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Today's
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September
25, 2003
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
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September
26, 2003
Gold Warriors
The
Plundering of Asia
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
Gold Warriors is
more than a book about Japan's "serious, sober and deliberate"
plundering of Asia's treasure from 1895 until 1945, and its collusion
after the war with American officials to recover and use the
loot as a secret political action slush fund to promote right
wing regimes: Gold
Warriors:America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold
is a journey into the darkest recesses of history and the
human soul. Authors Peggy and Sterling Seagrave not only unravel
one of the greatest crimes and cover-ups ever, they reveal something
new and startling about the depths of human depravity and barbarity,
and the human capacity for deceit.
The book begins in 1895 with a fascinating
account of the grisly assassination of Korea's Queen Min by terrorists
posing as business agents of Japanese companies. The clever
coup d'etat provides Japan with official deniability, and the
confusion that follows provides the Japanese with a pretext for
its military occupation and plundering of Korea. Japan's brutal
conquest of Korea foretells how it will achieve one victory after
another in Far East Asia over the ensuing 45 years.
The next victory occurs in 1904, when
tiny Japan defeats Russia and annexes Southern Manchuria. Manchuria,
unlike Korea, has little gold worth stealing. But it is rich
in natural resources, so the Japanese settle in for the long
haul, and slowly develop Manchuria over several decades. They
build roads and create industries and, more importantly, they
work with corrupt warlords and Chinese gangsters associated with
Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Party to transform Manchuria into
a vast poppy field. By 1937 the Japanese and their  gangster and Kuomintang associates are
responsible for 90% of the world's illicit narcotics. They turn
Manchu emperor Pu Yi into an addict, and open thousands of opium
dens as a way of suppressing the Chinese. When subversion and
propaganda don't get the job done they commit unspeakable atrocities.
In late 1937 and early 1938 the Japanese slaughter an estimated
350,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in Nanking. Tens
of thousands of women and girls are raped, and many are mutilated
or murdered. Nanking foretells what will happen as Japan expands
its empire to include Indochina, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.
It's also with the Rape of Nanking that
the authors introduce the main characters in the book; the Japanese
soldiers, crime lords, and officials who, by the December 1941
attack on Pearl Harbor, realize they have bitten off more than
they chew, and begin their retreat to Japan. A small inner circle
becomes responsible for securing billions of dollars worth of
gold, platinum, cultural artifacts and precious gems stolen over
the previous 45 years. The Japanese call this operation Golden
Lily, and the Seagraves do not shy away from naming those involved.
They finger General Doihara, and Japan's top yakuza gangster,
Kodama Yoshio, both of whom worked closely with Chinese drug
smugglers in Manchuria and Shanghai. Golden Lily's overall boss
is Prince Chichibu, one of Emperor Hirohito's three brothers.
The Kempeitai were Golden Lily's first agents, moving 6000 metric
tons of gold from Nanking to Japan in 1938. But most of the
Golden Lily treasure was buried in the Philippines by General
Yamashita, and it is in the Philippines that most of the action
in the book takes place.
When the Seagraves claim that their lives
are in danger for having written this book, they aren't kidding.
This is explosive material, for they not only name the Japanese
involved in Golden Lily, they name the Japanese corporations,
including Nissan, Mitsui (which processed Manchurian opium into
heroin in the 1930s), Mitsubishi and Sumitomo as having used
American POWs as slave laborers during the war. They also name
the Americans who worked with the Japanese to recover the buried
loot after World War II. The Japanese had no monopoly on deceit
or disregard for human suffering, and some of these Americans
conspired with the Japanese to deny reparations to the POWs,
sex slaves and forced laborers that survived.
The reader will learn how, in order to
share in the plunder, members of General Douglas MacArthur's
occupation army, along with US government officials and banks,
connived to absolve Japanese corporations, war criminals and
drug smugglers many prominent officials in the Post War
government of responsibility for these ghastly crimes.
How the Americans went about this is very interesting. To ensure
his silence, General Yamashita was hanged by a military tribunal
in February 1946, while his right hand man, Kojima, was tortured
by a Filipino, Santa Romana, into revealing where the treasure
vaults were buried in the Philippines. Romana then guided CIA
officer Edward Lansdale to the loot. Lansdale did a quick inventory,
and for the next 20 years supervised Romana, the unlikely front
man for a number of slush funds. Thereafter the purloined gold
was moved through 176 accounts in 42 banks in several countries,
to people and organizations the CIA wanted to secretly support.
The Americans viewed this money as a
War prize, and every American president from Harry Truman to
George W. Bush has used the slush funds for various purposes.
Truman, through a number of his top aides close to the Harrimans
and the Rockefellers, set up the Black Eagle Trust Fund to fight
communism. General MacArthur set up the Yotsuya Fund to finance
Japan's yakuza underworld, and one of his aides set up the M-Fund
to help reconstruct Japan and turn it into an economic powerhouse.
