I have been preparing an article on Wikileak’s contribution to the anti-Clinton crusade, a united front of extreme right and extreme left conspiracy theorists and just plain liars. Here is a foretaste:
The Wikileak Claim
On August 1, Wikileak’s Twitter fed us this morsel:
Summary of the What Is Wrong with this Tweet
- Lafarge did business in an area which was occupied by ISIS and was pressured to pay bribes and taxes to ISIS. There is no record of how much, if any, money Lafarge actually donated to ISIS.
- Hillary Clinton did business with Lafarge a quarter of a century before ISIS came into being and had no responsibility for what decisions Lafarge made in 2015.
- The claim that Lafarge, and hence Hillary Clinton, had anything to do with Iraqgate, is based on the uncorroborated word of a lawyer who had worked with Lafarge, who has claimed that documents existed showing that Lafarge was a crucial link in the Iraqgate scandal. The fact is, no such documents have ever been produced. Further, the article cited to prove this in Wikipedia’s source is a publicist for the American and Israeli far-right, published by a rightist journal which made a career out of spreading lurid Clinton conspiracy theories.
- This tweet is therefore cheap sensationalism that no one with any sense will have anything to do with and heaps discredit upon those who were involved in it.
Now let’s dissect these claims in detail.
Piece One: Nafeez Ahmed Is Shocked, Shocked
The article from The Canary linked to in this post is by the journalist Nafeez Ahmed; the treatment of his complex form of advocacy journalism beyond this post. His biggest claim to fame was a May 2015 article claiming that a declassified Pentagon document was a sort of smoking gun which proved that the Americans were well aware that their Syrian policy would lead to a rise of Islamic extremism, and that this would be a positive outcome. A rather self-congratulatory review of his own work “overlooked” a damning criticism of it by Juan Cole, who was, unfortunately, a voice in the wilderness of credulity.
The Canary piece starts strong: “The City of Paris has struck a corporate partnership with French industrial giant, Lafarge, recently accused of secretly sponsoring the Islamic State (Isis or Daesh) for profit.” The very next line takes it down a notch: It paid taxes to ISIS to keep functioning. This would make Nafeez Ahmed an agent of the British imperialism for paying his taxes, I suppose, but let’s agree that this is problematic.
ISIS Oils Lafarge
The Canary provides an original (undated) source from Zaman al-Wasl (See the original Arabic sources dated February 16 and 25, 2016, here and here; a third part was promised by a search for it came up empty. See also a June 22, 2016, article in this journal published after Le Monde carried its own revelations several months later. The English translation is very weak but adequately covers the main points made in the Arabic originals.) detailing LaFarge’s history of business in north-east Syria. A far better source is the Le Monde mentioned by the author of the Canary piece (and which he accused of getting most of its material from Zaman al-Wasl, although he he gives no direct reference to it and clearly hadn’t read it; at one point, he writes, “But the Le Monde story only covered a fraction of the revelations. Previous investigations by Zaman al-Wasl, an independent news outlet run by elements of the Syrian opposition, revealed that Lafarge had even regularly bought oil from Isis.” Had he bothered to read the Le Monde story, he’d have seen that it said, “Lafarge passait donc par des intermédiaires et des négociants qui commercialisaient le pétrole raffiné par l’EI [ISIS], contre le paiement d’une licence et le versement de taxes.”)
The Le Monde story says that the cement plant was acquired in 2007, years before the outbreak of fighting in Syria in 2011, by Assad family capital and the capital of a prominent Egyptian investor. The article adds that, valued at over half a billion euros, it represented the most important foreign enterprise in Syria outside of the oil industry.
The enterprise went well even two years into the war. First, it was protected by the central government’s armed forces, then, in the summer of 2012, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). Finally, in March 2014, when ISIS closed in on it, it was forced to open negotiations with the jihadis to secure the safety of its employees and its supply lines. The arrangements made were of necessity kept hidden from Damascus, management rehearsing various excuses, such as by keeping it alive, Lafarge was securing a steady flow of tax income and cement to the central government. (This excuse is hard to understand; according to Le Monde‘s examination of the routes issued by ISIS to the truck drivers, the cement stayed in ISIS-held or -contested territory.) The factory’s director, a Baath party cadre, only hoped that the government would understand Lafarge’s position and agree that these were necessary to keep this major foreign investment alive under very adverse conditions. On the other hand, both Le Monde‘s account indicates that Lafarge’s Paris office was kept in daily contact concerning these unsavory dealings. The first article in the series published in Zaman al-Wasl includes facsimiles of the original emails and correctly states that they indicate that Lafarge was buying oil from illegitimate sources and was concerned with the government cracking down on it.)
