... neo-fascist religious fronts ... propagandistic TV movies  ...

Circumnavigate and return to the same crowd, the center of gravity.

On board of General Motors, for instance – a SAM holding – you find one of the powerbrokers of military industry: Kent Kresa from Northrop Grumman. Kresa handled the most important aquisitions of Northrop Grumman. He was a force in Grumman's Logicon TASK, a step on the path to the 9/11 covert operation.

Logicon (a Northrop-Grumman subsidiary) TASK was cobbled together by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Titan, Boeing, EDS, Neil Armstrong's Veridian, and several other tech contractors. Logicon was a partner in the Eagle Alliance, the NSA-revamping group that included ACS, CACI, TRW, etc., led by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).335

These, together with Raytheon and a number intelligence-related high-tech contractors, were instrumental in the 9/11 operation. In bestowing power upon them, ChoicePoint is a critical element here, of course, and CP is directed by Kenneth Langone, the Tricon/Yum! Brands (held by "The Path to 9/11" sponsor SAM-Longleaf) and former NY Stock Exchange director. (Yum! Brands began as Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc. an independent, publicly-traded company that spun-off from PepsiCo, the Tom Kean haunt.)

download 13 - From the ArchivesKenneth Langone

Officers of these companies meet in herds at various think-tanks and corporate fronts, but most tellingly ar the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where ChoicePoint's Kenneth Langone is a trustee.

 

 

NOTES

328.) Max Blumenthal column, September 8, 2006.
http://maxblumenthal.blogspot.com/2006/09/discover-secret-right-wing-network.html

329.) Andrew J. Weaver & Nicole Seibert, "Church & Scaife," Media Transparency Project, August 2, 2004.
http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=42

330.) Max Blumenthal, "Avenging angel of the religious right," Salon, January 6, 2004.
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2004/01/06/ahmanson/index.html

331.) "F.C. Episcopal Withholding $ From Virginia Diocese," Falls Church News-Press, November 6, 2003.
http://www.fcnp.com/335/story4.htm

332.) Lisa Burks, "One Person Can Make a Huge Difference," Fair Elections web site, undated.
http://www.fairelections.us/article.php?id=104

333.) Reprinted at:
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004_11_01_rigorousintuition_archive.html

334.) "George W. Bush – Terrorist in the White House – Election Fraud."
http://www.nogw.com/electionfraud.html

335.) Nico Haupt, "9/11: The lost War drill? (Chapter 10)," GlobalFreePress mirrir, June 18, 2004.
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/06/290960.shtml