- Current Affairs
- Money Laundering
- Drug Trafficking
- Russian Mob–Ciudad del Este Major Cocaine route to Russia, Global trafficking including Iran-Contra Cocaine Smuggling under Reagan/Bush & Oliver North, President of the NRA May 2018
- Paraguay-CIA & US Military immunity arranged by George W. Bush
- 1980 Bolivia‘s Cocaine Coup
- 1982 Moon felony conviction for tax evasion arising from an earlier money-laundering scheme
- Religious Right– John Birch Society,(1958, Anti-Communist, Elitist, Conspiracy Theorist- Koch)
- Adoption Agencies
Bush Praises Moon as ‘Man of Vision’ Monday November 25, 1996 7:11 AM EST
“BUENOS AIRES (Reuter) – The South Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon launched a new Spanish-language newspaper for the whole of Latin America this weekend, with the backing of guest George Bush who praised Moon’s respect for editorial independence.
The former U.S. president, guest speaker at a banquet late Saturday to launch Moon’s new publication “Tiempos del Mundo” (Times of the World), was full of praise for the controversial evangelist’s best-known newspaper, the Washington Times, and referred to Moon as “the man with the vision.” [Fake News]
Bush then travelled with Moon to neighboring Uruguay Sunday to help him inaugurate a seminary in the capital Montevideo to train 4,200 young Japanese women to spread the word of his Church of Unification across Latin America.
Moon already owns a major newspaper, bank and hotel in Uruguay and is buying up land in the Argentine province of Corrientes, where he plans to construct what his followers call “ideal cities”.
“I want to salute Reverend Moon who is the founder of the Washington Times and of the new paper here,” said Bush, who was reported by the Washington Post to have been paid $100,000 for his Buenos Aires appearance.
Bush was staying at Argentine President Carlos Menem’s official Olivos residence, and there was a place reserved at the top table for Menem. But Menem, who met Moon secretly last year, snubbed him this time on the advice of foreign policy and religious policy aides.”
Moon/Bush ‘Ongoing Crime Enterprise’ Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel by ROBERT PARRY
“Also in 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew the whistle on one scheme in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers of Moon allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each.
The money from the women went into the account of an anonymous association called Cami II, which was controlled by Moon’s Unification Church. In one day, Cami II received $19 million and, by the time the parade of women ended, the total had swelled to about $80 million.
It was not clear where the money originated, nor how many other times Moon’s organization has used this tactic – sometimes known as “smurfing” – to transfer untraceable cash into Uruguay.
…
From petty local scams to international money-laundering, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s political/media/business/religious empire has all the looks of a global “ongoing criminal enterprise,” albeit one with enough powerful friends in Washington to protect it from serious consequences.
Benefiting from relationships with the Bush family and other prominent Republicans, Moon’s Unification Church slips away from one illegal scheme after another – despite overwhelming evidence and first-person admissions about the systematic pattern of the criminality. Somehow U.S. authorities never put two and two together.
Even Moon’s 1982 felony conviction for tax evasion arising from an earlier money-laundering scheme and public confessions from his ex-daughter-in-law and other church insiders about later financial conspiracies don’t clue in the feds to the bigger picture before them.
So, while prosecutors mostly look the other way, Moon continues to pour an estimated $100 million a year into his influential Washington Times newspaper and other pro-Republican media outlets. Additional millions have gone to fund right-wing political conferences; to pay speaking fees to world leaders, such as former President George H.W. Bush; and to bail political allies out of financial troubles.
In both Asia and South America, Moon’s operations have been linked to major crime syndicates including the Japanese yakuza and Latin American cocaine cartels.
When I was investigating Moon’s activities in the mid-1990s, I interviewed several former church insiders who explained how the smaller and bigger operations meshed. Local church-related operations were expected to finance themselves often through petty criminality while the national business operations served to launder overseas money.
The U.S. government turned to Kodama and Sasakawa for help in combating communist labor unions and student strikes, much as the CIA protected German Nazi war criminals who supplied intelligence and performed other services in the intensifying Cold War battles with European communists.
Kodama and Sasakawa also allegedly grew rich from their association with the yakuza, a shadowy 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.
While Bush’s assertion about Moon’s Washington Times as a voice of “sanity” may be a matter of opinion, Bush’s vouching for its editorial independence simply wasn’t true. Almost since it opened in 1982, a string of senior editors and correspondents have resigned, citing the manipulation of the news by Moon and his subordinates.
The first editor, James Whelan, resigned in 1984, confessing that “I have blood on my hands” for helping Moon’s church achieve greater legitimacy.”
Copyright © 2007 The Baltimore Chronicle. All rights reserved.
Republication or redistribution of Baltimore Chronicle content is expressly prohibited without their prior written consent.
This story was published on February 19, 2007.
