Fraud, scandal and murder

Top that headline! This is one of those days when I must play traffic cop. My job is to point out where to go.

Vote fraud and votER fraud: Larisa Alexandrovna (who, I am happy to note, has received good news from her doctor) has compiled a map-o-scandal worthy of your study.

The Carol Lam firing: Daniel Hopsicker has a new piece that'll set your head spinning like Linda Blair on a Tilt-A-Whirl. He has uncovered a Carol Lam quote which pretty much confirms that the fired prosecutor had intended to bring charges against another big fish.

He also points out a matter of timing that had never before occurred to me. As those of you who nosed your way through the prosecutorgate document dump may recall, Rep. Ric Keller (Republican of Florida) started to lay the groundwork for a "soft on immigration" charge against Lam back in May of 2006. As it happens, he did so right after Lam started to bring her inquiry to the CIA's doorstep:

When she informed superiors she was taking her corruption probe to the doorstep of the Central Intelligence Agency, notifying them on May 10, 2006 of the imminent arrival of FBI agents at Dusty Foggo’s Washington D.C. home to execute a search warrant, alarm bells went off all over Washington D.C.

Never in the CIA’s history has such a search warrant been issued against a high-level CIA official for non-espionage criminal conduct.

Keller, we learn, has had financial ties to both Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan.

Hopsicker also has some interesting new points to make about the infamous murders of Kevin Ives and Don Henry -- the Arkansas "train deaths." This mystery may or may not be related to the Cunningham scandal (frankly, I think Daniel is straining a bit too much for connective tissue here), but it sure is fascinating in its own right.

Nick Berg redux: "Nick Possum," the famed investigator Down Under, has whipped up a fascinating new theory concerning the death of Nick Berg, the U.S. contractor with the unusual history who was murdered on camera, allegedly by Zarqawi himself. (Although we later were told -- very briefly, in one of those vanishing news squibs -- that the killers were captured and had nothing to do with either Z-man or Al Qaeda.)

While I never agreed with those who argued that the execution was faked, I always felt that a strange odor pervaded this affair. Berg's previous encounter (in Oklahoma) with Zacarias Moussaoui, along with other clues, set me to thinking that he may have dabbled in espionage. See my previous pieces here, here, and here.

Nick Possum looks at the Berg affair through an unusual lens:

The case of Donald Vance, an American citizen secretly imprisoned by the US military in Iraq after making accusations against an Iraqi-owned security company for which he worked, has revealing parallels with the 2004 disappearance of Nick Berg, a US contractor whose murder is officially attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

More:

Vance is a US Navy veteran who signed on with an Iraqi-owned security company based in Baghdad. He and a fellow-worker, Nathan Ertel, came to suspect that the company was involved in illegal arms dealing “and other nefarious activity”.
He contends that he fell foul of the Occupation military authorities because he shared this information with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to David Phinney:

Vance claims that during the months leading up to his arrest, he worked as an unpaid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sometimes twice a day, he would share information with an agent in Chicago about the Iraqi-owned Shield Group Security, whose principals and managers appeared to be involved in weapons deals and violence against Iraqi civilians. One company employee regularly bartered alcohol with U.S. military personnel in exchange for ammunition they delivered …

Vance and Ertel barricaded themselves in their office after the Iraqi firm confiscated their ID tags. They were rescued by US soldiers and taken back to the Green Zone. There they were arrested and held, secretly, for three months. They were systematically mistreated and tortured with very loud music.

Possum argues that Vance fell victim to a turf war between our "official" intelligence agencies and the not-quite-official spook networks set up by the neocons.

Moreover, what happened to Vance may be what happened to Berg -- who was photographed in an Abu Ghraib-style orange jumpsuit, sitting in surroundings that bore a striking resemblance to the images that came out of that notorious prison.

The 911 investigator Michael Wright unearthed evidence supporting the view that Berg was working under CIA supervision at OU [University of Oklahoma], perhaps spying on some of the alleged 911 hijackers who were living nearby at the time. Whatever the truth of this, suspicion must arise that Nick Berg was a part-time CIA operative and/or FBI informant.