[editor’s note, by lapin] BooMan has graciously invited me to post on the front page. Thank you for this privilege.
Jack Abramoff dangled a carrot to Indian tribes in exchange for contributions to a charity he set up, the Capital Athletic Foundation. The Foundation had been described to them by Abramoff as one of Tom DeLay’s favorites. They understood that contributions to the charity would grease the skids into Tom DeLay’s office. What they didn’t understand was that some of their contributions would be used to fund anti-intifada operations by Israeli settlers:
Abramoff has stepped in it big time.
The Newsweek investigative piece details shattering revelations:
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In 2002 alone, records show, three Indian tribes donated nearly $1.1 million to the Capital Athletic Foundation. But now, NEWSWEEK has learned, investigators probing Abramoff’s finances have found some of the money meant for inner-city kids went instead to fight the Palestinian intifada.
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The FBI, sources tell NEWSWEEK, is now examining these payments as part of a larger investigation to determine if Abramoff defrauded his Indian tribe clients. The tribal donors are outraged. “This is almost like outer-limits bizarre,” says Henry Buffalo, a lawyer for the Saginaw Chippewa Indians who contributed $25,000 to the Capital Athletic Foundation at Abramoff’s urging. “The tribe would never have given money for this.”
Abramoff is described in the article by one of his associates as a super-zionist. The connection between Israeli internal affairs and American policies has only been strengthened by DeLay and his association with Abramoff. Who would have guessed that gambling Americans would end up funding sniper rifles for Israeli settlers. This is truly bizarre.
Jack Abramoff in his natural state: consulting with his lawyer in 2004
what a debut!! Welcome Lapin. This is beyond belief.
Damn… there goes my jaw again, hittin’ the floor.
This is great work, Lapin! And I’m still reeling from the Frontline report about three weeks ago on the settlers. To think that they’re being financed, via a U.S. Congressman, for military purposes is shocking.
I cross posted this at dKos. Got a link to this press release from a comment there. Apparently, the Israeli settlers are not the only beneficiaries of the Capital Athletic Foundation:
If these charges are valid, the harm is not limited to the donors who contributed to the Capital Athletic Foundation in the anticipation that their charitable generosity would support sports-related programs. The harm extends more generally to the nonprofit sector, undermining the trust that charitable donors can expect from nonprofit organizations that their donations will not be diverted away from the functions that they expected to support, but away from charitable purposes entirely to activities that look like potential self-enrichment and political lobbying. If these questions about the Capital Athletic Foundation are validated, they raise significant issues about nonprofit ethics and probity that cannot and should not be ignored.
So Abramoff used the charity to fund his kids’ school and his political activities. Slimy, slimy, slimy.
Is this the same charity that was in the news concerning Delay, used as a way of basically laundering funds to be used for politics? I know it was a children’s charity, but don’t recall the details and of course the media didn’t do a lot of follow up on it.
If his is a different one, it would be interesting to find out how many other ‘for the children’ charities these crooks are hiding behind.
Or as Ducttape Fatwa refers to them below, business plan. The DeLay’s have made good use of the title “charitable organization.” From Salon:
What you need instead is a powerful politician with enough influence over government to shake down big donors.
These slimebuckets are slowly but surely being revealed. A big Yahoo to Newsweek for actually doing a real journalistic piece and for you bringing this to our attention. It is almost with glee that I read these things. Between these revelations and Rep. Slaughter’s revelations about Guckerts access to the WH it is going to be a good week.
Newsweek smells blood in the water, otherwise they wouldn’t have the guts to tackle such a big story. This is just the tip of the iceberg and merely confirms terrorist propoganda that US interests are conspiring to kill Muslims (the Palestinians). Abramoff’s dirty dealing certainly hasn’t helped our image with the Muslim community. Hard to say if could get any worse though.
Excellect piece Lapin but I think that this comment is a little dangerous if it buys into either the Anti-Zionist muslim perceptions or those of the right-wing that “Palestinian” equates with “Muslim”.
The Palestinian constitution is essentially secular and historically there were Palestinians of all of the three Abrahamic religions and none.
for Israeli settler youth. And some of those activities get pretty athletic, don’t let anybody kid you.
This will be a great inspiration for other politicians to establish philanthropic funds for similar purposes.
Those poor settlers need all the help they can get. Poisoning cattle is neither easy nor cheap.
seriously, this is the worst scandal I have seen break around a politician in a long time.
DeLay still has an arm’s length, but this should be catastrophic since Newsweek is mainstream. Should…
Is this kind of stuff part of the criminal investigation going on in Texas? Or is that limited to voting-related issues?
In any case, it’s becoming objectively obvious that Delay and his gang belong in jail. We need to make sure the relevant prosecutors see all this material.
I tried to find the CAF website, referenced in the WP article. No luck. Found one page at Indianz.com which contains a link:
http://64.62.196.98/News/2004/004433.asp
but the link is broken.
The website is supposed to be http://www.capathletic.org.
Think the site was taken down in a hurry? Anyone here know how to access archived website info?
no google cache, no internet archive files (www.archive.org). Odd, for a ‘charity’, I would think, although there are probably other types of companies who would go thru the trouble to make sure they left no internet tracks.
Am not sure of another method of finding the pages.
I’ve got to take issue with the “anti-intifada” terminology that Newsweek uses. Armed settlers are not an “anti-intifada” militia, and their violence against Palestinians is usually not in self defense nor anything to do with the intifada (which it long predates). For example, these settlers from Tapuah settlement,
using their IDF supplied weapons to prevent Palestinians bringing in the olive harvest which is their only source of income,
are nothing to do with the intifada.
Nor is this Hebron settler, who is standing guard so that settler children might stone their Palestinian neighbors undisturbed:
Settler violence is primarily “anti-Palestinian”, not “anti-intifada”, and directed at ordinary people who have the audacity to be Palestinians trying to live on, build on, and farm their own lands, which the settlers happen to covet.
If you are sending weapons to militant settlers, those weapons will be used primarily not against the intifada, but to intimidate – and in the worst cases to murder – Palestinians, so that their land can be expropriated. Newsweek needs to stop with this “anti-intifada militia” nonsense, which makes it sound like this is some kind of self defense. Just spit it out and admit that an armed thug is an armed thug, whether he’s Israeli, Palestinian, or anything else.