Geert Wilders: "It"s Time To Drain The Swamp... In Europe"

Authored by Geert Wilders via The Gatestone Institute,

• Our democracies in the Western half of Europe have been subverted. Their goal is no longer to do what the people want. On the contrary, our political elites often do exactly the opposite. Our parliaments promote open-door policies that the majority of the people reject. Our governments sell out sovereignty to the EU against the will of the people. Our rulers welcome ever more Islam, although the majority of the people oppose it.


• Our democracies have become fake democracies. They are multi-party dictatorships, ruled by groups of establishment parties.... The establishment parties control everything, not just the politicians in their pay, but also the top brass of the civil service, the mainstream media, even the courts.... They call us "populists" because we stand for what the people want. They even drag us to court.


• We need to show that Europe"s streets are our streets, that we want to stay who and what we are, and do not want to be colonized by Islam. Europe belongs to us!

Next month, I will be visiting Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. I have been invited to speak to a group of Czech patriots. The Czechs are a freedom loving people. In 2011, on the occasion of the 100^th birthday of Ronald Reagan, they named a street in Prague after this great American president and freedom fighter.

This fact reminded me of a shameful event in my home town of The Hague, the seat of the Dutch Parliament and the government of the Netherlands. Look for a Ronald Reagan Street in The Hague and you will find none. A proposal in 2011 to name a street in The Hague after Reagan ran into fierce political opposition. Leftist parties, such as Labor, the Greens and the liberal D66 party, argued that naming a street in honor of Reagan would "do the image of the city no good." The whole affair ended in a disgraceful political compromise. Last year, a short stretch of a local bicycle path was named the "Reagan and Gorbachev Lane".

This anecdote is indicative of the difference between East and West in Europe. We can see the same difference in the attitude of their ruling elites towards Islam, the new totalitarianism that is threatening Europe today. In the East, political leaders oppose Islam; in the West, they surrender.

Islam has already gained a strong foothold in Western Europe. Its streets have come to resemble the Middle East, with headscarves everywhere. Parts of Western Europe, such as the Schilderswijk district in The Hague, the Molenbeek borough in Brussels, the banlieues [suburbs] of Paris, Birmingham in Britain, the Rosengård area in Malmö, Sweden, and many other neighborhoods, have become hotbeds of Islamic subversion.

Islam"s totalitarian nature cannot be denied. The command to murder and terrorize non-Muslims is in the Koran. Islam"s prophet Muhammad was a mass murderer and a pedophile. Those who leave Islam supposedly deserve death. And everyone who criticizes Islam and exposes what it actually says, ends up like me: on an Islamic death list.

In the past decades, Islam has entered Western Europe with the millions of immigrants from Islamic countries. Now, the European Union wants to distribute third-world immigrants over all the 28 EU member states. The nations in Central and Eastern Europe reject the EU plans to impose permanent and mandatory relocation quotas for all EU member states. They warn about the dilution of their identity, which is not Islamic, but Judeo-Christian and humanist -- rooted in the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome; not Mecca.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has denounced the EU"s pro-immigration agenda as a means to eradicate the culture and Christian identity of Hungary. Czech President Miloš Zeman is an outspoken opponent of immigration and the Islamification of the Czech Republic. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has said that "Islam has no place in Slovakia" and warns that "migrants change the character of our country." Polish Prime Minister Beata Szyd?o staunchly defends Poland"s refusal to accept the EU-imposed immigration quotas. "We are not going to take part in this madness," she says. In the Eastern part of Europe, anti-Islamification and anti-mass migration parties see a surge in popular support.

Resistance is growing in the West, as well. This year, we have seen my party, the Party for Freedom (PVV), become the second-largest party in the Netherlands. This is a great achievement in a country with 13 parties in Parliament. In France, Marine Le Pen made it to the second round in the French presidential elections and her party, the Front National, got more votes than ever. In Austria, the FPÖ became the second biggest party. In Germany, the patriots of the AfD forced their way into the Bundestag.

Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), casts his vote in The Hague during the Dutch general election that made his the second-largest party in the Netherlands, on March 15, 2017. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

However, the political elites in the West do all they can to keep the winners of the elections from power. Last month, in my country, the Netherlands, a new government coalition consisting of no less than four parties was formed. Because they stubbornly refused to talk to PVV, it took the political elites a record seven months to put together a coalition. They preferred to take in D66, the party which had denied Ronald Reagan his street in The Hague, and still they were only able to form a government with a majority of just one single seat in Parliament.

