w*********s 发帖数: 2136 | 1 The Strauss Kahn Frame-Up
The Amerikan Police State Strides Forward
By Paul Craig Roberts
5-18-11
The International Monetary Fund's director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was
arrested last Sunday in New York City on the allegation of an immigrant
hotel maid that he attempted to rape her in his hotel room. A New York judge
has denied Strauss-Kahn bail on the grounds that he might flee to France.
President Bill Clinton survived his sexual escapades, because he was a
servant to the system, not a threat. But Strauss-Kahn, like former New York
Governor Eliot Spitzer, was a threat to the system, and, like Eliot Spitzer,
Strass-Kahn has been deleted from the power ranks.
Strauss-Kahn was the first IMF director in my lifetime, if memory serves,
who disavowed the traditional IMF policy of imposing on the poor and
ordinary people the cost of bailing out Wall Street and the Western banks.
Strauss-Kahn said that regulation had to be reimposed on the greed-driven,
fraud-prone financial sector, which, unregulated, destroyed the lives of
ordinary people. Strauss-Kahn listened to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz,
one of a handful of economists who has a social conscience.
Perhaps the most dangerous black mark in Strauss-Kahn's book is that he was
far ahead of America's French puppet, President Sarkozy, in the upcoming
French elections. Strauss-Kahn simply had to be eliminated.
It is possible that Strauss-Kahn eliminated himself and saved Washington the
trouble. However, as a well-travelled person who has often stayed in New
York hotels and in hotels in cities around the world, I have never
experienced a maid entering unannounced into my room, much less when I was
in the shower.
In the spun story, Strauss-Kahn is portrayed as so deprived of sex that he
attempted to rape a hotel maid. Anyone who ever served on the staff of a
powerful public figure knows that this is unlikely. On a senator's staff on
which I served, there were two aides whose job was to make certain that no
woman, with the exception of his wife, was ever alone with the senator. This
was done to protect the senator both from female power groupies, who lust
after celebrities and powerful men, and from women sent by a rival on
missions to compromise an opponent. A powerful man such as Strauss-Kahn
would not have been starved for women, and as a multi-millionaire he could
certainly afford to make his own discreet arrangements.
As Henry Kissinger said, "power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." In politics,
sex is handed out as favors and payoffs, and it is used as a honey trap.
Some Americans will remember that Senator Packwood's long career (1969-1995)
was destroyed by a female lobbyist, suspected, according to rumors, of
sexual conquests of Senators, who charged that Packwood propositioned her in
his office. Perhaps what inspired the charge was that Packwood was in the
way of her employer's legislative agenda.
Even those who exercise care can be framed by allegations of an event to
which there are no witnesses. On May 16 the British Daily Mail reported that
prior to Strauss-Kahn's fateful departure for New York, the French
newspaper, Liberation, published comments he made while discussing his plans
to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency of France. Strauss-Kahn said that
as he was the clear favorite to beat Sarkozy, he would be subjected to a
smear campaign by Sarkozy and his interior minister, Glaude Gueant. Strauss-
Kahn predicted that a woman would be offered between 500,000 and 1,000,000
euros (more than $1,000,000) to make up a story that he raped her. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1387625/IMF-chief-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-
feared-political-enemy-pay-woman-allege-rape.html
The Daily Mail reports that Strauss-Kahn's suspicions are supported
by the fact that the first person to break the news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest
was an activist in Mr Sarkozy's UMP party who apparently knew about
the scandal before it happened. Jonathan Pinet, a politics student, tweeted
the news just before the New York Police Department made it public, although
he said that he simply had a 'friend' working at the Sofitel where the
attack was said to have happened. The first person to re-tweet Mr Pinet was
Arnaud Dassier, a spin doctor who had previously publicised details of multi
-millionaire Strauss-Kahn's luxurious lifestyle in a bid to dent his left
wing credentials.
Strauss-Kahn could just as easily been set up by rivals inside the IMF, as
well as by rivals within the French political establishment.
Michelle Sabban, a senior councillor for the greater Paris region and a
Strauss-Kahn loyalist said: 'I am convinced it is an international
conspiracy.'
She added: 'It's the IMF they wanted to decapitate, not so much the
Socialist primary candidate.
'It's not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women.
That's how they got him.'
Even some of Strauss-Kahn's rivals said they could not believe the news. 'It
is totally hallucinatory,' said centrist Dominique Paille.
'If it is true, this would be a historic moment, but in the negative sense,
for French political life. I hope that everyone respects the presumption of
innocence. I cannot manage to believe this affair.'
And Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas co-operation in President
Nicolas Sarkozy's government, added: 'We cannot rule out the thought of a
trap.'
Michelle Sabban is on to something when she says the IMF was the target.
Strauss-Kahn is the first IMF director who is not lined up on the side of
the rich against the poor. Strauss-Kahn's suspicions were of Sarkozy, but
Wall Street and the US government also had strong reasons to eliminate him.
Wall Street is terrified by the prospect of regulation, and Washington was
embarrassed by the recent IMF report that China's economy would surpass the
US economy within five years. An international conspiracy is not out of the
question.
Indeed, the plot is unfolding as a conspiracy. Authorities have produced a
French woman who claims she was a near rape victim of Strauss-Kahn a decade
ago. It would be interesting to know whether this allegation is the result
of a threat or a bribe. As in the case of Julian Assange, there are now two
women to accuse Strauss-Kahn. Once the prosecutors get the odds of two
females against one male, they win in the media.
It has not been revealed how the authorities knew Strauss-Kahn was on a
flight to France. However, by arresting him aboard his scheduled flight just
as it was to depart, the authorities created the image of a man fleeing
from a crime.
The way Amerikan justice (sic) works is that prosecutors in about 96 percent
of the cases get a plea bargain. US prosecutors are permitted by judges and
the public to pay for testimony against the defendant and to put sufficient
pressure on innocent defendants to coerce them into making a guilty plea in
exchange for lesser charges and a lighter sentence. Unless the hotel maid
has a spell of bad conscience and admits she was paid to lie, or gets cold
feet about perjuring herself, Strauss-Kahn is likely to find that Amerikan
criminal justice (sic) is organized to produce conviction regardless of
innocence or guilt.
On May 16, the day following Strauss-Kahn's arrest, the US Supreme Court
threw its weight behind the Amerikan police state by destroying the remains
of the Fourth Amendment with an 8-1 ruling that, the U.S. Constitution
notwithstanding, Amerika's police do not need warrants to invade homes and
search persons.
This ruling is more evidence that every American is regarded as a potential
enemy of the state, not only by Airport Security but also by the high
muckety-mucks in Washington. The conservatives' "war on crime" has created a
police state, and conservatives, who originally stood for limited
government and civil liberty, are euphoric over the expanded and
unaccountable powers that a conservative Supreme Court has handed to the
police.
On the same day the federal government reached the $14.3 trillion debt
ceiling, which forced the Treasury to "borrow" money from federal employee
pensions in order to continue funding Amerika's illegal wars and crimes
against humanity. The breached debt ceiling serves as an appropriate marker
for a country that has squandered its constitutional heritage and has
arrived at moral as well as fiscal bankruptcy. |
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