A cluster of unusual donations from California to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign has cast an unwanted spotlight on a prominent McCain fund-raiser in Florida and his Jordanian business partner who apparently solicited the contributions. Harry Sargeant III, who is the part-owner of a major oil trading firm and the finance chairman of the Florida Republican party, is the fund-raiser who has been credited by the McCain campaign with raising the more than $50,000 from a single extended family, the Abdullahs, and a few of their friends, in California. It was a long-time business partner, however, Mustafa Abu Naba’a, who actually solicited the more than $100,000 in contributions overall from the Abdullahs and a circle of other Arab Americans in California to not only Mr. McCain but also Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is a close friend of Mr. Sargeant’s.
A lawsuit filed earlier this year in Florida against both men by a former associate, Mohammad Anwar Farid Al-Saleh, who happens to be the brother-in-law of the King of Jordan, offers a glimpse into the business relationship between Mr. Abu Naba’a and Mr. Sargeant and the nature of their lucrative work. The suit, which was reported on by MSNBC earlier this year, alleges that Mr. Sargeant and Mr. Abu Naba’a cut Mr. Al-Saleh out of his rightful one-third share of their company, International Oil Trading Company (IOTC). It also highlights the apparent close ties that IOTC was able to forge with the Jordanian government as part of a lucrative contract it eventually landed with the Pentagon to transport aviation fuel to the military in Iraq. Mr. Al-Saleh said in the lawsuit that he secured letter of authorization from the Jordanian Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources for IOTC to transport the oil across Jordan. He also said he “negotiated a deal with the National Resource Development Company, a company connected to the Jordanian Army, to ensure that the cargo arriving by ship from Saudi Arabia at the Jordanian port of Aqaba would be offloaded from the ships and placed into storage without interference, bureaucratic or otherwise.” Mr. Sargent declined in an interview Wednesday to respond specifically to the allegations in the lawsuit, describing it merely as a “commercial dispute” that was irrelevant to his political fund-raising. For anyone looking to peruse further, the full complaint filed by Mr. Al-Saleh is here.
They say say nobody reads books anymore. But Dr. Jerome Corsi, the man of right-wing letters whose goofy books got Americans talking in 2004 about whether John Kerry shot himself on purpose (Unfit For Command), and in 2007 about the “coming merger with Mexico and Canada” (The Late Great U.S.A.) has just struck New York Times Bestseller List gold with his dumb new book, The Obama Nation. And this one has people asking whether Barack Obama plans to team up with his depraved cousin from Kenya—the Luo politician Raila Odinga—to make your daughters wear burqas and pledge allegiance to Terrorist Law. “Obama-backed ally forged pact with radical Muslims,” was how WorldNet Daily heralded Corsi’s book, “New book details intervention in Kenyan presidential election.”
In the Muslim-rumor laboratories of the Internet, stories have circulated for months of an evil pact—not between Obama and the Wall Street donors you would think to look at, but between Obama and Raila Odinga, Kenya’s goateed socialist opposition leader and Obama’s fellow Luo. In 2007, a disputed election brought on riots and murder, which Corsi would like to blame on the Democratic senator. Odinga, as it turns out, is an Anglican. And his promise to Muslims to blanket Kenya in Islamic sharia law appears only in a document that seems, at first glance, to be a shoddy forgery created by his enemies.
During a 2006 trip to Kenya, the story goes, Obama had campaigned for Odinga, his fellow Luo, so ardently that an government spokesman (representing the corrupt Kibaki regime) had accused the senator of being a “stooge.” Celeste Davis, an influential missionary in Africa who has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, is credited with an e-mail missive that tries to link the Kenya riots to Obama’s alleged true nature as an Islamist who plans to bring on a “race war” akin to the tribal fighting in Kenya. Davis also claimed the senator gave $1 million to help his evil Muslim cousin campaign for a power-sharing agreement. And on Sean Hannity’s site, someone has written: “This puts both Obama and Odinga right up there in a pantheon with Idi Amin!” Which would put George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice up there, too; the president has backed the power-sharing agreement between Odinga and his rival, incumbent Mwai Kibaki, who has become a controversial figure for allowing his constituents to be renditioned to Guantanamo Bay and various abusive countries. It turns out that the supposed $1 million “Friends From Senator BO” donation has been debunked by Snopes. And in a delightful twist, if you want to blame someone for planning the Odinga campaign, you are better off blaming Dick Morris, the campaign consultant and prolific author of Jerome Corsi-esque books about wicked liberals. He was part of the Odinga campaign team, Reuters has reported.