Our democracies in the Western half of Europe have been subverted. Their goal is no longer to do what the people want. On the contrary, our political elites often do exactly the opposite. Our parliaments promote open-door policies that the majority of the people reject. Our governments sell out sovereignty to the EU against the will of the people. Our rulers welcome ever more Islam, although the majority of the people oppose it.

Our democracies have become fake democracies. They are multi-party dictatorships, ruled by groups of establishment parties. They wheel and deal, often selling away the principles for which they have been elected. The establishment parties control everything, not just the politicians in their pay, but also the top brass of the civil service, the mainstream media, even the courts. Parties such as mine are excluded from coalition talks. They call us "populists" because we stand for what the people want. They even drag us to court.

Three decades ago, the countries in Central Europe witnessed a Velvet Revolution: Democratic, political and peaceful. They took to the streets. They decided that enough was enough. Thanks to their Velvet Revolution, they have leaders today who truly represent the people and who are not afraid to stand up for their nation and its identity.

We, in Western Europe, can learn lessons from the Velvet Revolution in the East. We, too, urgently need to make clear that enough is enough. In Western Europe, too, it is time to drain the swamp and to drive the elites from power. Peaceful and democratic, but thorough. We have to make our so-called democratic systems truly democratic again. The political actors should no longer be the professional politicians alone. The crisis is existential. It is time for every man and woman to do his and her duty. Because the survival of our nations itself is at stake.

We, too, have to make it very clear that we no longer want to take part in the madness of leaders, who sell out their country to the EU institutions in Brussels, and the madness of the EU elites, who sell out our continent to mass-immigration and Islam. That is why the PVV will demonstrate in the streets of Rotterdam on January 20^th. We need to show that Europe"s streets are our streets, that we want to stay who and what we are, and do not want to be colonized by Islam. Europe belongs to us!

The U.S. Owes UNESCO Half A Billion Dollars

This week, the U.S. and Israel announced that they would be withdrawing from UNESCO, citing "continuing anti-Israel bias".

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, the move comes as a major blow to the organization which is known for designating cultural sites around the world such as the Grand Canyon or ancient Palmyra in Syria.

The U.S. has been expected to pay the bulk of UNESCO"s budget for years and it cancelled its financial contributions back in 2011 in protest of Palestine"s admission as a full member.

In the years since, it has amassed significant arrears of over $500 million...

You will find more statistics at Statista

This year, the UK, Japan and Brazil have all failed to pay their contributions so far, accrueing nearly $70 million of arrears between them.

This isn"t the first time the U.S. has turned its back on UNESCO.

The country also left the organization under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s before rejoining under George W. Bush in 2003.

The latest withdrawal will come into effect at the very end of 2018.

Brazil's President Tells Supreme Court To Suspend Corruption Probe Of Brazil's President

In a move that will surely light the proverbial lightbulb over Donald Trump"s head, Brazilian President Michel Temer, having been officially dragged into Brazil"s massive corruption scandal after a record emerged in which he urged the payment of "hush money", said on Saturday he would ask the Supreme Court to suspend its investigation into allegations he was also involved in the carwash corruption scheme, vowing to remain in power.

Speaking during a televised address on Saturday afternoon, Brazil’s deeply unpopular president, who replaced a just as deeply unpopular president last year when Dilma Rouseff was impeached, claimed the recording that implicated him in the scandal was doctored and said he would file a petition with the Supreme Court to suspend the investigation until it could be verified, the WSJ reported.

In the recording cited by Temer, which unleashed a historic crash of the Brazilian stock market and currency on Thursday when news of Temer"s involvement broke, the president can be heard chatting with Joesley Batista, chairman and heir of the beef-and-chicken JBS empire, apparently him his approval to pay the jailed former speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha - the man responsible for Dilma Rouseff"s ouster last year - to buy his silence. Batista, who made the recording and gave it to prosecutors in hopes for prosecutorial leniency against JBS, said the recording wasn’t edited.

“Our country will not go off the rails—I will continue at the front of the government,” Mr. Temer said in his latest defiant speech about the allegations.

To simplify: Brazil"s president just told Brazil"s Supreme Court to suspend its probe of Brazil"s president which would most likely result in Brazil"s president being impeached. Again.

