After reading "Matt Drudge Meets The Octopus" in the Things Are Gonna Slide section of the Steamshovel web page, a reader wrote:
"There's more on Barbara Ledeen. She's executive director of the Independent Women's Forum, yet another conservative foundation, this one focused on hijacking feminism for right-wing purposes. The friend-of-the-court brief which Ken Starr prepared for the original Paula Jones legal team was undertaken at the behest ofthe Independent Women's Forum. In the last couple of years, Ledeen has spoken out several times in support of Jones and her "cause." It's been reported that Starr's amicus curiae brief was prepared on behalf of the Scaife-funded Landmark Legal Foundation and Mark Levin, president of Landmark, has denounced such claims. Turns out that he's technically correct; the job was handled by another part of the vast right-wing network, Ledeen's IWF. This is reported in the Feb. 27 issue of the LaRouchie Executive Intelligence Review. They connect Ledeen and her husband to what they call the Bush "secret government" network, a claim which, given Iran-Contra, seems plausible enough. They also connect the Ledeens--again correctly--to the Jewish-American neoconservative movement, the group that, next to Pat Robertson's evangelicals, is the biggest American supporter of the right wing in Israel.The LaRouchies, of course, see both groups collaborating in the operation to Get Clinton."
Michael Ledeen goes after Clinton a little more in the April 6 issue of National Review, calling the president a product of small town politics that "always have a bit of the mafia about them, particularly in the south, whether it be southern Italy, southern Germany or the Southern United States." Ledeen explains at length various mafioso practices of the current administration, including making Al Gore "the bag-man in the Buddhist temple caper" because all mafioso "must be guilty of serious crimes, so that betrayal will doom them all to extended prison terms." "For outsiders who pose a danger, more explicit threast are required.," Ledeen continues with his spin on Monica Lewisnsky, "Anyone acting against the family must be destroyed (as the White house brags it is doing with Kenneth Starr), but at the same time the Godfather invariably offers such people a corrupt way out: cooperation is rewarded." He concludes noting the Clinton marriage of the Arkansas and Chicago mobs, longstanding Clinton financial ties to Asian families, and the implication that outright war would be better than Clinton corruption.
In light of all this, Steamshovel reviews here what Danny Casolaro had to say about Michael Ledeen and political corruption. The following is taken from The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro:
One of the ways in which Jimmy Carter may have "bruised the Octopus", as Casolaro says, was through the imposition of a 1979 embargo on the shipment of arms to Iran. Certainly that bruise healed quickly. Octopus familiar Ted Shackley appears, after his alleged retirement from the CIA in 1979, in 1984 negotiations for the shipment of arms to Iran by the Reagan administration. Shackley passed information from Iranians General Manucher Hashemi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, who had held influential positions in the SAVAK secret police under the Shah, and now were close to the Ayatollah Khomeini, to Oliver North and alleged P2 member Michael Ledeen in the White House. The Iranians suggested that arms shipments to "moderates" such as themselves in Iran could do much to prevent the Ayatollah from taking sides with the Soviets, and could speed the release of the American hostages. The billions of dollars of arms shipments began, using Israel, Taiwan, and South Korea as middlemen, as early as 1981, with some of the profits from the Iranian shipments being diverted to help the contra cause in Nicaragua.….
The National Endowment for Democracy has been alleged to be a private intelligence network with the purpose of establishing a fascist, corporatist world state, a theme which also seems to inform the movements of Casolaro's Octopus. The model of this state can be observed in Michael Ledeen's book, Universal Fascism, in which he extolls a fascist state based upon the ideals of Gabriele d'Annunzio, Mussolini's predecessor. Ledeen was connected to P 2, which was in turn connected to the NSC. Reporting directly to North (as well as being a consultant in the Pentagon and State Department) was Michael Ledeen. Ledeen was responsible for obtaining Israeli Mossad spy Jonathan Pollard his job in the Department of the Navy, for establishing a line of Israeli influence into the NSC, and is known in Italy to have been a member of the P2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic lodge. P2, with a membership believed to include Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, is the organization known to have taken over the highest levels of Italian government and responsible during the 70s and 80s for an attempted bankrupting of the Vatican, in an alliance that linked the P2, the KGB, and major networks of drug trade.The Wall Street Journal detailed a meeting between Alexander Haig, Michael Ledeen, and high ranking P 2 member and number two man in Italian intelligence Francesco Pazienza. Pazienza is said to have been involved in shipments of US arms to Iran arranged by the Reagan administration.
Reference: Honnegger, Barbara, October Surprise, New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1989
(57) Honegger, p. 124; Servadio, Leonardo, "Ledeen's Spanish Connection", Executive Intelligence Review, March 20, 1987
Egypt
In 1979 Edwin Wilson and Theodore Shackley formed EATSCO, the Egyptian American Transport and Services Corporation, which according to some sources obtained an exclusive and highly lucrative Pentagon contract to ship US arms to Egypt. Wilson also included in the partnership Richard Secord, Thomas Clines, Hussein K. Salem, and Erich von Marbod (at the time Deputy Director of the Defense Security Assistance Agency in the Pentagon... Can you say, "conflict of interest"?). Secord and his partners were indicted in 1983 for $8 million in "billing abuses" to the government. Michael Ledeen, at the time a State Department advisor, stepped in, suggesting to US Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella that the overcharged funds may have been used for the funding of black operations (thus rendering them a "hands off" proposition for prosecution). Secord retired from the Pentagon in 1983, after the EATSCO scandal, then started another company, IRANSCO, with Albert Hakim, in order to ship arms to Iran. (73)
(73) Honegger, p. 81, 82.