SEPTEMBER 2006

A native Oklahoman, Joe Albaugh began his association with George W. Bush in 1994, serving as campaign manager for Bush's successful run for governor of Texas. He then became Bush's chief of staff. His duties included overseeing all emergency and disaster occurrences and he was dubbed "master of disaster" when he supervised relief for both flooding and drought.
In February 2001, after Bush was elected president, Albaugh was appointed director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Bush decided soon afterwards to assign terror response to FEMA.


Congressman Crowley meets with Joe Allbaugh, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to discuss the personal and financial needs of civilian survivors of the 9-11 attacks and the victims' families. Congressman Crowley is working with "Give Your Voice," a group of families who are working to ensure that their needs are met.

“Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington because he was very close to someone who was very active in Bush’s campaign.”

While most folks who knew Brown over the years were startled to see a person of such modest accomplishments in a high Washington post, the IAHA brass was not. As Hart recalls, “Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington because he was very close to someone who was very active in Bush’s campaign.”

Why exactly would this apparent incompetent be tapped for one of the most sensitive jobs in post-9/11 Washington? The key to that mystery lies in the career of Joe Albaugh, George W. Bush’s adjutant since 1994, who first met Brown back in the 1980s when both were young men starting out professionally in Oklahoma...... The first verifiable direct link between Albaugh and Michael Brown is in an obscure company called Campground Development Corporation, which Brown and his brother-in-law, Bill Oxley, formed in 1985. For two years, records show, Campground Development employed Joe Allbaugh as a state capitol lobbyist..

Before joining the DHS/FEMA, Brown was the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, (IAHA), from 1989-2001. After numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions Brown was forced to resign.

A March 2000 two-part report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, chronicling one of the disciplinary actions, lauded Brown for pursuing an investigation against David Boggs, "the kingpin of the Arabian horse world," despite internal pressure to end the inquiry The Brown-led investigation found Boggs performed medically unnecessary surgery on horses to enhance their visual appeal. An ethics board suspended Boggs for five years. Boggs protested through multiple lawsuits against both the organization and Brown, alleging slander and defamation. Brown and the IAHA prevailed, but the lawsuits nonetheless took a toll on morale. Some members interviewed felt Brown showed an imperious attitude, and nicknamed him "The Czar."

Brown started his own legal defense fund before resigning, a move he said was necessary to protect his family's assets. However, some IAHA insiders claimed that this was what really led to his ouster. He raised money from breeders for the fund as well as IAHA, creating a conflict of interest. Also, his contract stipulated that IAHA was to pay all his personal legal expenses, on top of his $100,000 annual salary. IAHA became financially depleted, and had to be merged with the Arabian Horse Registry of America.

Within six months of Brown’s arrival as general counsel of FEMA, Allbaugh was ready to promote him. First, though, he had to oust his current acting deputy director, John Magaw—a former director of the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom Clinton had placed in charge of coordinating domestic-terrorism efforts for FEMA. Allbaugh’s most damaging accomplishment at FEMA was pre-positioning Michael Brown as his successor. Allbaugh included him in all key deliberations, even naming him Chief Operating Officer, and Brown’s influence was apparent to all.

“One day, Mr. Allbaugh came in and said, ‘I know you’ve got these other things to do. I’m going to ask Mr. Brown to be deputy,” recalls Magaw, who promptly returned to the domestic-terror position assigned him by Clinton. In reference to Hurrican Katrina on August 29, 2005, five hours after the hurricane hit land, Brown made his first request for Homeland Security rescue workers, to be deployed to the disaster area only after two days of training.He also told fire and rescue departments outside affected areas to refrain from providing trucks or emergency workers without a direct appeal from state or local governments in order to avoid coordination problems and the accusation of overstepping federal authority.On September 1, 2005, Brown told Paula Zahn of CNN that he was unaware that New Orleans' officials had housed thousands of evacuees, who quickly ran out of food and water, in the Convention Center — even though major news outlets had been reporting on the evacuees' plight for at least a day. He also criticized those that were stuck in New Orleans as those "who chose not to evacuate, who chose not to leave the city" (disobeying a mandatory evacuation order).On September 2, 2005, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley stated that he pledged firefighters, police officers, health department workers, and other resources on behalf of the city, but was only asked to send one tank truck.

Controversy arose in November of 2005 as a House committee investigating the response to Katrina released about 1,000 e-mail messages between Brown, staff and acquaintances. On the day Katrina struck, Brown jokingly wrote "Can I quit now? Can I go home?" He later quipped to a friend on September 2 that he could not meet her because he was "trapped [as FEMA head] ... please rescue me." On August 29th (the day the hurricane hit), Brown also quipped in e-mail to a co-worker, "I am a fashion god" because he shopped Nordstrom's [26]. In another e-mail, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, advised him to roll up his sleeves, "to look more hard-working." "Even the president rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow."[27] An e-mail offering critical medical equipment went unanswered for four days.

On September 12, 2005, Brown announced his resignation as director.After resigning from FEMA Brown testified before Congress

On February 10, 2006, Brown again testified before Congress and this most recent statement, this time placed blame for errors on the Department of Homeland Security for the poor handling of the disaster, asserting that the anti-terrorism focus of the Department had caused it to deny resources needed to FEMA.(Was he trying to blame his predecessor John Magaw?)In his February 2006 testimony, Brown also contradicted earlier claims that the White House was unaware of levees having breached, stating "For them to claim that we didn’t have awareness of it is just baloney."On March 1, 2006, AP re-released a recording of Michael Brown and the President in a video conference in which the vulnerability of the levy system was raised with a great deal of concern over potential loss of life. The President has denied any awareness of the possibility of a levy-related catastrophe.