Temer’s statement comes the day after it was revealed that the executives at Brazil’s meatpacking giant JBS told prosecutors they had paid millions of dollars in bribes to the president and his predecessors, Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In documents released by the country’s Supreme Court Friday, JBS executives told prosecutors the company had paid a total of $123 million in bribes to the country’s politicians over recent years, including payments of $4.6 million to the president.

In his speech on Saturday, Temer immeiately attacked JBS, accusing its executives of “damaging Brazil.” Ironically, in a attempt to drag down JBS with him, Temer also highlighted reports that JBS made money from the latest scandal by buying large amounts of dollars before the news broke. The Brazilian real plunged in value against the dollar on Thursday, the first day of trading after a report about the recording was published.

On at least one thing Temer may be right: the alleged incident involving JBS insider trading is perhaps just as amusing as Temer telling the court to stop probing him. On Friday, Brazil"s regulator said it launched probes against JBS - i.e., the company at the heart of the latest and greatest Brazilian scandal - and other companies controlled by J&F Investimentos to investigate suspicious trades made before Brazil"s markets crashed after the revelation of a plea deal by the company"s top executives.  In a statement late on Friday, the regulator CVM said it is investigating "signs of possible insider trading" of foreign exchange futures, derivatives and JBS stock ordered by meatpacker JBS SA, Banco Original SA and FB Participacoes SA, Reuters reported. The regulator is also examining the sale of shares in the company by its controlling shareholders and subsequent acquisitions by the company´s treasury.

The probe emerged after Brazil"s Valor Economico reported on the same day that JBS and other companies owned by the Batista brothers bought over $1 billion in U.S. dollar contracts in the local market hours before the plea deal news broke.

In other words, the Batistas are accused of going long the dollar in Soros-sized amount, and shorting their own stock, in frontrunning the market turmoil that they themselves would unleash just hours later after news of the plea bargain and Temer"s involvement emerged!

Not even Brazilian telenovellas have this much drama and intrigue, let alone hubris...

Predictably, JBS said denied everything and on Friday said any trades made this week were consistent with the company"s strategy of hedging its large dollar-denominated debt. Amusingly, the company said the recent currency swings could have caused more than 1 billion reais in losses. It has yet to be discloed what gains the "currency  swings" generated instead as a result of the corrupt company"s insider trading, pardon hedging. The real fell 8 percent against the U.S. currency on Thursday, sustaining the largest losses since the country devalued its currency in 1999.

Meanwhile, taking a page out of the Venezuela playbook, protests are planned across Brazil’s major cities on Sunday against Temer, whose popularity rating was less than 9% before the latest scandal broke.

Somewhere, Donald Trump is furiously taking notes.

Unprecedented Corruption Among Brazil's Top Politicians Revealed In Unsealed JBS Plea Bargain

Recall that behind the latest political scandal to grip Brazil, in which president Michel Temer was accused of paying hush money to the jailed former House speaker, Eduardo Cunha (who was responsible for the impeachment of Temer"s predecessor Dilma Rouseff) to keep him from dragging Temer down as well, and which yesterday led to historic losses for the the Bovespa, was a plea bargain by the top executives of Brazil"s meatpacking giant JBS, Joseley Batista and his brother Wesley, which among other things, included an alleged recording of a phone conversation in which Batista told Temer he was paying Cunha to remain silent, to which the president was recorded saying, "You need to keep that up, okay?"

Batista and Temer

Moments ago, Brazil"s O Globo newspaper reported that the latest episode in Brazil"s epic political corruption saga has been unveiled, and two things emerged. First, president Temer is under now officially under investigation for corruption and obstruction of justice.

Second, and more important, the contents of the JBS plea bargain testimony were disclosed, courtesy of Reuters, and they reveal corruption so pervasive that virtually every single current and past top politician has been implicated. Here are the details:

• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY INDICATES BRAZIL PRESIDENT TEMER ALLEGEDLY RECEIVED 15 MILLION REAIS IN BRIBE IN 2014


• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY SAYS COMPANY PAID BRIBE TO TEMER TO END PETROBRAS MONOPOLY ON NATURAL GAS


• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY SAYS EX PRESIDENT LUIZ INACIO LULA DA SILVA RECEIVED $50 MILLION IN BRIBES IN OFFSHORE ACCOUNT


• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY SAYS EX PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF RECEIVED $30 MILLION IN BRIBES IN OFFSHORE ACCOUNTS


• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY INDICATES JOESLEY BATISTA PAID 30 MILLION REAIS FOR EX PRESIDENT DILMA ROUSSEFF"S 2010 CAMPAIGN


• JBS PLEA-BARGAIN TESTIMONY SAYS PAID SUSPENDED SENATOR, EX PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE AECIO NEVES BRIBE IN 2014 TO FAVOR COMPANY


• BRAZIL PROSECUTORS SAY JOESLEY BATISTA"S TESTIMONY INDICATES HE PAID EX HOUSE SPEAKER CUNHA MONTHLY BRIBES WITH TEMER"S BLESSING

Some more from Reuters:

Brazil"s Supreme Court released plea-bargain testimony on Friday that includes accusations President Michel Temer received 15 million reais ($4.6 million) in bribes in 2014 before he took office from executives of meatpacking giant JBS SA. 

The testimony also claims former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva received $50 million in bribes in offshore accounts from JBS, while ex-President Dilma Rousseff took $30 million in bribes in offshore accounts.

If true, the plea testimony implicates virtually all top Brazilian politicians - from both the current and previous administrations - who have now been thrown under the bus for corruption and bribery, which while no longer surprising in all matters Brazilian, prompt one to ask: is there any politician left in Brazil who is clean "enough" to take over the presidency without fears of compromising recordings emerging just months if not weeks later, resulting in another political scandal and more chaos in the biggest Latin American nation.

Millionaire Migrants: Countries That Rich People Are Flocking To

Money may not buy happiness, but, as Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, it does buy the ultimate flexibility for making financial and lifestyle decisions.

For many of the world’s millionaires, money provides a highly effective means to escape their home country when times get tough. They can pack their bags, and move their family and capital to a location that will provide superior opportunities for prosperity.

According to a new report by New World Wealth, this couldn’t have been truer for 2016, as the amount of millionaire migrants increased by 28% from the previous year.

HUMAN AND CAPITAL FLIGHT

In 2016, there were a total of 82,000 millionaire migrants that left for greener pastures.

France tops the list for a second straight year, as rich people dodge conditions that they consider to be adverse. France has rising religious tensions and populism, but it also has a tax system that is not particularly friendly to the ultra rich. The International Business Times calls the ongoing problem a “Millionaire Exodus”.

China and India both continue to have net outflows of millionaires, but two of the more interesting countries on this list are Brazil and Turkey.

Brazil continues to be deep in economic crisis, with its worst-ever recession likely continuing into its eighth-straight quarter in Q4 2016. The country also recently impeached Dilma Rousseff in August 2016. On the other hand, the Washington Post describes Turkey as a country that is in a “permanent state of crisis”. This may be a fair criticism, since in 2016 there was the assassination of a Russian ambassador, a currency crisis, an economic crisis, and also an attempted military coup.

Like most people, millionaires don’t like uncertainty – and they have the wherewithal and conviction to get out of places that have ongoing issues.

In 2016, Australia was the number one destination for millionaire migrants, with the United States and Canada being close behind.

New Zealand also had the amount of net inflows double, while the UAE remained a popular location for the wealthy in the Middle East.

Billions Wasted: Structures Built For 2016 Olympics In Brazil Are Now In Ruins

Submitted by Alice Salles via TheAntiMedia.org,

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil cost Brazilian taxpayers $4.6 billion, conservative estimates show. But once related expenses covered by the Brazilian government are factored in, the overall costs hit the $12 billion mark, which equates to about 0.72 percent of Brazil’s national budget.

Prior to the Olympics, however, the Brazilian government had already spent BR$39.5 billion on infrastructure, or about $12 billion. Stadiums and urban projects designed to ensure the country was ready for the sports event were built, but aside from the events scheduled for 2014 and 2016, there seemed to be little to no demand for such public investments, which prompted the country to wonder whether the expenses were worth the trouble.

Now, as these same structures are left to rot, the documented decay becomes a symbol of government waste, not only because the investments weren’t meant to stand the test of time, but also because the Brazilian government’s lack of concern for the taxpayer is not the main story. It is, in fact, just a footnote.

Like many others, the government ignored the economic realities of the country, betting on inflation and cronyism in order to throw an unforgettable party.

