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This article appears in the August 2, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Knock Out Lieberman and
McCain To Save the Republic

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Faced with the specter of the worst financial and real-economic collapse in centuries, and the imminent danger of the outbreak of war on several Eurasian fronts, the very survival of the planet depends on effective policy leadership on the part of the President of the United States. Beyond the well-known weaknesses of President George W. Bush and his immediate circle of Presidential advisors, the greatest obstacle to that kind of effective leadership from the institution of the U.S. Presidency, is the vicious ongoing insurgency against the Bush Presidency, led by Senators Joseph Lieberman (D-Ct.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Lyndon LaRouche writes in an accompanying article that the McCain-Lieberman cabal must be crushed now, to liberate the Democratic Party from the grips of the so-called "New Democrats" insanity, and create the needed bipartisan climate to allow the Bush Presidency to make the Constitutionally-approved, but revolutionary policy changes, upon which the fate of humanity hangs. Leading circles in Europe, Asia, Ibero-America and other parts of the world can contribute to the needed policy shift, but no salvation is possible, unless the United States takes the proper leadership role among the community of sovereign nations.

Only the United States has the republican Constitutional system of government that permits the proper executive leadership during times of crisis. All other nations on the planet, to varying degrees, are still trapped in different forms of oligarchical rule—at best.

Moose Bull

The treacherous McCain-Lieberman partnership has been a major fact of life in American politics since no later than the July 4th weekend of 2001, when the two men gathered at McCain's ranch in Arizona. They met to launch their "Bull Moose" campaign to blackmail the Bush Administration into fully adopting the Anglo-American agenda of "perpetual war," otherwise known as the Samuel P. Huntington, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Henry A. Kissinger dogma of the "Clash of Civilizations."

As reported in the Feb. 4, 2002 New Yorker magazine, McCain is demanding that President Bush invade Iraq, give Israeli butcher Ariel Sharon full backing to crush the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people, and carry out other "Clash of Civilizations" atrocities—or face certain re-election defeat in the 2004 Presidential election, through a McCain third-party "Bull Moose" candidacy.

In 1992, it was H. Ross Perot's third party campaign that helped defeat George Bush, Sr. in his re-election campaign. Both the 1992 Perot effort and the threatened 2004 McCain run are modeled on the 1912 Presidential election, when former President Theodore Roosevelt left the GOP to run as the British Fabian Society-sponsored "Bull Moose Party" candidate, throwing the election to the dyed-in-the-sheets Confederate, Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The result, back then, was two Anglo-American provoked world wars and a global depression. The results, this time, if the McCain-Lieberman insurrection is not crushed, will be worse.

Mobsters, Carlists and Jabotinskyites

On July 14, 2002, the LaRouche in 2004 Presidential campaign issued a mass-distribution leaflet, "The Real Corruption: McCain and Lieberman," which launched the drive to expose the two Senators as front-men for some of the filthiest organized crime and rightwing terrorist infested circles in America.

That ongoing investigation has already turned up sufficient evidence to convince any honest Democrat that Joe Lieberman is the last man on Earth who should be allowed anywhere near the party leadership, not to mention nominated as its Presidential candidate.

The basic facts in the McCain-Lieberman file are these:

1. Since the day he entered public life, Joe Lieberman has been affiliated with, and sponsored by, some of the most notorious rightwing fascist circles on the planet.

Lieberman, himself, freely acknowledges that he owes his 1988 election to the U.S. Senate, to William F. Buckley, Jr., the avowed Carlist, apologist for Sen. Joe McCarthy, and publisher of the New Right National Review. On the surface, the Buckley-Lieberman 1988 "marriage of convenience" centered on Buckley's near-obsession with defeating then-incumbent Republican Senator Lowell Weicher, by throwing the election to Lieberman. But Buckley acknowledges his ties to Lieberman date back to the latter's tenure as editor of the Yale University Daily News, a post that Buckley had earlier held.

Buckley devoted the pages of National Review to a running attack on Weicher throughout the 1988 electoral season. Buckley launched a family political action committee, BuckPac, which was dedicated exclusively to pouring money into Lieberman's campaign coffers.