Consider the trajectory of Shaw Group, a Baton Rouge engineering and construction firm, and one of Allbaugh’s biggest clients. On August 15, 2005, with hurricane season getting under way, Joe and Diane’s firm, Allbaugh Co., registered as a lobbyist for Shaw, which began advertising for workers to man its rebuilding projects before Katrina even struck.After the levees broke, Shaw, which had not been a FEMA contractor during the Clinton years, received two separate $100 million federal clean-up contracts and saw its stock price shoot up 50 percent in a few weeks.


The Allbaughs and Cheneys are literally so at home with each other that, on first arriving in Washington in 2001, the Allbaughs bought Cheney’s townhouse in McLean, Virginia, for $690,000. During the house tour, Cheney must have pointed out the revolving doors. One of Allbaugh’s biggest clients is Cheney’s former employer, Halliburton, whose Kellogg, Brown and Root subsidiary got at least $61 million worth of Katrina business.


He also formed Blackwell-Fairbanks, a joint venture with Andrew Lundquist, with whom he had served on vice president Cheney’s secretive energy task force. (The name of the company is based on the hometowns of the two principals.)

Clients in 2004 included the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin; on required forms, Blackwell-Fairbanks would later report that it had lobbied both the offices of the president and of the vice president. Filings for Joe and Diane Allbaugh’s The Allbaugh Company show among its clients Oshkosh Truck, the leading supplier of vehicles to the Pentagon. http://realnews.org/realnews.org/photos/ab.jpg

Where war was once the domain of soldiers, it is more and more aimed at civilians. We see this today with Israeli attacks on the civilian population of Lebanon, their attacks on the civilian population of Gaza and the West Bank. We see it, too, in the war in Iraq waged by the United States of America against a people who were no threat to anyone.

There are also the manmade viri that spread from the laboratory into the population, causing diseases that can potentially kill millions more.

All the evidence points to the fact that war, violence, and the killing of innocents is part of who we are as a species.

But what if the initial assumptions are wrong?

How many of you reading these words would be able to do such a thing as kill a baby or small child? How many of you could put a bullet, or several, into the head of a ten-year-old on her way to school, or empty your pistol's clip into the body of a child wounded at your feet? How many of you could order the bombing of an appartment block knowing that the dead will be civilians, families, people who have never raised a gun against an enemy in their lives?

We ask again. What if our initial assumptions are wrong? What if this violence we see all around us does not come from within us, from within people of conscience, but comes from another source?

What if the evil we see around us in the world is not born from human nature?

Our studies on psychopathy, and the work of Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski on the dynamics of psychopathic political systems, suggests very strongly that everything we "know" about the dark side of human nature is wrong, that the primary source of the violence and active harming of other beings on our planet comes not from mankind, but from an almost human species in our midst, a species that looks human, but that is missing that which we would say is the defining characteristic of humanity: conscience.

Could it really be that these horrors that we live with on the nightly news, that we read about in history books, that have always been with us and which seem such an integral part of human life, are not a necessary component of life? That they are injected into our lives through a parasite/predator in our midst? One that moves invisibly within society?

If you have done no research into psychopthy, such a hypothesis may well seem far-fetched, an idealist fantasy. It seems outrageous. It goes against everything you have been taught. It goes against everything you think you "know". However, once you have studied the issue, have read the research into psychopathic behaviour, have studied a psychopath's methods and means of manipulation, once you have understood the individual psychopath and have traced its predation as the most successful ones move into positions of power in the law, politics, business, the police and the military, and as these individuals join together with others of their ilk to form cohesive structures that can take over social movements and political parties, once all of this is understood, and the horror of what we are facing hits home, then, in the face of this horror, a small spark of hope is lit.

An in-depth understanding of psychopathy and ponerology brings the realization that the violence around us is not an instrinic part of who we are. It is an intrinsic part of who they are.

Having potentially identified the true source of evil doesn't mean that it can be easily eradicated. Obviously, there are no easy solutions. It is way too late for easy solutions.

However, instead of constantly fighting against the branches, we can begin to strike at the root.

The first thing people need is knowledge of the true problem. Just that, just identifying the real cause, is a large step. It makes the world understandable. You can understand why there is such relentless bombing of Lebanon, of the Gaza. You understand why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the rest of their gang can lie about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, in spite of it costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. You stop wondering how people can do such horrors because you see them for who they are. You understand that they act this way because that is who they are.

So the first thing this knowledge brings is clarity. I think that this understanding alone may well make a big difference in how we approach the problems facing us. With a clear mind, solutions will appear that have eluded us while we suffered under the delusion that the problem came from within us.

If the origin of evil is genetic, that is, it arises from those psychopaths with this genetic difference who have a predisposition to committing acts that the rest of us judge as evil while we, the people of conscience, do not, we need to become aware of this difference and the way it is being used against us.

And here is where such understanding brings hope. Such violence is not part of what makes us human. This understanding will give to people a hope that the senseless slaughters of history, that have been put down to "human nature", and therefore to a certain inevitability, can be ended once and for all. If the psychopaths who rule our societies and who deform our understanding of ourselves can eventually be isolated, human history might well embark on a completely different path..........................

Henry See of Sign of the Times