Due to backlash over former President Dilma Rousseff’s economic policies, a nationwide movement supporting impeachment targeted her for, among many other things, raising government spending without accounting for the increases.

Due to the government’s lavish spending prior to the World Cup and Summer Olympics, Rousseff was afraid of suffering the consequences for increasing spending without hurting other government projects as a result, which would have forced the president to be upfront about her expenses. This led to a move that provoked chaos among consumers simply because banks were forced to put money into circulation that wasn’t backed by anything.

Instead of giving the money to banks so they could then cover social projects, pensions, and welfare programs, Brazil’s Treasury Department simply promised banks they would pay them back down the road. Thus, money meant for other projects remained in the treasury, allowing the federal government to spend it with other matters. This move guaranteed that financial institutions keeping an eye on the government’s budget wouldn’t know that banks hadn’t been using the money coming from the Treasury. This allowed banks to distribute sums associated with welfare and other social programs without depleting the government’s funds. As more cash was put into circulation by the banks and the federal government due to the World Cup and Olympics-related expenses, the value of Brazilian money tanked. To the consumer, that translated into lower purchasing power, making it more difficult for the poor to stock their pantries.

With the government’s out of hand expenses prior to the World Cup and Olympics, the Brazilian people suffered the ultimate blow because the government robbed them of their money’s purchasing power, all because the president didn’t want to admit she had gotten out of hand.

Now that the structures built for the world to see are rotting away, the low-income Brazilian continues to suffer. The only solution to this matter is to unleash currency control from the Brazilian central bank, removing its responsibility for financial policies from the hands of the federal government. Only then will the federal government be powerless in creating more debt and inflation, keeping it from playing with the Brazilian taxpayer’s hard-earned money.

A Foreign Nation Did Interfere In A US Election...In 1980

Submitted by Wayne Madsen via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

It was October and the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate was faltering in the polls after the Democratic National Convention. The Republican Party’s presidential candidate began negotiating with a foreign government to cook up a scheme to embarrass the Democratic candidate. The scheme was successful and the Democratic candidate went on to lose the election to a Republican candidate who was feared by many for his unorthodox stance on several domestic and foreign issues.

If one thinks the above description is about the recent 2016 election, he or she would be wrong.

In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter, running for re-election under the cloud of the U.S. embassy in Tehran having been seized by radical Iranian students and 52 members of its staff being held hostage, was trying desperately to pull off an «October Surprise» to salvage his presidency.

Unbeknownst to Carter, the campaign of his Republican rival, Ronald Reagan, had secretly negotiated an «arms-for-no-hostages» deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran. 

In return for the shipment of embargoed military items, including spare parts for Iran’s U.S.-supplied F-14 Tomcat fighter planes and Phoenix air-to-air missiles for the planes, before the November 4 election, the Reagan team was promised by the Iranians that Tehran would hold the hostages until after the November election. Upon Reagan’s defeat of Carter, Iran held true to its promise and did not release the American hostages until noon Eastern Standard Time on January 20, 1981, the very moment Reagan raised his hand to take the presidential oath of office.

Although the media today is rife with reports of so-called «treasonous» contacts between Donald Trump advisers and officials of the Russian government, the media was not to be found anywhere in October 1980 when the Central Intelligence Agency, working with the Reagan campaign, contracted with a U.S. merchant vessel, the «SS Poet», to deliver the U.S. military contraband to Iran. In 1980, vice presidential candidate George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey secretly met with Iranian government officials, reportedly in Paris, and worked out the covert «arms-for-no-hostages» plan. The Reagan team was worried that Carter would beat them to the punch because of the White House’s own secret negotiations with Iranian representatives to have the hostages freed in October, giving Carter a much-need campaign boost.

The Reagan conspirators included, in addition to Bush and Casey, Robert Gates and Donald Gregg, the CIA"s moles inside the Carter National Security Council. Carter"s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, not happy with Carter"s human rights stance, may have given a «wink and a nod» to the treason. The entire caper was conducted without the knowledge of Stansfield Turner, Carter"s friend and U.S. Naval Academy classmate who served as CIA director.

The «SS Poet», a World War II-era U.S. merchant vessel, was at the center of the Reagan team’s treasonous plot. Little has been written about the fate of the vessel because the CIA arranged to have it sunk while outbound from the Persian Gulf after it delivered its weapons cache to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The ship was officially listed as «lost at sea» somewhere in the mid-Atlantic after departing from Philadelphia"s Girard Point marine pier #3 on October 24, 1980. The ship was ostensibly bound with a cargo of 13,500 tons of corn for Port Said, Egypt, but, in reality, had military equipment loaded in its rear number four cargo, contraband bound for Iran. 

