FYI - I've been tilting at more local windmills. Here's a letter I'm hosting re an alleged local political/corruption problem with the River Park Square (Parking Garage) in Spokane, WA

RBT

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From: "Timothy J. Connor" < tjccamas@comcast.net>
Date: August 29, 2007 9:33:23 PM PDT
To: apspokane@ap.org
Subject: Letter to DOJ, FBI, SEC

The attached letter from former Spokane City Councilwoman Cherie Rodgers and me lays out the primary basis for criminal securities fraud indictments in the River Park Square case. It was sent earlier today to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, FBI Director Robert Mueller III, and SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. Mrs. Rodgers and I believe a broad and thorough federal criminal investigation into fraud, money laundering, conspiracy and public corruption is warranted by the evidence that has been gathered by RPS bondholders, the Internal Revenue Service's Tax Exempt Bond Unit, former City special counsel O. Yale Lewis, and others.

The new letter is a followup to our August 19th letter and reports to U.S. Attorney James A. McDevitt. (The McDevitt package can now be found on the Camasmagazine.com website, with all 50-plus evidentiary exhibits, under McDevitt's Fingerprints). Mr. McDevitt quickly recused himself upon receipt of the letter because of his direct involvement, as an attorney with Preston Gates, in closing the River Park Square garage transaction on behalf of the bogus non-profit corporation established to buy the garage from Cowles real estate companies. Mrs. Rodgers and I welcome that development, and expect indictments to follow from an independent federal investigation.

The RPS case involves a very complicated white collar crime, and for that reason it's easy to get distracted by generalized speculation and ad hominem commentary. But both of us believe the public discussion of the allegations can benefit by focusing on certain aspects of the alleged crimes, and the specificity of the evidence. The charges are serious. But so are the facts we've presented and will continue to present. With this new letter to federal officials who have clear responsibility for securities fraud, we've laid out ten clear factual misrepresentations and omissions of material facts from the September 1998 Official Statement on the $31,465,000 bond issue. We think an objective reading of the evidence removes any doubt that indictments should have been filed by now against those responsible for the fraudulent misrepresentations in the OS. In our letter, we are asking to meet personally with the federal investigators who will handle the new inquiry.

All the referenced exhibits can be found on the Camas website. I'm attaching to this email one previously unpublished exhibit, which is a December 4, 1996 letter from John Moore of Prudential Securities that was sent to former RPS project manager Bob Robideaux and an official with the City of Spokane. The significance of this new exhibit is discussed in item #9 of the letter and it supports a serious charge made in 2003 by Gary Ceriani, the attorney for Nuveen, Vanguard and other bondholders. The OS claimed that only Standard & Poor's was approached for a bond rating on the garage bonds. Moore's memo, in our view, clearly shows that this was untrue. It's doubtful that the RPS garage deal could have been pulled off if unwitting securities buyers knew that Moody's refused (as it did) to rate the bonds as investment grade securities. . .

Tim Connor

RC 82907 ltr.s.PDF

Moore ltr..PDF

This is a must read, rich with embedded links view of Iraq War from alternative media resources.

RBT

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The Big Picture(s) [Karl]

This post is not short. Accordingly, everyone can get a head start on it while I get the links posted.

In the midst of the still-lingering controversy over the truthiness of The New Republic’s “Baghdad Diarist,” more than a few people suggested that war supporters, unable to discredit the real bad news coming from Iraq, targeted the Scott Thomas Beauchamp stories as a weak link. I cannot speak for everyone who supports the mission in Iraq, but I would submit that Beauchamp’s apparent fables and embellishments are not a “weak link” to be attacked, but simply an egregious example of the establishment media’s flawed coverage of the conflict. Accordingly, what follows is an over view of the establishment media coverage of the conflict in Iraq.

Though public opinion polls consistently show that Americans consider Iraq to be the most important issue facing the country, establishment media has slashed the resources and time devoted to Iraq. The number of embedded reporters plunged from somewhere between 570 and 750 when the invasion began in March 2003 to as few as nine by October 2006. The result was the rise of what journalists themselves call “hotel journalism” and “journalism by remote control.” Janet Reitman, reporting for Rolling Stone, described the state of the media in early 2004:

When I arrive in Baghdad in April, most American journalists are holed up in their rooms, reporting the war by remote: scanning the wires, working their cell phones, watching broadcasts of Al Jazeera. In many cases, they’ve been reduced to relying on sources available to anyone with an Internet connection… While Arabic and European media such as The Guardian and Le Monde manage to cover the war on the ground, American reporters seldom interview actual Iraqis. Instead, they talk to U.S. officials who are every bit as isolated as they are, or rely on local stringers and fixers, several of whom have been killed while working for Americans. “We live in a bubble,” grumbles one AP reporter. “If we know one percent of what’s going on in Iraq, we’re lucky.”

[...]