What about Odinga’s shadowy promise to enslave Kenyans under the full weight of sharia Islam? Though this claim has been repeated in a shoddy story by Daniel Johnson in The New York Sun, and elsewhere in the Right Web, the muckraking site Wikileaks cuts through the story pretty quick. It lets us compare two versions of a “Memorandum of Understanding” signed by candidate Odinga. One of them is a nuanced document pledging to work harder to protect Muslim Kenyans from renditions. The other (download it, seriously) is a nutty and crude version of the first one. Someone has inserted Muslim prayers and insha’Allah ‘s all over the place. There are explicit orders to make every child attend a madrassa, recognize sharia as “the only true law” in some regions, outlaw Christian TV, ban liquor, reject “heathens and Zionists.” Odinga, an Anglican, is cast in the world of this zany document as a crypto-Muslim “who recognizes Islam as the only true religion.” It comes across as the Kenyan answer to the Michelle Obama “Whitey Tape.”
And what about Obama’s supposedly outrageous 2006 appearance in Kenya? I imagine that hundreds of Corsi fans are Googling “Obama + Odinga” tonight and deducing, from the sheer volume of nonsense clogging the top Google results, that the senator was down there advocating something luridly tribal and alien. A different picture comes across in coverage of Obama’s visits to Kenya in the conservative Economist or the mainstream CBS, which find Obama pleading for the violence to end and declaring that “ethnic-based tribal politics have to stop.” No mention of any hidden jihadist thrust behind it all, which would be a secret safe with Dick Morris.
Over the weekend, The New York Timesnoted that some of John McCain’s foreign policy advisers from the “realist” camp are uneasy with the amount of influence enjoyed by neoconservatives like Randy Scheunemann, who’s been serving as McCain’s chief foreign policy aide and spokesman.
But it isn’t only his internal rivals who have reason to worry about Scheunemann. Not only does he have McCain’s ear, he also has a track record of being consistently wrong on the major foreign policy question of the day — Iraq. Of all the hawkish Washington foreign-policy types pushing both before and after 9/11 for war with Iraq — a war that an overwhelming majority of Americans now considers a mistake — Scheunemann, though not a marquee name, was among the most energetic and influential. And in the invasion’s aftermath, he consistently opposed steps that might have helped stabilize the country.
And yet, the political press has largely given McCain a pass on the fact that his top foreign policy adviser was at the center of perhaps the biggest strategic folly in our history.
Here, to refresh reporters’ memories, is the rundown on Scheunemann’s Iraq record:
As a top aide to then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott, Scheunemann helped draft — and acted as a driving force behind — the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), which essentially made “regime change” the official Iraq policy of the US. The Act was cited as a key basis of support in the fateful 2002 Congressional resolution authorizing military force, and directly paved the way for President Bush’s invasion.
Scheunemann was a board member of Bill Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, which played a major role in agitating for the war. Scheunemann signed Kristol’s influential letter to President Bush, sent nine days after 9/11, which asserted that failing to respond to the Al Qaeda attack by going after Saddam would “constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.” Scheunemann also served as a “consultant” to Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon while it was planning the war. And in late 2002, Scheunemann, with administration approval, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), an advocacy group with the explicit goal of whipping up pro-war sentiment across the country.
Scheunemann was a crucial Washington backer of Ahmad Chalabi, the now-disgraced Iraqi exile who helped feed the CIA false intelligence on Saddam’s WMD program and has since been accused of giving US state secrets to Iran. In the years leading up to the invasion, the two were so tight that the spokesman for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress shared a Washington address with both CLI and Scheunemann’s private lobbying firm and Scheunemann was mentioned in press reports as a candidate for the job of formal envoy to the Iraqi opposition. During this period, Scheunemann, who acted as a crucial link between Chalabi and John McCain, was a go-to guy for reporters seeking pro-Chalabi quotes. He toldThe New York Times that Chalabi possessed “tremendous attributes that would be of immeasurable benefit to an Iraq in transition to democracy” and separately called him “an Iraqi patriot.”
Like other war supporters, Scheunemann threw caution to the wind in declaring, wrongly, that Saddam had WMD. “There is no doubt Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” he assured Americans a month before the invasion.
Scheunemann also played a key role in lining up support for the invasion from the “Vilnius Ten,” a group of former Soviet bloc countries seeking to gain entry to NATO, some of whom Scheunemann has worked as a paid lobbyist on behalf of. With his partner Bruce Jackson, a Lockheed Martin executive, Scheunemann reportedly gave assurances to the Ten that backing the invasion would help their chances for NATO membership. Ultimately, seven of the ten countries gained entry to NATO, and two of those, Romania and Latvia, employed Scheunemann as a paid lobbyist to promote their applications.