The crew of 34 U.S. citizens was declared «missing at sea» by a U.S. Coast Guard board of inquiry, which was under heavy pressure from the CIA to cover up the ship"s fate in the Gulf. The Reagan team sweetened the deal with a cash payment to Iran. Gates was said to have overseen the transfer of money to an Iranian bank account at Banque Worms in Geneva.

The Coast Guard report on the «Poet"s» disappearance was tainted by an individual who claimed to have been a former third assistant engineer on the vessel. A year after the «Poet» disappeared, the witness told the Coast Guard, after the Board of Inquiry had already issued its conclusion about the fate of the ship, that the vessel was not seaworthy. However, this individual later was discovered to have been an impostor, likely hired by Casey’s CIA, who never served on board the «Poet».

The CIA"s cover story, dutifully echoed by the Coast Guard, was the Poet sank without a trace in three minutes and without a distress call. One of the Poet"s previous trips, in the months prior to sailing to Iran, was to Israel. The vessel had been chartered by Hawaiian Eugenia Corporation, the Poet"s owner and a firm with murky CIA links, to sail to Israel. There is a strong possibility that the Israelis rigged the ship with explosives that would be detonated after its delivery of weapons to Iran on behalf of the CIA and Reagan-Bush campaign plotters.

There was a feeble attempt by certain remaining pro-Carter elements within the CIA and Justice Department to investigate the involvement of a foreign power - Iran - in the 1980 election. A March 16, 1981, memo written by then-unconfirmed Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani to the Acting Criminal Division chief, John Keeney, which was titled «CIA Referral - Alleged Foreign Government Interference With 1980 Presidential Election», suggests that the CIA referred to the Justice Department certain evidence that there was criminal activity involving a foreign power in the 1980 presidential election.

Keeney and Giuliani agree to draft a letter from Deputy Attorney General Edward C. Schmults to the CIA to ask for a full report on the criminal referral. The CIA report, which was never written, would have been available to Justice personnel on a strict need-to-know basis. It can be assumed that after Casey took over at the CIA, he immediately quashed the investigation of the involvement of Iran in the 1980 election.

In any case, the investigation was stopped dead in its tracks. The Attorney General at the time of the Giuliani memo was Reagan confidante William French Smith. Smith"s special assistant at the time was David Hiller, who later became the publisher, president, and CEO of the Los Angeles Times. Hiller"s fellow special assistant for Smith was John G. Roberts, Jr., later nominated by George W. Bush to the Supreme Court as Associate Justice, followed by his nomination to be Chief Justice.

The «Poet"s» official charter to sail a cargo of corn to Port Said was oddly appended with a «war risk» clause, even though Egypt was not in a state of war. The only state of war that existed at the time was in the Gulf between Iran and Iraq. The charter also involved Universal Shipping Company, a CIA front company headquartered in Rosslyn, Virginia, along with other firms controlled by CIA weapons smuggler Edwin Wilson. Later convicted and imprisoned for smuggling weapons to Libya, Wilson, a «retired» CIA operative, contended that his weapons smuggling operations were carried out with the approval of the CIA.

There is an interesting current news peg to the story of the 1980 election and the «Poet.» The Iranian side in the «arms-for-no-hostages» conspiracy was led by the then-speaker of the Iranian parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He would later become a key cog in the Iran-contra scandal that almost brought down the Reagan administration. Rafsanjani died recently at the age of 82. Considered a leading Iranian moderate, Rafsanjani traveled widely throughout the United States prior to the Iranian revolution in 1979 and he may have served as a deep cover CIA asset. With his death disappears from the scene another witness to the treachery involving the disappearance of the «SS Poet».

When the CIA wants to advance a meme that a foreign nation interfered in a U.S. election, it can coax its puppets in the media to hype the story, as seen now with the frivolous allegations about Russia and the Trump campaign. However, when the Langley boys want to bury their own chicanery and skullduggery in election interference, as is currently the case with CIA and British MI-6 involvement in the 2016 election on behalf of Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton and as was the situation in 1980 with Iran and the Reagan campaign, the media dutifully follows.