In any case, by September 2014, the factory had to be abandoned and was looted by ISIS (as mentioned in the second article in the Zaman al-Wasl series as well). When a shady “consultant” whom Lafarge hired proposed a deal with ISIS in which Lafarge would pay a 15% tax to stay open, it declined. He repeated this offer in person to Lafarge’s French office. The offer was ill-timed. It was presented on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack. Lafarge itself made the decision in February to cut off all relations, no matter how indirect, with ISIS. By then, ISIS fled the area around the factory, chased off by the YPG.
(In the second article in this series, Zaman al-Wasl writes about ISIS’s seizure of Lafarge’s stockpiles of hydrazine, a chemical used in its industrial production of cement, when the plant fell into its hands, but which is also very useful in making rockets and other weapons. Since it is hard to see how Lafarge has any culpability in this matter, we only indicate that this chemical was smuggled over the Turkish border and was thus obtained by illegal methods. The final article promised in the series refers to Lafarge’s aid to Yazidi refugees and neglect of Muslim refugees.)
It should be pointed out that in all this time, the factory director was known as a Baath Party cadre and close to the government. He did not consider doing business via ISIS to be an act of treason to the Party; his only concern, as I have pointed out, was that, should the government find out about it, he could convince it that it was in its interests, too, according to Le Monde‘s sources.
Indeed, documents captured from ISIS indicated that its oil sales to Damascus “contribut[ed] 72 percent of $289.5 million the group earned in natural-resource revenues in the six months preceding February 2015.” U.S. Treasury Department official Adam Szubin claimed last December that the Assad government has purchased some half a billion dollars worth of ISIS oil in 2015.
It should also be remembered that this sort of thing has been going on in Afghanistan for year after year; indeed, “[i]n Afghanistan, one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country.”
Piece Two: Hillary Clinton in Iraqgate
But Lafarge has another, more shady, bit of history in its involvement in the Middle East.
Iraq Gate
First, let’s recall a forgotten episode in American political history.
During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), the Reagan administration, became increasingly concerned that the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was going to overrun Iraq. In June 1982, after the Iranian forces substantially drove Iraqi forces out of Iran, IRI decided to carry the war into Iraq. Iraqi troops were thrown on the defensive, and soon, its second city, Basra, was besieged. IRI launched scores of powerful attacks; were it not for support from the conservative Arab regimes and many Western powers, the Iraqi Baath dictatorship could well have been overthrown and Iraq would’ve been reduced to an Iranian vassal state. This, of course, was a nightmare scenario to the West in general and the United States in particular. The Reagan administration instituted a tilt toward Iraq. (For further reading, see Kenneth R. Timmerman’s The Death Lobby, which highlights Germany and France’s role in arming Iraq and has very little on the Reagan and Bush administration’s role, and a well–received Spider’s Web : The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq (which I haven’t read yet) by Alan Friedman (who was invited “to brief staffers of the Senate Intelligence Committee about allegations” contained in his work. Sam Vincent Meddis, “‘Iraqgate’ figure accuses U.S.“, USA Today, November 10, 1993).)
As it happened, the Bush administration become enamored of a strategy of wooing Saddam away from the Soviet bloc and continue this policy long after the Iran-Iraq war ended in June 1988, ignoring the fact that it was creating a monster.
Stubborn journalists, members of the Democratic Party, along with pro-Israeli Republican activists such as William Safire, started digging into what was being increasingly seen as an illegal effort at arming a brutal dictatorship.
Enter Hillary Clinton?
In the meantime Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. The state was, to put it simply, an impoverished backwater and Clinton was one of the good old boys who ran it. The blood money prison scandal, now forgotten, which resulted in the death of thousands gives one insight into the utter amorality of this young but hungry power couple.
Hillary Clinton’s six year selection to become a member of the board of directors of Walmart shows that her strongest features were, aside from her gender and her legal talents, her simply being part of this power couple. This is apparently what got her a position at Lafarge, a business based in Virginia and had a problematic operation in northern Ohio but nothing in the way of business in Arkansas.
What got Hillary the Lafarge job? Bill and Hillary Clinton were inducted into the French-American Foundation (FAF) in 1984 and 1983, respectively. (FAF was founded by Tuck in 1975 in order to overcome French anti-Americanism and American French-bashing. Its elite quality–many of France’s (and America’s) leaders come from this organization, have made it a speculation of the French far right, a bit like the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States.) It was apparently through their acquaintance with its founder, the late Edward Tuck, who was also supposedly on the board of Lafarge, that Hillary got appointed to Lafarge Corporation’s board of directors. (None of his obituaries I have found make any mention of this.) (There is confusion in the literature on the subject. Hillary was not put on the board of directors of the international conglomerate Lafargue, but it’s American subsidiary, Lafarge Corporation. For a history of the latter, see here.) Hillary’s income from Lafarge, $31,000 per year out of the total $100,000 she was earning for her legal and corporate work.