In the invasion’s aftermath, Scheunemann’s judgment proved no more effective. He argued vociferously against giving the UN a significant role in stabilizing Iraq. And he also opposed leaving any members of Saddam’s Baath party in government positions, declaring: “It is very difficult for me to conceive of democratic institutions being established in Iraq with the Baathist power structure mostly intact.” Both of these positions, of course, proved to be disastrous policy blunders, which badly damaged our ability to stabilize Iraq in the crucial early months.
It’s kind of astonishing that McCain continues to be taken seriously on Iraq when his closest adviser has a track record on the issue as atrocious as Scheunemann’s. At the very least, when reporters hang up from their frequent conference calls, arranged by the McCain campaign, in which Scheunemann attacks Barack Obama’s judgment on Iraq, they might want to keep Scheunemann’s own history on the subject in mind.
Late Update: We wrote above, based on a 2004 report in The Los Angeles Times, that the spokesman for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress shared a Washington address with both CLI and Scheunemann’s private lobbying firm. But Entifadh Qanbar, who worked for the INC at the time, told TPM that Scheunemann took over the office space from the INC when the INC moved into new digs.
” … Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle – a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn’t move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face. This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret’s immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera’s studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead … ”
– from Robert Fisk, Independent, 7 Aug, 2008
(This is the second highly sophisticated McCain video product I have featured – RB)
I N F O R M A T I O N A L M E M O R A N D U M
TO: INTERESTED PARTIES
FROM: The Eleison Group (Contact: Eric Sapp)
DATE: Tuesday, August 5, 2008
RE: McCain Campaign Resorts to Scare Tactics in new “The ONE” Ad Choosing Lowest Possible Path to Mislead with Religion, Creating Fear and Division Instead of Unity and Hope
The McCain campaign has responded to initial criticisms about their “THE ONE” ad by saying it was meant merely as a joke poking fun at Obama’s strong support and Messiah-like imagery. But this was not some YouTube video put together in someone’s basement. It was a professionally and carefully produced ad that had a much more sinister subtext that millions of Americans will pick up on. The makers of the ad chose all of Obama’s quotes very carefully and the ad is rife with image after image equating Senator Obama to the anti-Christ, and especially to Nicolae Carpathia, the anti-Christ in the popular Left Behind series.
This is the use of religion at its very worst in politics because it is an attempt to subtly and perhaps even subconsciously play on some of the deepest fears of millions of evangelical Americans. From the title of the ad (that immediately reminds anyone familiar with the Left Behind series of the name of the false church set up by the anti-Christ) to the quotes (with no respect to context) and images that the McCain camp chose to use, which basically allude to every symbol of the anti-Christ possible short of flashing 666 on the screen, this ad is an attempt to stir up already circulating falsehoods about Obama and add more fuel to the fire.
The McCain campaign clearly believes that Democrats and the press will not be attuned enough with the people who bought over 70 million copies of Left Behind to realize what is happening. But as with apocalyptic writing that can seem just plain odd until one really studies them and understands the symbolism and contextual language of the time, there are numerous parts of this ad that make no sense in a high-budget presidential ad unless they are understood for what they really are: attempts to scare people with contextually bankrupt scriptural and Obama quotes and imagery tied together to send messages of fear that Obama is somehow the anti-christ.
Even the chosen format as an internet ad allows for it to blasted out to targeted religious populations that will immediately recognize its significance and forward it on to others in their community so that the whispers and innuendo can continue in dark corners outside the scrutiny of the general public who would be horrified by such tactics.
Our goal with this memo is to expose the McCain campaign’s lies they disseminate in darkness with the light of public scrutiny and the scriptural facts they quietly distort and use to mislead.
Lest people simply dismiss this ad as pandering to a small subset of people “who would never vote for us anyway,” here are some facts on how predominant and wide-spread the Premillenialist (also known as Darbyist or dispensationalist—see attached background memo for more info) views are…A Time Magazine poll that came out after the 9/11 attacks found that 1 in 5 Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime; 1 in 4 felt 9/11 was predicted in Revelation; and 1 in 3 Americans who support Israel said they do so because they believe Israel must reconquer the Promised Land for Christ to return.
The Left Behind series has sold nearly 70 MILLION books (plus a 40-book children’s series, graphic novels, books on tape, movies, etc). Another recent poll found that 3 of 4 Americans believed that the Left Behind series accurately depicted the events described in the Book of Revelation, although less than half believed that was an accurate description of how the world would end.
And a simple search for “Obama anti-christ” or “Obama Nicolae Carpathia” turns up numerous hits and bloggers commenting about how many people came to their posts doing just that search. This is a real phenomenon being put forth and encouraged by modern day false prophets and now we see coming to light in the McCain campaign’s TV ad.
