A growing Republican scandal at INSA and Qualcomm.

Qualcomm was founded by the billionnaire McCaw family

(truculent Wendy McCaw, a newspaper publisher in Santa

Barbara, flared up in the press recently after she

fired a dozen reporters for not bending news stories

as she demanded, inspiring the banned and fired & the

community at large to backlash against the shrew, who


remains untamed), specifically a member of the



National Security Council ... kicked out by John F.

Kennedy. The family, which got into broadcasting early

rock and roll, gave us the Top 40 music format; tou



have the McCaws to thank for that ... and for Qualcomm

... 



- AC




"Deputy Undersecretary Shaw, an old Republican hand

who had served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White



Houses, quickly became the point man for the

initiative to bring CDMA to Iraq...."



1/11/2006



Conrad Burns INSA Lotta Trouble?

by Matt Singer @ 12:18 pm.




I’m still hearing rumors that there is more interest

in this story and also that the way it’s been broken

so far is a bit confusing, so here’s the whole



INSA/U.S.-Asia Network story as far as I’ve been able

to pull together the disparate threads.



Several weeks ago, a man named George Bailey wrote a

letter to the editor that appeared in several Montana


newspapers defending the character of Conrad Burns and

dismissing critics of Conrad.

The letters received a quick response in the form of a


second letter to the editor from Jim Farrell,

executive director of the Montana Democratic Party.

Farrell’s letter pointed out that Bailey was not a

distinterested party or merely even an old friend of

Conrad Burns, but someone with a clear financial

conflict of interest when it comes to vouching for

Burns’ character.



Specifically, George Bailey is the executive director


of the Inland Northwest Space Alliance (INSA), a

Missoula-based 501c3 (charitable or educational

non-profit) that has received over $5 million in

federal earmarked appropriations, all lined up by

Conrad Burns’ office. INSA employs former Burns chief

of staff Leo Giacometto as one of its lobbyists

(another INSA lobbyist, one of Giacometto’s partners,

Robert Arensberg, figures in to this story later).

Giacometto became briefly famous in Montana for his


role in allegedly seeking to cover-up the drunk

driving accident in which Martz’s chief policy advisor

killed the majority leader of the Montana House, but

he has a long history and is well-known as one of the

shadier players in Montana politics.



The relationship doesn’t end there. INSA employs a

number of people with close connections to both Conrad

Burns and U.S. Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), including


former staff and spouses of current staff. All told,

INSA staff have donated roughly $15,000 of their

salaries into Burns’ campaign coffers. In other words,

Burns lines up federal money, which pays the salaries

of staff, who donate to Burns.



But the connections don’t end here. While looking

further into connections between Conrad Burns and

George Bailey, I came across the U.S.-Asia Network


(the organization’s website has been removed from the

internets since I first wrote about this

organization). The Network’s board consists of three

people: George Bailey, Leo Giacometto (who also serves

as CEO of the Network), and Robert Arensberg

(Giacometto’s lobbying partner, he also serves as

President and COO of the Network). Conrad Burns serves

as the Honorary Chairman, along with three Korean

politicians.




I have no clear paper trail on where the Network’s

finances come from, but at several of its events,

featured speakers came from Qualcomm and Samsung. Do a

google search for ‘Qualcomm Samsung Conrad Burns‘ and



the first result is a Mother Jones report on “How a

top Pentagon official and a host of influential

Republicans almost made sure that one American company

gained a key stake in Iraq’s lucrative wireless


market.”



One of those “influential Republicans” is none other

than Montana’s junior senator. The American company is

none other than Qualcomm:



“The battle for Iraq is not over oil,” said one

Defense Department official involved in

communications. “It’s over bandwidth.” And no one was

fighting harder for a piece of the spectrum than the


consortium led by American cellular giant Qualcomm

with such business partners as Lucent Technologies and

Samsung of South Korea. They wanted to follow U.S.

troops into Iraq with Qualcomm’s patented cellular

technology, called CDMA, a system no nation in the

Middle East had yet been willing to adopt.