All of this is important because of a whistle blower, Marianne Gasior, whose story is adequately told here and, even better, here. She becomes of particular interest for this article of her claim that Hillary Clinton played an important role in the conspiracy American sales of militarizable materiel to Iraq and a key role in its cover-up. She first raised this in public in her July 1996 open letter to Treasury Secretary Richard Rubin, which bears close reading since it is a pivotal document in this article.
This letter claims that the investigation has unearthed “evidence detailing the path of the shipments out of the U.S. via the Ordnance Center located on Lafarge’s premises on Marbelhead Pennisula.” A google search of the internet and a Lexis-Nexis search of the press through 1996 for the terms Lafarge Iraq came up empty.
Timmerman’s piece is an odd one. Its main contribution to the discourse on Iraqgate is to blame Hillary Clinton for covering it up, either because she wanted to protect the CIA from embarrassment (pp. 36, 37), or to have herself protected from embarrassment, since she was on the board of a company which had some relationship to the sales of military goods to Saddam (p. 37). If it’s the former, it shows what an unprincipled and selfish opportunist she is. If the latter, it shows her husband, at least had a previously unsuspected proximity to the cloak and dagger crowd. (p. 41) In between these two extremes, we find the author arguing that the Democratic Party’s lack of interest in Iraqgate after the elections was just a matter of their having used the whole issue for purely political gain in the first place, and now that they were in office, it was of no interest to them any more or, alternately, it was just a case of the CIA covering its behind and being too powerful to take on (pp. 37-38)–in which case, all this energy Timmerman expended on pinning the cover up on Hillary (or Bill) was for nothing.
In order to make the case that Hillary Clinton played a crucial role in the coverup, he has Marianne Gasior claim that Lafarge Corporation “provided key services for the covert arms export network that supplied Saddam Hussein.” He proves this by saying that “investigators from other U.S. government agencies who worked on the case say they were “waved off” whenever they got too close to exposing the involvement of the intelligence community in the Iraq export scheme.” But this is, of course, a total non sequitur. He then quotes her as saying that Lafarge’s Marblehead property was used as a transshipment point of potentially military goods to Canada, whence it was shipped to Churchill Matrix, an Iraqi military front. Gasior is again quoted as saying that the Iraqgate investigation into these facilities because the “soon-to-be-first lady” was on Lafarge’s board of directors. But up through early 1992, Clinton was not taken seriously as a candidate. What is distinctly odd about all this is that this is the first ad only time that Gasior mentions the allegedly crucial role Clinton played in the cover up of Iraqgate (depending on which of the several narratives Timmerman pursues in this five-page article!) This certainly requires an explanation on her part. Finally, what sense does it make to hire the wife of someone from from the Democratic Party, which was conduction a vigorous effort to expose Iranqate, and put her in a position to blow the whole operation wide open?
The incoherence of this piece becomes comprehensible when you understand that the American Spectator is an anti-Clinton disinformation site. And Timmerman himself, once a respected researcher, has made a pitch for the cheapest and most tawdry right-wing fear-mongering propaganda.
As opposed to this jumble of contradictory narratives, the simplest story is the almost certainly the true one. Hillary was hired for the job at Lafarge because she met a certain criterion for competence and had made the right social connections. In addition, she was young, hungry, and ambitious and could be expected to be a good team player. She would need these qualities. Lafarge’s big problem in the public eye was not its alleged integration into Iraqgate, but its environmental criminality. One of the technologies it was pioneering was the incineration of toxic waste. This technology was very imperfect and it led to disastrous. As the Washington Post wrote,
Lafarge, a U.S. cement maker owned by a French conglomerate, was one of her largest sources of income, paying her $31,000 a year to serve on its board. Shortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant. A year later, the Clinton administration reduced that fine to less than $600,000. Hillary Clinton had left the board in spring 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination.
Michigan: Lafarge-Systech Cement Kiln now burns about 50,000 tons of hazardous waste a year, right on Lake Huron. The entire community of Alpena is virtually a Superfund site because of a thousand tons of toxic, contaminated cement kiln dust. It’s the largest off-site hazardous incinerator in Michigan, and the largest cement kiln cement-producing facility in the entire country. Hillary Clinton used to sit on the board of Lafarge.
See also here, here, and here. (Hillary Clinton had previously had a close relationship with a major Ohio polluter, having done legal work in the 1980s for Waste Technologies Industries–see here, here, here, and here—run by their buddy Jackson Stevens. )