Wayne Madsen's latest -- on vote fraud, and much else

Oh boy. Where to start?

Wayne Madsen caused quite a stir with his Online Journal pieces on electoral tampering, in which he claimed that money to pay the vote-riggers was channeled through a shady entity called Five Star Trust. His unnamed sources also gave him a copy of a $29 million check used in the operation.

The check, alas, proved to be a phony. Moreover, one of Madsens' sources seems to have been Marion "J.R." Horn of Five Star Trust, who had made the news after a conviction for wire fraud.

Since Madsen has kept most of his sources unnamed, and since the fake check fiasco left a sour taste in many a mouth, most commentators on the vote fraud controversy stopped citing his work. My own views remained -- and remain -- conflicted. Madsen may have stumbled onto something important, but could we be confident of his abilities to separate the Hersheys from the horseshit?

Now his latest article -- if it really is a formal article (it seems to have originated as a private letter to a Kos diarist) -- has seen publication under not-quite-reputable circumstances. Even if your info is solid, even if you've received the straight skinny from the archangel Michael himself, you do not want your words presented to the world on a website with a name like "Conspiracy Planet."

Well, presentation doesn't really matter. What of the substance of the piece?

Oh boy. Where to start?

As my ex- once said, "This isn't an essay. It's a brain dump." Free association provides the primary organizing principle. Madsen wanders far -- very far indeed -- from the topic of electoral fraud.

For example, Madsen interrupts his essay to provide a list of "mystery deaths." Many are genuinely mysterious. But most of the names (Danny Casolaro, David Kelley, John Tower, etc.) have nothing to do with the present election controversy. Even if we allow for a topic switch ("I'll take 'Mystery Deaths' for 400, Alex"), some of the names on this list strike me as something of a stretch.

For example, Madsen brings up Paul Wilcher, a name which some may recognize. In the 1990s, right-wingers often cited Wilcher as a "victim" of the Evil Clinton Conspiracy. I've read Wilcher's magnum opus -- another unorganized brain dump, which took the form of an open letter to Janet Reno -- and came away with the impression that its author was not someone who could have mounted a serious challenge to anyone in power. The guy was a flake.

Madsen also claims, intriguingly, that the late journalist Gary Webb "was investigating ACS and contract fraud in CA when he committed suicide on Dec. 10." ACS is Affiliated Computer Systems of Dallas, which Madsen links with possible vote hacking. (Or does he? His wording, to be frank, is unclear.) Webb had, in fact, written about ACS, but not in a context connected with elections. Moreover, Robert Parry, who has spoken to Webb's relatives, reports that Webb wrote several suicide notes to various people close to him, and that the family considers these missives genuine. (I will confess that one need not be paranoid to look askance at published reports that Webb shot himself in the head twice.)

Madsen also finds parapolitical overtones in the death of Chandra Levy and the attendant smearing of Gary Condit. I say that a vote-fraud story that veers into Condit-land has veered too far.

So why do I ask you to read what Madsen says?

Because, if nothing else, his work is interesting. Yes, his latest piece is a pile of unassembled pieces from several different jigsaw puzzles. But others may be able to organize this material, discard the extraneous, and conjure up a congruent image.

I strongly encourage researchers to do whatever they can to double-check Madsen's allegations regarding two Florida companies, Datamaxx and Seisint. These firms, he avers, are "personal data miners." They provided information helpful to the vote-riggers in 2000 and 2004 -- for example, Datamaxx provided the names of black "felons" who weren't' really felons in the earlier election.

Or so, at least, claims Madsen.

His most intriguing data nuggets concern a Christian cult called the Fellowship -- the roots of which, so far as I can tell, go back to the work of a Methodist minister named Abraham Vereide in the 1930s, although the group was not formally named the Fellowship Foundation until 1972.

This is the same group which frightened the readers of Jeffrey Sharlet's seminal work "Jesus Plus Nothing: Under Cover Among America’s Secret Theocrats." Sharlet's article presents a frightening picture of religious zealotry and naked political ambition. Incidentally, the Fellowship -- also known as the Family -- owns a "Fellowship House" near the House of Representatives, where a number of politicians have stayed.

Madsen claims that the Fellowship story goes deeper than most of us suspected. He connects the group to the scamsters behind the "Nigerian" emails. Is this notion feasible? Missionary work did put the Fellowship in Africa, and the Nigerian scam was far more than a mere email ruse, since it involved on-the ground operatives in that country.

So far, I've seen no evidence for Madsen's allegation. It should be noted, though, that many variations of the Nigerian letters include theological overtones reminiscent of the Fellowship's beliefs. On the other hand, American churches were prime targets for the scam.