Go to any “end times” website that explains how we will recognize the anti-christ, and most will begin by explaining how he will be a charismatic figure and moving speaker based on the description in Revelation 13:5 that the anti-christ will be given a “mouth speaking great things.” He is initially seen as a blessing to the world that unites it and brings it out of a period of great economic hardship and war.
Below, we break the ad up into its different parts to more easily highlight and explain the numerous allusions to Obama as anti-Christ.
NARRATOR: It should be known that in 2008 the world shall be blessed. They will call him The One.
In The Left Behind series, the false religion set up by Nicolae Carpathia (the anti-christ) is called THE ONE World Religion. Nicolae Carpathia began his political career as a young junior Senator who, with Satan’s help, then embarked on a meteoric political rise by preaching unity, hope, and peace in the midst of world-wide calamity following the Rapture. “[the beast] was given authority over every tribe and people and language and nation, and all the inhabitants of the earth will worship it…” Rev 13:7.
OBAMA: A nation healed, a world repaired…we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.
In the Left Behind Series, the slogan of the One World Religion is, “We are God.” What is very explicit in this line, which is taken out of context from one of Obama’s speeches and placed into a religious context here, is the insistence that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Throughout the Bible, Christians are taught that their hope must be in Christ alone. Especially in apocalyptic writings, good Christians are called to turn away from the teachings of false prophets and wait upon Christ to deliver them from the period of tribulation. “For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall show signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.” Mark 13:22 “The man of lawlessness…will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God and worshiped”. 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 “You [Lucifer] said in your heart’ “I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God… I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” Isaiah 14: 13-14
NARRATOR: And he has anointed himself ready to carry the burden of The One. To quote Barack: “I have become a symbol of America returning to our best traditions.” He can do no wrong.
Viewers will notice how similar the very odd pictures that appear in the middle of the McCain ad are to the cover art and fonts of the Left Behind series, especially to the image and colors of the final book in the series that would be most recent in reader’s memories. The hidden images in the clouds and sun in the ad, which took a great deal of editing and are so strange that they had to be intentionally chosen and placed there by the McCain camp for their symbolic value, are of screaming, frantic crowds. One image has a man holding his hand up in a fist, which will evoke black power and Olympic protests, and another has a stair leading to heaven.
CBS NEWS CORRESPONDENT LARA LOGAN: Do you have any doubts?
OBAMA: Never.
NARRATOR: Can you see the light?
OBAMA: A light will shine down from somewhere. It will alight upon you. You will experience an epiphany and you will say to yourself, “I have to vote for Barack.”
“Then I saw another beast….that exercised authority on the part of the first to make the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast…it performs great signs, even making fire come down from heaven to alight on the earth in the sight of all; and by the signs it is allowed to perform on behalf of the beast, it deceives the inhabitants of earth…and it caused all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead.” Rev 13:11-16. An excerpt from Left Behind which is a good example of how the anti-Christ is constantly described in the books as he fools the people during his rise to power from junior Senator to world ruler:
“I wouldn’t feel this way about anybody else [but Carpathia]. No U.S. president could turn my head like this, no U.N. secretary-general.”
“You think he’ll be bigger than that.”
“The world is ready for Carpathia, Buck. You were there Monday. You saw it. You heard it. Have you ever met anyone like him?”
“No.”
“You never will again, either. If you ask me, Romania is too small for him.
Europe is too small for him. The U.N. is too small for him.”
“What’s he gonna be, Steve, king of the world?”
Steve laughed, “That won’t be the title, but don’t put it past him. The best part is, he’s not even aware of his own presence. He doesn’t seek these roles. They are thrust upon him because of his intellect, his power, his passion.”
NARRATOR: And the world will receive his blessings. “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Christ, and will deceive many…if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect ” Matt 24:4-24
OBAMA: This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
CHARLTON HESTON AS MOSES: Behold His mighty hand! [visual of seas parting and Obama seal rising from the sea as supporters chant “Obama, Obama” in background]
The Moses reference could be a joke about Obama leading people to the promised land, but why did the makers of this ad chose this very odd quote about the oceans and create this very odd image of parting the Red Sea to have the Obama logo come floating out? That doesn’t make sense unless one understands that it is always from the sea that the anti-Christ comes… “Then the dragon took his stand on the sand of the seashore, and I saw a beast rising out of the sea…and the dragon gave it his power and his throne and great authority…they worshipped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” Rev 12:18-13:4. “And I saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, and four great beasts came out of the sea.” Daniel 7:2-3.
NARRATOR: Barack Obama MAY BE THE ONE. But is he ready to lead?
Niqnaq 