Eisenhower used the M-Fund to help create Japan's Liberal Democratic
Party in 1956, and in 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon turned
over M-Fund over to Japan's Prime Minister, Kishi Nobosuke, in
return for kickbacks Nixon used to help finance his presidential
campaign. Carter, Reagan, Clinton and both Bushes were complicit,
using Golden Lily slush fund money to buy elections in nations
all around the world. George W. got into the act in March 2001,
sending Navy SEAL commandos to the Philippines to recover a portion
of General Yamashita's gold. Bush was privately in the market
to buy some of the bullion that was being recovered. His representative
was William S. Parish, his nominee as ambassador to Great Britain,
and the manager of his blind trust
Most of the action in the book takes
place in the Philippines, where the Japanese buried much of the
Golden Lily loot in 175 vaults in and around Manila. Prince
Takeda Tsuneyoshi (using the nomme de guerre, Kimsu) was in charge
in Northern Luzon and gave maps to his Filipino aid, Ben, indicating
where the vaults were located. Kimsu swore Ben to secrecy, but
gradually the maps slipped out and in 1971, a treasure hunter
named Roxas unearthed several gold bars and a Golden Buddha that,
amazingly, weighed a ton. Word of the discovery reached Philippine
President Ferdinand Marcos and soon thereafter Roxas was arrested,
tortured, and imprisoned, and Marcos acquired the Golden Buddha.
Marcos, notably, had been working with the CIA for years using
Golden Lily assets to bribe nations to support the Vietnam War.
In return for services rendered, Marcos was allowed to sell
over $1 trillion in gold through Australian brokers.
By the 1970s, rumors about General Yamashita's
gold had grabbed the imagination of a number on treasure hunters
and in 1975, Robert Curtis acquired copies of Kimsu's maps.
Financed by far right wing John Birch Society, and working with
cutthroat Ferdinand Marcos, Curtis joined with Ben and Japan's
Lord Ichiwara to find the remainder of the loot. Alas, the partners
were mutually untrustworthy and Curtis, like Roxas, ran into
trouble. But the dangers of hunting for buried Japanese gold
in the Philippines did not dissuade others, and in the mid-1980s
a group of disgruntled former CIA officers and military men,
including Generals John Singlaub and Robert Schweitzer, organized
an expedition using former Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces
personnel. One member of the team, Charles McDougald, actually
recovered 325 metric tons of gold in 1987, although, as one might
suspect, he found himself in trouble too.
The Seagraves conclude their exciting
and excellent book by taking us down the Money Trail, and explaining,
in layman's terms, how the Gold Warriors have been able to cover
their tracks. Emperor Hirohito, for example, worked directly
with Pope Pius XII to launder money through the Vatican bank.
In another instance, Japan's Ministry of Finance produced gold
certificates that were slightly different than ordinary Japanese
bonds. The Seagraves interview persons defrauded in this scam,
and other scams involving the Union Bank of Switzerland and Citibank.
Without descending into convoluted legalese,
the Seagraves describe the devious means bankers have used to
conceal the vast hordes of Nazi and Japanese gold in their possession.
The Seagraves do this primarily by examining multi-million-dollar
lawsuits filed by Roxas, Curtis, and Santa Romana's heirs against
Citibank, the US government, and Philippine President Ferdinand
Marcos. In this way the Seagraves reveal how the banks use complex
accounting methods, or claim that gold certificates are fake,
or simply move gold to offshore accounts to conceal it. In every
case the US government assists the banks by stonewalling, refusing
to investigate, or ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests.
In one noteworthy case, attorney W.R.
"Cotton" Jones walked into the Swiss Bank Corporation
in New York City and asked the bank to authenticate a $25 million
certificate of deposit issued by the Bank and bearing the Federal
Reserve seal. Cotton was quickly arrested by the Secret Service
and his certificates were confiscated. As Cotton rhetorically
asks, how can a Swiss bank have a federal agency intervene on
its behalf and confiscate personal possessions? What right does
the Secret Service have to arrest, interrogate, intimidate, and
threaten anyone on a Swiss bank's behalf, without due process
of law?
The answer is obvious: the banks that
maintain the US government's stolen gold are above the law, and
if they stonewall long enough, anyone trying to sue them will
eventually fade away. The Seagraves asked the Treasury Department,
Defense Department, and the CIA for records on Yamashita's gold
in 1987, but were told the records were exempt from release.
During the 1990s, the records mysteriously went missing. Other
records were destroyed in what the Seagraves caustically call
"history laundering."
Throughout the book, the writing is descriptive
and engaging. Having authored several books about the Far East,
the Seagraves are experts in their field and their arguments
are convincing. In fact, they have compiled so much supporting
evidence that many of the documents are contained on companion
CDs the reader can buy separately at the Seagraves' web site.
There are two CDs, the first containing eleven files. This
writer examined three of them on Lansdale, Kodama, and
Golden Lily and found them utterly fascinating. The second
CD contains 19 files, many concerning the various lawsuits the
Seagraves have used as evidence to prove their case.
And they do more than prove their case.
In the end, Gold Warriors transcends its subject matter,
and its great triumph is that it tells us something new about
the savage and avaricious side of human nature. The reader will
walk away from this book astounded and outraged at the immensity
of the fraudulent activities that the world's governments, banks,
and spies are engaged in. Gold Warriors is chilling in
its accumulation.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The
Hotel Tacloban, The
Phoenix Program, and TDY.
His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau
of Narcotics, 1930-1968,
will be published in May 2004. His latest article, "Whose
Homeland Security", appeared in the July 2003 issue of Penthouse
Magazine.
For information about Mr. Valentine,
and his books and articles, please visit his web sites at www.DouglasValentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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