According to Madsen,

Some of those "419 emails" have been discovered by US intelligence to contain coded instructions to the money launderers and financial manipulators in the States and in off shore bank havens like the Bahamas and Tortola.

This allegation will strike most readers as far too Ian Fleming-esque, but don't be too quick to dismiss the notion. If you study the material produced by international scamsters, you'll come across passages which -- to put it bluntly -- make no sense whatsoever. Using "Nigerian letters" to convey coded data strikes me as downright ingenious.

Of course, we have no hard evidence that such trickery has taken place.

"Wait a minute," I hear you saying. "What on earth does this convoluted Nigerian business have to do with vote fraud?" Well, the Nigerian scams do connect with the Five Star Trust -- or so it has been alleged, and not just by Wayne Madsen. And Marion Horn of Five Star may possess links to the Fellowship -- links forged during his stay in the pokey:

The Fellowship has some very unsavory founders -- all pro-Nazis: Abraham Vereide, Frank Buchman, and Gustav Gedat, J. Edgar Hoover and James Jesus Angleton were close to the Fellowship.

The use of prison ex-cons like Marion "JR" Horn in KY, John Elder and Jeffrey Dean in WA, and others in the financing and carrying out of the rigging, was mostly arranged through Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries, an organization that has carte blanche access to anyone deemed of value, especially computer programmers, after their incarceration and upon their release, especially if they promise service in return for parole.

SO far, I've seen no proof backing the claims in this paragraph. But I do note that Horn received a ridiculously attenuated sentence for massive wire fraud, which he committed while on parole for another offense.

I'll have to look more carefully through the bios of Angleton and Hoover to see if the links alleged by Madsen really do exist. (Alas, I've forgotten far too much of my Angleton lore. Wasn't he Catholic? His mother was a lovely lady from Mexico...)

Here are a few other Madsen allegations vis-a-vis the Fellowship:

The Prime Minister of Norway has just been outed as a member of this group.

In fact, most of the so-called "Coalition of the Willing" nations' leaders are members of The Fellowship, e.g., Tonga, Macedonia, Palau, Netherlands, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Solomon Islands, Uganda, Rwanda, Guatemala, El Salvador, Denmark, Romania, Iceland, Fiji, Georgia, Colombia, possibly also Howard of Australia and Blair of Britain.

The Fellowship believes that ANYTHING is permitted in order to bring about a 1000-yr Kingdom of Christ on Earth, and that includes stealing elections and even murder.

Some of the money used by the Fellowship to obtain real estate and maintain their group came from Saudi Arabia through lucrative defense contracts and pass throughs like the Islamic Institute.

And:

In their group homes in Arlington it is obvious they keep the troubled teens of GOP big businessmen and politicians out of sight through a combination of intensive Bible study and "drug treatment."

Noelle Bush may have been one of their "Guests/Victims."

There should be a focus on Infinity Software of Tallahassee, the place Noelle was put to work when she was busted for trying to illegally obtain prescription drugs in 2002.

(C'mon. Admit it. Even if you think Madsen is full of it, that allegation about Noelle must bring a wicked smile to your face -- presuming, of course, that you don't like the Bush family.)

Finally, and most importantly...

Tom Feeney, Ashcroft, DeLay, Bush (Dubya and Jeb), Cheney, Sean O'Keefe, Condi Rice, John Bolton, Ed Meese, [Charles] Colson, Brownback, Ralph Reed, Frank Wolf, Ernie Fletcher, Katherine Harris, [Newt] Gingrich, JC Watts, Burr, Jindal, Lamar Smith, Zach Wamp, Scalia, Ensign, Kyl, [Kenneth]Blackwell, Bob Ehrlich, Karl Rove, Jack Kemp, James Baker, Clarence Thomas, Tom Coburn, Asa and Tim Hutchinson, Gens. Boykin and Myers, DeMint, Curt Weldon, Grover Norquist, George Allen, [Rick] Santorum, are all in this group. The late Lee Atwater was close to this group.

The Fellowship, which has strong links to the "Rev." Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, operates in cells and not only takes over governments but also local church congregations to further their goals.

Moon, as all must know, wants an end to democracy; he has made no secret of this ambition.

He also has access to seemingly illimitable wealth, which he uses to fund the right. Nobody knows where the money comes from. Some have alleged that his church launders recovered WWII booty -- popularly known as "Yamashita's gold." We thus return to Madsen's initial allegation that Five Star Trust was involved with transactions involving Yamashita's gold.

How much of this story squares with the facts? I'm not sure. Hell, I'm not really sure I yet comprehend the story!

In the Revolutionary war, General Washington's spies placed certain information in a special category: "Interesting, if true." That's my assessment of Madsen's work. He may be on to the story of the century -- but until his facts are both confirmed and organized, we cannot be certain.