Sources familiar with the 1988 Senate campaign reported that, at a critical point, during the final months of the campaign, Lieberman was running out of money. Buckley again came to the rescue, by steering Lieberman to the Cuban exile community in Miami. Lieberman traveled to Miami to meet with Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder and head, at the time, of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a collection of old Batista-era Cuban gangsters and politicos, who formed the core of the Brigade 2506 Bay of Pigs invasion force in 1961. Mas Canosa, who came to the U.S. in 1960, worked with the CIA on several assassination plots against Fidel Castro, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He was also closely affiliated with ex-CIA agent and Buckley intimate, E. Howard Hunt, who was later one of Nixon's Watergate burglars.

CANF was founded in the early days of the Reagan Administration, with the active involvement of Reagan's first National Security Advisor, Richard Allen. From the outset, CANF was an integral part of what came to be known as the "Iran-Contra secret-parallel-government," of Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, et al.

Contra covert operator and former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez described Mas Canosa as "my longtime friend," in his autobiography, Shadow Warrior. The two men were in Brigade 2506 together—along with Luis Posada and Orlando Bosch, who were responsible for blowing up an Air Cubana passenger plane in 1976, killing all 73 people onboard. Posada went on, under Rodriguez's supervision, to head up the Nicaraguan Contra supply operations from Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador, a facility identified by the Drug Enforcement Agency as a major trans-shipment point for Colombian cocaine destined for the United States—cocaine which financed the Contras.

Bosch, for his part, was jailed in Venezuela for the Air Cubana bombing. Mas Canosa, until his death several years ago, staged an annual "Orlando Bosch Day" in Miami, and launched a campaign to have Bosch freed from jail in Venezuela, winning his release in 1988, the very year of the Mas Canosa-Lieberman liason.

From their first meeting, Lieberman became Mas Canosa's number one friend in the Democratic Party.

"We established a very close relationship with Sen. Lieberman, who understood the plight of the Cuban people," CANF spokesman Fernando Rojas told the Miami Herald, in a Feb. 1, 2000 interview. "Jorge Mas Canosa and he became very close friends over the years." The Free Cuba PAC, the election arm of the tax exempt CANF, has been giving money to Lieberman steadily since the crucial campaign financial bailout of 1988. Cuba PAC was launched by Mas Canosa, with the active assistance of Bernard Barnett, a bigshot in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the official Israel lobby in America.

A Sept. 14, 2000 article in The New Republic, by Ryan Lizza, labeled Lieberman "Gore's Man in Little Havana," and updated the Lieberman love affair with the rightwing Cubans. "Once in the Senate," Lizza wrote, "Lieberman continued to work on behalf of the anti-Castro Cubans. He championed the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act, which tightened the U.S. embargo by barring foreign subsidiaries of American companies from trading with Cuba. In 1996 he supported the Helms-Burton Act, which penalizes foreign firms that do business with Cuba. He has publicly chastised Nelson Mandela for befriending Castro and Vaclav Havel for allowing the Czech Embassy to house Cuban diplomats in Washington, D.C.. He has consistently backed funding for Radio Marti and TV Marti, the much-criticized broadcasting operations run by Cuban exiles. He was even a member of Mas Canosa's 'Blue Ribbon Commission for the Economic Reconstruction of Cuba,' which hatched the dubious plan of sailing into Havana when Castro finally falls." That Blue Ribbon Commission is chaired by another rightwing free market Republican, Malcolm Forbes, Jr.

The Lansky Links

2. While John McCain's links to organized crime are notorious, his Connecticut partner in crime has also relied on the political and financial patronage of some of the leading associates of the late National Crime Syndicate boss-of-bosses, Meyer Lansky.

McCain literally married into the mob, when he dumped his first wife, shortly after returning home from years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, and linked up with the 25-year old Cindy Hensley. McCain's new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, made his $200 million fortune as the principal beer distributor in Arizona for the Southwest's leading organized crime figure, Kemper Marley. Marley was given the Prohibition era bootlegging franchise by Sam Bronfman, the leading Canadian supplier to Lansky's National Crime Syndicate, and the father of Edgar Bronfman Sr., one of the founders of the Mega Group of Canadian and American Zionist billionaires, who are among both McCain and Lieberman's biggest boosters today.

The brothers Hensley, along with several scores of other Arizona gangsters—all part of the Kemper Marley apparatus—were convicted of tax evasion and other crimes in the immediate post-war period. Marley's Valley National Bank of Phoenix, was a major source of funding for the Lansky syndicate's move into Las Vegas. Later, real estate speculator Charles Keating, one of the notorious "Milken Monsters" who were bankrolled by Drexel Burnham's leading junk bond hoaxter Michael Milken, would provide a steady stream of "loans" to John McCain, earning him the distinct honor of being one of the "Keating Five," crooked Congressmen on Keating's dole.

