A multi-billionaire who embodies the worst of Jewish America

[Errigal]

I found this profile in a very interesting article on a new neocon ad campaign in the US. The man, Mel Sembler was ambassador to Italy during the build-up to the Iraq war and is entangled in the abuse of teens at a drug rehabilitation clinic.

Mel Sembler – A multi-billionaire shopping center magnate and real estate developer, CEO of the Sembler Company, and former ambassador to Australia, Nauru, and Italy, Sembler was also chairman of the Scooter Libby Defense Trust. His tenure in Rome was coincident with a series of rather dubious goings-on connected to the Niger uranium forgeries, including secret back channel meetings between leading neocons in the Pentagon, Iranian arms dealer and Iran-Contra figure Manucher Ghorbanifar, and convicted spy Larry Franklin, who was caught red-handed funneling classified top secret information to Israeli embassy personnel via two officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. As Joshua Micah Marshall put it:

"There's a lot that's still really murky about what was happening at the U.S. embassy in Rome after 9/11 with the forgeries and other matters. That was on Sembler's watch. And Libby's bad acts stem from the whole forgeries bamboozlement. (Whacking Wilson was part of the larger White House effort to keep the forgeries scam covered up – a cover-up that's still underway.)

"So Sembler just seems like a pretty big part of this story to be collecting money for the one person under indictment for their role in it."

Sembler's bio veers from the neoconnish to the nightmarish when we consider his founding of "Straight, Inc.," a teen drug rehabilitation program that was forced to close on account of numerous successful lawsuits by former clients who were tortured, raped, and systematically humiliated. Their hair-raising testimony of sadistic abuse while in custody at Sembler's teen-Guantánamo can be read here. Apparently, an entire movement of Sembler's victims has risen up spontaneously – that's how many lives "Straight, Inc." destroyed. All this bad publicity required a name change, and "Straight, Inc.," was reconstituted, in 1996, as the Drug Free America Foundation. As a result of Sembler's political clout, the Foundation is prospering, thanks to federal subsidies, $720,000 in the year 2000 alone.
The drug war, the Iraq war, Scooter Libby's private war against Valerie Plame and her husband – with Sembler, it's always wartime, and that's the way he likes it.

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