Wolfowitz, his girlfriend, and Lebanon (updated)

You know that Paul Wolfowitz -- the guy with the comb in Fahrenheit 911 -- was the neocon architect of the Iraq war. You know that he is now the embattled head of the World Bank. You know that he's in trouble because WB rules say that he's not supposed to have a sexual relationship with any employee, yet he has had one with a Libyan-born British national named Shaha Ali Riza, who has been with the WB since 1979.

Wolfowitz first forced defense contractor SAIC to hire her, and then made sure that she received a strange sinecure at the State Department.

The Village Voice had the gist of the story more than a year ago:

Insiders tell me that Riza got a $50,000 raise, to an annual salary of $170,000, before (as I reported earlier) Wolfie arranged to ship her to the State Department to work with Dick Cheney's daughter Elizabeth Cheney, where the two women are operating what amounts to a slush fund at State's Middle East bureau.

Riza, a foreign national, could not hold these jobs without very high-level security clearances -- yet the State Department has no record of issuing her any such clearance.

The State Department project she runs with Elizabeth Cheney is called The Foundation for the Future, and Uncle Sam funds it to the tune of $56 million. (Here's a fun fact: "The Foundation" translates into Arabic as "Al Qaeda.")

So what does this "Foundation" do, exactly?

Load up your backpacks and hop into the Mystery Van, kids -- because we are heading into some very odd territory.

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

From the Washington Post:

The Foundation for the Future, as the effort is called, has made no grants and held only two board meetings since its creation 1 1/2 years ago.

Riza is the only person who works in the Washington "branch" office in the Henry L. Stimson Center. Another office is scheduled to open in Beirut, of all places.

"It is basically just her running this thing," said Tamara Cofman Wittes, research fellow at the Brookings Institution Saban Center for Middle East Policy, who closely tracks democracy programs in the region. She said the board members had no experience in grant-making and thus had "started from zero," with no bylaws or grant-making guidelines. She said the board has had a goal of trying to make its first grant by summer, nearly two years after the organization was formed.

(Emphasis added.) Despite being in business for two years, the Liz-and-Shaha show had not even hired a chief financial officer as of the time of the Post article, published less than a month ago.

The only American board member is Sandra Day O'Connor, the retired Supreme Court Justice. She has finally commented on the Riza matter:

"She's a very competent person and knows the region well," says former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who became acquainted with Riza as a board member of the Foundation for the Future, established two years ago to fund pro-democracy efforts.

"Her work on behalf of the Foundation for the Future has been excellent," adds O'Connor, who specifically mentions Riza's work on pro-democracy projects in Morocco and Lebanon. "Her knowledge of Arabic has been extremely helpful. She's an impressive woman."

Again I ask: What does this Foundation DO?

If they are in the business of "pro-democracy" projects, then why the secrecy?

If this Foundation is private, then why did it originate in the State Department? If it is a State Department deal, then why is O'Connor the only American on its board? Do the non-American board members have access to the classified information apparently made available to Riza?

The Foundation says that it is "not affiliated with any government" and that no Board member may hold a government position. Their FAQ also says that they merely have a "branch office" in DC. The FAQ does not mention anything about the Foundation's creation by Elizabeth Cheney and Riza while they were employed in the State Department.

How can anyone say that Riza has done excellent work when she allowed two years to pass before hiring a financial officer? How can anyone praise her work when she let two years pass without a offering a single grant (presuming that this Foundation really is in the grant business)? Why have only two board meetings been held?

Am I out of line in asking what the United States has received for its investment? Perhaps the State Department would be kind enough to humor us with some specifics.

After all, if Bill Clinton had tossed mega-millions into a do-nothing sinkhole run by the veep's daughter and a crony's main squeeze (who isn't even a citizen), we'd be hearing about the matter every damn time we turned on the radio.

By the way, I'd also like to know more about O'Connor's task in this enterprise. Since her retirement from the court, her interests have turned to the Middle East -- she has served, for example, on the Iraq Study Group.

Riza's trustworthiness can, perhaps, best be judged by her past association with the Iraqi exile group run by convicted bank fraudster Ahmed Chalabi. Wolfowitz wanted to transform the corrupt Chalabi into the new Saddam, a plan scuppered by Chalabi's ties to shady Iranian characters.

So far, all the available evidence suggests that the Village Voice's initial assessment -- "slush fund" -- seems accurate. But the choice of Beirut as a secondary home leads me to speculate if something even more ominous could be on the plate.

Some time ago, I wrote a brief series on "the seedy of Lebanon" -- the international network of Lebanese involved in drugs and other criminal enterprises. The stories are here, here and here. Lebanon has always been an important player in the drug trade.

One of these shadowy Lebanese families, the Smatts, is based in Florida and Jamaica. The wacky head of this family is so enamoured of W that he wrote a book proclaiming George W Bush to be -- no joke -- The Messiah. The Smatts were close to the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, a fascist movement funded largely by the opium trade. An FBI agent named Darlene Novinger (now decased) had made a drug case against the Smatt clan back in the 1980s; the case was deep-sixed, she later claimed, by the Bush family.

Another powerful Lebanese is Richard Rainwater...

...a billionaire financier who profits from calamity. Perhaps the greatest calamity he helped to inflict on the world is the presidency of his good friend and financial partner, George W. Bush. Daniel Hopsicker has linked a Rainwater enterprise with the "drug jet" owned by the scam company Skyway.

Am I speculating? Am I reaching? Frankly -- yes.

It would be unfair and outrageous to suggest that Riza's languages (she knows five, including Arabic and Turkish) would make her an asset to any international criminal enterprise. I have no evidence that Riza's mysterious foundation, with its mysterious links to Lebanon, has any linkage to the Bush clan's mysterious Lebanese "friends."

No evidence at all.

So why is my "Spidey sense" tingling?