The Bronfman gang, which launched the careers of Marley and Hensley, boasts a family motto: "From rags, to rackets, to riches, to respectability."

Lieberman Backer Michael Steinhardt

The same motto could apply, equally, to another of Joe Lieberman's leading mob-tainted patrons, Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt ran one of the filthiest hedge funds on Wall Street during the 1980s and 1990s, Steinhardt Management. In conjunction with another large Wall Street hedge fund, Caxton Corp., Michael Steinhardt ran a thoroughly illegal conspiracy to corner the market on an April 1991 two-year U.S. Treasury bond issuance. Steinhardt and his chief partner-in-crime, Caxton founder Bruce Kovner, made an instant killing, netting between $200-600 million (by Steinhardt's own account in his recent autobiography, No Bull). But several years later, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission landed on Steinhardt, Kovner and Salomon Brothers, which ran a parallel, and apparently coordinated cornering operation on a later Treasury auction.

On Dec. 16, 1994, the SEC and DOJ issued a joint press release, announcing that "Two of the country's leading investment fund managers, Steinhardt Management Company, Inc. and Caxton Corporation, have agreed to pay $76 million to settle antitrust and securities charges," which had been filed in Federal Court in the Southern District of New York.

The government complaint had noted that "The conspiracy had a dangerous probability of damaging the Treasury of the United States.... Above all, this represented an attempt to disrupt and render ineffective a part of the market of the sovereign debt of the United States."

Remarkably—or not so remarkably—Steinhardt avoided jail, and did not even face felony prosecution for the scam. Perhaps Steinhardt's intimate ties to both Lieberman and then-Vice President Al Gore had something to do with Steinhardt's good fortune. At the time of the Treasury market conspiracy, Steinhardt was the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the "Third Way" caucus in the Democratic Party that he had bankrolled from the mid-1980s, when it was launched out of Pamela Harriman's "Democrats for the 80s" group. When Steinhardt quit as DLC chairman in 1995, over his personal hatred for President Bill Clinton, the vacancy was filled by Steinhardt's favorit pol, Joe Lieberman.

In his autobiography, Steinhardt candidly admitted that he was a Barry Goldwater Republican, and a Buckleyite National Review booster. Steinhardt, Lieberman and Gore would go on to play a pivotal role in the attempted coup d'état of Sept. 1998, when they tried to convince President Clinton to resign over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

At issue at the time was President Clinton's and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's threat to crack down on the speculative activities of Wall Street hedge funds, as part of their effort to establish a "new global financial architecture," an effort bearing some similarity to Lyndon LaRouche's well-known call, at the time, for the convening of a New Bretton Woods conference to place the global financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, modeled on FDR's 1944 action.

Red, Meyer and Jimmy Blue Eyes

Steinhardt had been well-schooled in crime. His father, Sol "Red" Steinhardt, was the leading jewel fence for the Meyer Lansky syndicate. "Red" Steinhardt's most intimate mob ally was Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, a Genovese family hit-man, who happened also to be Lansky's partner in casinos in Havana, Cuba and southern Florida.

"Red" Steinhardt was arrested in 1958 on jewelry theft charges, and was jailed a year later. Son Michael, who was put through the Wharton School by his father's ill-gotten gains, organized the appeal, and hired attorney O. John Rogge, who had earned a reputation by working with Roy Cohn in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on charges they passed U.S. nuclear weapons secrets to Moscow. Rogge represented David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and the key witness against the couple. "Red" got out of jail after only two years, served in Sing Sing and the maximum security Danamora prison, and immediately began pouring his mobbed-up money into his son's brokerage business.

Michael Steinhardt is not only Joe Lieberman's most prominent public booster. Since shutting down his hedge fund in the wake of the Treasury scandal, Steinhardt has emerged as a major player in the Bronfman-founded Mega Group, a secretive collection of 50 or so Zionist billionaires, who have provided the financial and propaganda backing to Ariel Sharon's Jabotinskyite fascist government, since February 2001.

Steinhardt is now the chairman of Martin Peretz's The New Republic, and a director, along with the Hollinger Corporation's Conrad Black, Bruce Kovner, and Alliance Capital boss Roger Hertog, of the newly launched New York Sun. This is an unabashed Mega propaganda sheet, boosting the McCain-Lieberman assault on the Presidency.

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