Add neo-confederates to the ranks of the right-wing neo-conservatives who have taken over the Federal government.

POLITICAL CHATTER AFTER DARK

January 7, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. Add neo-confederates to the ranks of the right-wing neo-conservatives who have taken over the Federal government. The Neo-Confederacy's very own foreign policy apparatus revealed.

The history books teach us that the Confederacy lost the Civil War to the United States of America. That is so. But when one looks at the people who have secured prime positions within the Bush administration, head scratching results about who actually surrendered to whom in 1865 at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

Take Nancy P. Dorn, the Texas native who served as House Speaker Dennis Hastert's national security and foreign policy adviser and went on to serve as Vice President Dick Cheney's legislative affairs assistant after she worked from 1996 to 2000 as a lobbyist for Hooper, Owen, Gould, and Winburn, counting among her clients one of the People's Republic of China's richest men, Li Ka-shing, the owner of Hutchison Whampoa, Ltd., the Hong Kong mega shipping company. Dorn also represented the governments of Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan and Houston-based Coastal Corporation, owned by Oscar Wyatt.

Wyatt and Coastal were listed in UN Oil-for-Food documents as recipients of oil allocations from Saddam Hussein's government. Charles Duelfer's CIA report stated that Wyatt and Coastal reaped $23 million in profits during the seven-year Oil-for-Food program. In return, from 2000 to 2003, Coastal paid Saddam some $201,000 in secret surcharges on Iraqi oil exports. Wyatt broke with the senior Bush before Desert Storm when he personally flew to Baghdad to successfully arrange for the release of his oil workers who were being held as "human shields." In October 2005, George W. Bush struck back, indicting Wyatt and two of his Swiss colleagues for paying millions in secret surcharges to Saddam as part of the Oil-for-Food program via three of their companies.

Dorn lobbied the Clinton administration not to enact a trade embargo against Iran, a major source for Iranian crude. She threatened to move Coastal off-shore. Nevertheless, the Clinton administration imposed an embargo on Iran in 1995. As a lobbyist for Islamabad, Dorn also ensured that Pakistan was free of threatened U.S. sanctions over its weapons dealings with China.

Dorn worked with former Texas Rep. Charlie Wilson's public relations firm to ensure that Azerbaijan received favorable treatment by the Congress and Clinton administration. While serving in the House of Representatives in the 1980s, Wilson helped fund and arm the Afghan mujaheddin. Some of that funding was made through the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) (the Saudi-controlled Office of Services), which was controlled by a Saudi mercenary fighting in Afghanistan named Osama bin Laden.

From 1991-1993, under George H. W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Dorn was the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, which had responsibility for the Panama Canal Commission, the Army Corps of Engineers, and Arlington National Cemetery. After her stint at the Army, Dorn helped Li Ka-shing obtain a lease for the port facilities at the Pacific and Atlantic termini of the Panama Canal. She also served Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Inter-American Affairs from 1990 to 1992.

In December 2002, George W. Bush nominated Dorn to serve as Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget under then-Director Mitch Daniels. She was confirmed in February 2002. In 2005, Dorn left the Bush administration to become the government affairs director for General Electric, the owner of NBC.

But its Dorn's connection to the neo-confederate movement that is most interesting. While serving as Assistant Secretary of the Army, she signed off on funding for Confederate memorials, according to John Edward Hurley, President of the Confederate Memorial Association. House Speaker Hastert, Dorn's old boss, also arranges every January 19 for the Robert E. Lee ceremony to be held in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, the future home of the statue for the recently deceased civil right pioneer Rosa Parks. While Assistant Army Secretary, Dorn oversaw annual ceremonies at the Confederate memorial in Arlington Cemetery.

Hurley also said that Dorn has close links to Richard T. Hines, the neo-confederate GOP lobbyist and one-time assistant editor for the clearly racist Southern Partisan magazine, which routinely attacks Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president. It was Hines who attacked Sen. John McCain in the GOP primary for McCain's failure to support the flying of the Confederate flag over the state capitol in Columbia.

Hines counts Gambia's dictator Yahya Jammeh as one of his clients. Hines is reportedly involved with Gambian aircraft contracts through Hondo, Texas-based World Air Leasing (Gambia) and Tri-Star Capital. Tri-Star Capital contracted with Hamilton Aerospace Technologies, a subsidiary of Renegade Venture Corp. of Tucson, Arizona to provide two L10100 aircraft to Northeast Airlines of Swaziland. Tri-Star Capital's managing partner is listed as a John Poindexter. It is not known if he is related to the indicted Reagan National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, who was involved in using proprietary CIA airlines to secretly ship weapons to Iran and illegally arm Nicaraguan contras. Perhaps not coincidentally, notorious Russian arms smuggler for Jammeh, other African dictators, and the Taliban Viktor Bout, has also based some of his aircraft in Gambia and Swaziland. Hines has also been a lobbyist for the pro-Chinese Cambodian dictator Hun Sen.

Other links have been drawn between the network of neo-confederates and the Alexander Strategy Group (ASG), with offices in Washington and Hong Kong, founded by Tom DeLay's former Chief of Staff, Ed Buckham. The founding of ASG was a pillar of DeLay's "K Street Project," which was intended to purge liberals and Democrats from Washington's lobbying firms and non-profit entities [This editor can attest to that fact based on personal experience with one non-profit]. ASG's partner Tony Rudy, another former DeLay aide, is now being investigated as part of the Jack Abramoff probe as is DeLay's wife, Christine, a salaried employee of ASG and chief executive officer of Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), a PAC that laundered illegal contributions to over 60 Republican members of Congress. ASG represented Enron and Blackwater USA, the latter accused of being involved in human rights violations in Iraq.

ASG also represents Group W Advisers, owned by Brent Wilkes, who is being investigated for bribing former California Republican Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Group W is an umbrella entity that includes a number of brass plate firms, including Acoustical Communications Systems (ACS) and ADCS, which shared the same address in San Diego. It was revealed yesterday that Cunningham wore an FBI wire during his meetings with companies like MZM and Group W Advisers.

There is an interesting footnote to this story. During the Reagan administration, Hines worked in the Department of Transportation, Interstate Commerce Commission, and the General Services Administration (GSA). While at GSA, Hines was in charge of business and industry relations, including acquisition policies for the agency that buys billions of dollars of goods and services for the government from private industry. Before he became the chief procurement official for OMB, indicted Abramoff key player David Safavian was the chief of staff for GSA. Safavian was charged with secretly helping Abramoff to obtain 40-acres of GSA-managed land in White Oak in Silver Spring, Maryland for a Hebrew school as well as leased office space at the Old Post Office Building in Washington, DC. Safavian also took a trip to St. Andrews golf course in Scotland, paid for by Abramoff's Capital Athletic Foundation, an entity for which TV "journalists" Tony Snow, Brit Hume, and Chris Matthews were listed as participants for a fundraiser held March 26, 2003 at the International Spy Museum in Washington.

When Hines worked at GSA, a source to whom WMR spoke confided that Hines enjoyed taking visitors to the GSA Building's conference room. Before 1937, the Interior Department was headquartered in the building. In 1921, the Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, a poker-playing buddy of President Warren G. Harding met in the Interior Department's conference room with Harry F. Sinclair, an oil tycoon from Wyoming. After the meeting, Fall pressured the Navy Department to transfer its oil reserve lands in Wyoming to the Interior Department. Fall then secretly leased the land to Sinclair in return for a few hundred thousand dollars and some prized cattle. The name of the Navy reserve is Teapot Dome. And now you know the "rest of the story."