XPost: alt.politics.scorched-earth, alt.gathering.rainbow, li.politics 
 XPost: soc.culture.japan 
 From: rosaphilia@webtv.net 
  
 The Dark Side of Rev. Moon 
 Rev. Sun Myung Moon and American politics 
 € 
 €€€ 
 Mysterious Republican Money 
  
 By Robert Parry 
  
 September 7, 2004 
  
 If House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits 
 being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming 
 billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. 
  
  
 Hastert would be looking at a principal conservative funder: South 
 Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon. 
  
 While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of evidence that the liberal 
 Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a substantial body of 
 evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal enterprise with close 
 ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The evidence includes 
 first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by Moon confidantes 
 and even family members. Besides those more recent accounts, 
  
 Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in the late 
 1970s about his money-laundering activities. 
  
  
 Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early 1980s, however, Moon 
 appears to have bought himself protection by spreading hundreds of 
 millions of dollars around conservative causes and through generous 
 speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including former President 
 George H.W. Bush. 
  
 Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion on the right-wing 
 Washington Times in its first decade alone. The newspaper, which started 
 in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated $50 million a year but 
 remains a valuable propaganda organ for the Republican Party. 
  
 How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of his media empire and 
 pay for lavish conservative conferences has been one of the most 
 enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of the least 
 investigated € at least since the Reagan-Bush era. 
  
 Limited investigations of Moon's organization have revealed large sums 
 of money flowing into the United States mostly from untraceable accounts 
 in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. 
  
 Former Moon associates also have revealed major money flows from shadowy 
 sources in South America, where Moon built relationships with right-wing 
 elements associated with the cocaine trade, including the so-called 
 Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the early 1980s. 
  
 But Hastert, an Illinois Republican, made news at the Republican 
 National Convention by suggesting that liberal funder Soros may be 
 fronting for foreign "drug groups." In a Fox News appearance, Hastert 
 said, "You know, I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't 
 know where € if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it 
 comes from.€" 
  
 Soros demanded an apology for the smear. "Your recent comments implying 
 that I am receiving funds from drug cartels are not only untrue, but 
 also deeply offensive," Soros said in a letter. "You do a discredit to 
 yourself and to the dignity of your office by engaging in these 
 dishonest smear tactics. You should be ashamed." 
  
 A Bush-Style Warning 
  
 Hastert and other Republicans seem to have targeted Soros because he has 
 helped finance liberal activist groups that have engaged in voter 
 registration drives and run TV ads criticizing George W. Bush. Hastert 
 and other Bush loyalists could be laying down a marker that people who 
 finance anti-Bush politics can expect to have their reputations 
 destroyed and possibly become subjects of federal investigations. 
  
 Yet for Moon, despite his criminal record and eyewitness accounts of his 
 money-laundering activities, opposite rules apply. Republicans € who 
 now control the Executive Branch, the Congress and the federal judiciary 
 € protect Moon and his money from any serious examination. (I detail 
 Moon's history of money laundering and organized-crime associations in 
 my forthcoming book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from 
 Watergate to Iraq.) 
  
 Moon's criminal associations go back to the early days of his 
 Unification Church when South Korean intelligence saw the church as a 
 means to conduct covert operations. Kim Jong-Pil, who founded South 
 Korea's KCIA in 1961, became closely associated with Moon's church 
 during a transitional phase as the institution evolved from an obscure 
 Korean sect into a powerful international organization. 
  
 In the early 1960s, Kim Jong-Pil€also was in charge of talks to 
 improve bilateral relations with Japan, Korea's historic enemy. Those 
 talks put Kim Jong-Pil in touch with two other important figures in the 
 Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama€and Ryoichi Sasakawa, both 
 of whom were jailed after World War II as war criminals but were later 
 released. The pair grew rich from their association with the yakuza, an 
 organized crime syndicate that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and 
 prostitution in Japan€and Korea. 
  
 Behind the scenes, Kodama€and Sasakawa€became power-brokers in 
 Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party. 
 Immediately after Kim Jong-Pil€opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa 
 in late 1962, 50 leaders of an ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect 
 converted en masse to the Unification Church. 
  
 According to David E. Kaplan€and Alec Dubro€in their authoritative 
 book, Yakuza, "Sasakawa€became an adviser to Reverend Sun Myung Moon's 
 Japanese branch of the Unification Church" and collaborated with 
 Moon€in building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia. 
  
 Worldwide Connections 
  
 Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson€wrote in their 1986 book, 
 Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon€was one of five indispensable 
 Asian leaders who made the World Anti-Communist League€possible. The 
 five were Taiwan's dictator Chiang Kai-shek, South Korea's dictator Park 
 Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters Sasakawa€and Kodama, and Moon, "an 
 evangelist who planned to take over the world through the doctrine of 
 'Heavenly Deception,'" the Andersons wrote. 
  
 WACL€became a well-financed worldwide organization after a secret 
 meeting between Sasakawa€and Moon, along with two 
 Kodama€representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The 
 purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that 
 "would further Moon's global crusade and lend the Japanese 
 yakuza€leaders a respectable new fa€ade," the Andersons wrote. 
  
 Mixing organized crime and political extremism, of course, has a long 
 tradition throughout the world. Violent political movements often have 
 blended with criminal operations as a way to arrange covert funding, 
 move operatives or acquire weapons. Drug smuggling has proven to be a 
 particularly effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, 
 especially those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more 
 legitimate operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence 
 services. 
  
 Nazi Rat Lines 
  
  
 [continued in next message] 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)