Bribe Money for Ukrainian Officials?

In my blog post of May 18, 2022, I raised the possibility that the $40 billion aid package that Congress quickly approved for Ukraine was going to be used, at least in part, to pay multimillion dollar bribes to Ukrainian officials. After all, why else would the members of Congress, as well as the Pentagon’s assets within the mainstream press, react so vociferously against the idea of having the Inspector General monitor how the money is being used? And what better way to ensure that Ukrainian officials remain on board for perpetual war than the payment of bribes to officials serving in what is perhaps the most corrupt regime on the planet?

For skeptics, I refer to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal whose title pretty much tells it all: “High-Ranking Afghan Officials Escaped to Luxury Homes Abroad.” The opening paragraph states, “Some senior Afghan officials and their families spent millions purchasing expensive homes in the U.S. and abroad in the final years of the war, which became luxurious landings when they escaped the escalating violence in Afghanistan.” The article then goes on to detail some of those “luxurious landings.”

Okay, yes, it is conceivable that those Afghan officials are all honest politicians and bureaucrats in an impoverished nation who became millionaires by dutifully saving portions of their government salaries. 

But there is another possibility, a much more likely one in my opinion. Do you remember those planeloads of U.S.-taxpayer-provided hundred-dollar bills that Pentagon officials were shipping into Afghanistan? Do you recall how there wasn’t any Inspector General monitoring how all that moolah was being disbursed? I think there is a very good chance that it was being handed out to Afghan officials as bribes to bring them on board in support of the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country. 

I’m reminded of the CIA’s plan to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile after he received a plurality of votes in the 1970 presidential election. Since the election was thrown into the Chilean congress, the CIA decided to secretly bribe the members of the Chilean Congress with U.S.-taxpayer money as a way to induce them to vote against Allende. 

The CIA also initiated a scheme designed to induce the Chilean national-security establishment to implement a violent coup that would keep Allende from taking office and, most likely, leave him dead in the process. As I detail in my new book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story, when the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, refused to go along with the CIA’s evil and illegal scheme, the CIA orchestrated his kidnapping/assassination, which left Schneider shot dead on the streets of Santiago. 

Ironically, the strong public reaction in Chile against Schneider’s assassination doomed the CIA’s bribery plot, and the Chilean congress ended up confirming Allende as president. Three years later, the CIA’s regime-change operation succeeded when the Chilean national-security establishment, with the full support of the U.S. national-security establishment, took control over the government, leaving the democratically elected Allende dead in the process. 

As I have repeatedly written, the war in Ukraine is not about freedom. It’s about membership in the old, rotten Cold War dinosaur known as NATO. Ukrainian officials were willing to sacrifice thousands of their citizens and the destruction of their country ostensibly for the sake of joining NATO. The question that obviously arises is: Was there something else — like the payment of multimillion bribes from U.S.-taxpayer-provided moolah — that induced crooked and corrupt Ukrainian officials to sacrifice their citizens and their country?

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

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