[…]

Senator Conrad Burns felt the sting of Qualcomm’s

defeat in October. As chairman of the Communications

subcommittee, the Montana Republican had strong ties

to the company: Qualcomm was Burns’ 12th-largest


campaign donor, and one of the company’s founders,

Klein Gilhousen, had recently given $5 million to

Montana State University. Gilhousen also sits on the

board of the Burns Telecom Center, an academic

research program, of which the senator is chairman.

During a trip to Iraq in October, Burns spoke with

officials one-on-one about the process that had denied

the Qualcomm consortium a license. “I think the

bidding was open, transparent, and fair,” he said upon


his return on October 14. That same day, however, one

of his chief aides began working behind the scenes to

plan a new way to get Qualcomm into Iraq, a plan

described in the aide’s internal emails, which were

obtained by Mother Jones. “As you know, Senator Burns

is taking flak for defending the CPA on Iraqi

telecommunications contracts which ignore CDMA,” wrote

Burns aide Myron Nordquist to one of the Pentagon’s

chief networking officials. “The Senator remains


determined to support CDMA.”



And Burns had a powerful motivation. The stakes for

Qualcomm, and by extension Burns, were far larger than

just the Iraqi market of 25 million people. For nearly

a decade, Qualcomm had been engaged in an

international battle with the non-American companies

pushing GSM, a rival technology that had been

developed in Europe and now controlled 72 percent of


the world market. A CDMA beachhead in Iraq would set

the stage for an expansion throughout the region, with

Lucent and Samsung well positioned to prosper as

leading makers of the CDMA switches and phones. As

Nordquist explained to the Pentagon last fall, Iraq

could provide a “communications link between Turkey

and the Gulf.”



Deputy Undersecretary Shaw, an old Republican hand who


had served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan White

Houses, quickly became the point man for the

initiative to bring CDMA to Iraq.



[…]



Senator Burns, wrote Shaw, was “strongly supportive”

of the plan. So was the South Korean government, which

sang its praises in a letter to CPA chief L. Paul

Bremer, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,


and Senator Ted Stevens, the powerful Alaska

Republican who was responsible for the provision

exempting Alaska Native American corporations from the

contracting rules requiring competitive bidding. “I

would like to ask for your support,” wrote Daeje Chin,

the South Korean minister of information and

communication, noting that he hoped the emergency

system would be converted by this summer to a

“commercial service.”




[…]



Around that same time Shaw also pressed the case for

the Qualcomm consortium when Daniel Sudnick, the

senior American adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of

Communications, visited Washington, D.C. Shaw invited

him to dinner at the exclusive Metropolitan Club,

located across the street from the White House, took

him to meet Senator Burns, and then hosted a meeting


at his office on January 12 with representatives of

Nana Pacific and the Qualcomm consortium.



For all the work Qualcomm’s supporters did to arrange

for its entry into Iraq, the final authority over

Iraq’s telecom future still rested with the American

advisers, like Sudnick, working in Saddam’s former

palace in Baghdad. Although Sudnick met with Shaw and

Senator Burns, he told colleagues that he remained


determined to not effectively award a new cellular

phone license for Iraq under the cover of a network

for the nation’s police and fire officials.



The Mother Jones piece ends by noting that the

fighting over technology resulted in delays in

instituting a first-responder communications system.

As a result, Iraqis died.



But it doesn’t quite end there. After this story


started to get unraveled (with nothing more than

Google, mind you), the U.S. Asia Network website

disappeared (although I have numerous screenshots and

Google cache should work for a while, the Wayback

machine is an option after that). Meanwhile, the INSA

staff page has been scrubbed to remove references to

some staff with Rehberg and Burns connections.



The final story looks a little like this: a shadowy


network of organizations, possibly financed with

taxpayer money, looking to advance the interests of

major campaign donors, lining the pockets of key

political advisors, and providing money in-turn to

Burns’ re-election efforts.



If this isn’t a scandal, I don’t know what is.

Conrad’s folks seem to think it’s a scandal, too.

Otherwise, I doubt they’d be covering their tracks


right now.